9 Transportation
Introduction
The goal of the City is to establish integrated multi-modal transportation systems that move people and goods in an efficient and environmentally sensitive manner. The City’s transportation policies focus on improving and enhancing mobility in a manner that improves air quality. Emphasis is on creating alternatives to the single occupancy vehicle (SOV) mode of travel by increasing pedestrian and bicycle linkages that support mass transit ridership.
Transportation Overview
The City’s Transportation policies focus on improving mobility and enhancing the travel environment where people are traveling the most, both now and for the future. This means providing affordable and attractive choices for how to make the trip, whether on foot, bike, transit or car. The dual emphases on better serving the areas where most trips are destined and providing choice for how to make that trip respond to both federal clean air mandates and to market choices that favor city or town living, working, shopping or entertaining. Both now and projected to 2030, analysis by the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) shows that more than 80 per cent of both residential and employment populations in the region are and will be within the five urban counties ringing the city, and so connecting these areas well will have the best return on public investment for our citizens. The congestion and air quality goals that must be met to maintain our economic strength require us to proportionally reduce the numbers and the lengths of drive alone trips, placing high priority on continually planning and developing an integrated, convenient, safe and affordable transit systems.
Recognizing that trips do not happen for their own sake but rather to connect places where people want to be, the City in all of its transportation priorities has linked its plans and actions to land use and environmental initiatives. Thus land use, zoning and development support activities have a significant transportation component and vice versa. Similarly, pedestrian, bicycle, and transit convenience and attractiveness place a priority on reworking transportation design standards to achieve the kind of livable, walkable centers that support transit.
In regional and state forums (ARC, GRTA, GDOT, GRPA, DCA) the city stands for equity in rebalancing transportation and land use policies and funding to improve and enhance travel for the full income range of our citizens where trips are presently or soon will be concentrated - in community, village, town and other activity centers and along high volume corridors. Similarly at the regional level, the city seeks to aggressively develop viable and equitable travel choices that reduce the stresses of singular dependency on the car. Accordingly, the city’s priorities target five broad spheres of activity in order to program, plan, fund and implement transportation and related land use and environmental improvements. These include the linear core, arterial corridors, transit, city-wide development and transportation initiatives and livable centers initiatives.
The principle forum for promulgating and funding most of the city’s projects is the ARC, whose programs and processes include the 2025 Regional Development Plan (RDP), the 2025 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) – both slated to be updated to 2030 over the next couple of years - and the 2003 – 2005 Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) – presently circulating for public comment prior to adoption this fall. In addition, the city periodically seeks federally earmarked funding for special projects like the Multimodal Passenger Terminal or streetscape projects along US routes in the city. All of these funding programs require local matching funds for which the city has used general fund and impact fee dollars, bond funds, private or foundation funds, Community Improvement District funds, SPLOST funds and Tax Allocation District funds. Project implementation increasingly depends on forging funding and development partnerships with other public agencies, foundations, community based organizations, non-profits and the private sector, and this work in recent months is directly overseen by the Mayor’s capital projects management team.
The Linear Core
Looking at the region, the city has about 12 per cent of the residential population, yet it accommodates about 20 per cent of the jobs and perhaps 85 per cent of the convention, cultural, sports and entertainment participants. The trips these activities generate are heavily concentrated within a roughly two mile by eight mile corridor based along the MLK/Auburn corridor at the south and curving from there along the Peachtree corridor north to the city limits. Seventy per cent of all of the city’s jobs and virtually all of its event destinations fall within this corridor, among the greatest concentrations of trips in the region, state and southeast. In addition, by virtue of its vitality, market strength, investment interest, underdeveloped land resources, and high density mixed-use zoning patterns, this corridor is attracting and will continue to attract the greatest additional growth in the city over the next several years.
Accommodating, improving, enhancing and diversifying the travel effectiveness, affordability, choice and quality in this broadly defined corridor thus is a priority for serving the greatest convergence of peoples’ travel needs on a day-in, day-out basis. Accordingly, much of the city’s, and increasingly the region’s and the state’s, attention is and will continue to be focused on meeting these needs. In addition, the Community Improvement Districts of Downtown, Midtown and Buckhead are increasingly partnering with each other, their adjoining neighborhoods and the city and state governments to coalesce a unifying linear core vision and the financial and organizational tools to implement that vision. This vision includes improvement in all modes of travel and places emphasis on the streetscape environment and provision of clear, high quality pedestrian connections to knit the core city together, within districts, between districts and across the downtown connector. The principal hub and crossroads for this connectivity is the downtown Multi-modal Passenger Terminal where pedestrians, MARTA bus and rail riders, commuter rail and bus riders, intercity rail and bus passengers, as well as future Segway riders and possible light rail, flex trolley or even magnetic levitation passengers, interconnect in what will become the surface transportation counterpart to the airport. The terminal will provide the foundation for concentrating new, high density, mixed use, mixed income development above and around, the impetus for knitting downtown together with its neighborhoods – Marietta to Castleberry, Vine City and the AU Center to Underground. There will be other, smaller terminals that connect various forms of transit as well, such as at Atlantic Station, Lindbergh, and perhaps the Arts Center and Civic Center stations.
The Arterial Corridors
The second highest generators of trips are scattered along the city’s roughly seventy miles of arterial corridors, many of which are commercial strips as well. The city’s strategies for improving and enhancing the serviceability of these corridors include:
- inducing greater use of our new zoning classifications to transform these often depressing, underutilized strips into more intense and vital residential and mixed use, mixed income boulevards;
- reworking the boulevards’ geometry to favor more effective transit use, whether for bus, bus rapid transit, flex trolley or perhaps light rail or street car;
- assuring a safe, well-lighted, tree-lined sidewalk environment that connects growing numbers of pedestrians, both walking and increasingly on Segways, between transit or car and home, work or shopping;
- improving street geometry, intersection efficiency, paving standards and signal timing to optimize these corridors’ functionality for cars and trucks whose use will continue to grow – though hopefully at a slower pace - even as population and jobs continue to grow.
The city has done a lot of work to improve the future of our corridors, including the recently approved zoning options mentioned above and plans for most of them either adopted, under planning or soon to be planned. These plans have provided the framework for shaping and evaluating new development activities whether in the Pryor Road corridor, Metropolitan Parkway, Cheshire Bridge Road, Memorial Drive, Campbellton Road, and many others (see attached listing of projects). All in all, these corridors add up to some 70 miles of street and can play a major role in accommodating, intensifying and improving the living, working and shopping environment in a diverse and equitable manner throughout the city, without any need to encroach into any of our forested, stable single family neighborhoods.
Transit
Transit initiatives throughout the region and state, because of the heavy concentration of destinations in Atlanta’s linear core, provide great opportunity to improve and enhance the travel choices and technologies for the city. These include (followed by the sponsor) the Northwest Connectivity Study (GRTA), prospectively connecting Kennesaw State to Downtown; the Regional Transit Action Plan (GRTA), connecting commuter bus service from nine counties all around the city to the linear core; the Georgia Rail Passenger Program (GDOT, GRTA, GRPA) that hubs at the Multi-modal Passenger Terminal downtown, the “C-train”(MARTA), linking Emory University to Lindbergh, Atlantic Station, Georgia Tech, the World Congress Center, AU Center, Turner Field, the Zoo and South DeKalb; the Beltline (MARTA), exploring the land use changes necessary to use the existing rail corridor to connect new transit oriented mixed use higher density development centers along its path; extending the MARTA west line; creating a transit link (MARTA) to Greenbriar as a major new mixed-use, high density, pedestrian friendly development center; and shuttle services (Downtown, Midtown and Buckhead CIDs/TMAs) to supplement travel in the linear center. These studies all consider the full range of transit technology and consumer cost options, from bus to bus rapid transit, to flex trolley, to light rail, to heavy rail, to Segway as a linking technology, and other possibilities. In all of these transit initiatives, it is important to remember that transit is only economically and functionally viable when there are heavy concentrations of trip destinations - high density, pedestrian supportive activity centers – making the parking, congestion, price and overall hassle of using cars less competitive.
Citywide Development and Transportation Initiatives
The city is in the forefront nationally in several new settlement pattern and technology initiatives that support its focus on both the linear core and arterial corridor transportation strategies. Its rezoning and capital improvement actions over the last few years have lifted the likelihood of reducing car trips while increasing pedestrian, transit, bike and, in the future, Segway trips. These include rezoning Lindbergh, Midtown, Little Five Points, the Pryor Road Corridor, East Atlanta, to name a few, passing a bond election that favors improvement of sidewalks and bikeways citywide and aggressively and successfully pursuing federal and state funding support for these initiatives.
In addition, the city has formed or participated in partnerships to facilitate major new high density development projects, like Atlantic Station, Lindbergh Station, Historic Westside Village, development around Centennial Olympic Park, Greenstreet Properties, the Housing Authority’s Hope VI redevelopments and others, many of which have been recognized nationally for their innovation and promise for moderating congestion and improving air quality. These developments all share the common transportation goal of reducing the need for drive alone trips. One strategy that is gaining momentum is to provide the availability of housing in close proximity to major employment centers where the housing costs reflect the range of incomes in the employment center, sometimes called “affordable” or “workforce” housing. Another is the provision of viable alternatives to the car for making necessary trips, responding to a growing demand for choices beyond the car. To reinforce this strategy, the City is involved in a range of citywide programs to upgrade and improve the travel environment at all levels.
Livable Center Initiatives
Consistent with the growing markets for in-town living and responsive new development patterns, the city has been active in the efforts by ARC to initiate and implement the Livable Centers Initiative (LCI) program. This program provides planning and capital funding for centers of activity that can reduce trips and diversify the mode of travel by creating vital, walkable, mixed use, mixed income, higher density transit-served communities throughout the region. Atlanta has seven designated LCI areas that are either in planning or implementation phases (West End, Greenbriar, Downtown, Midtown, Buckhead, Bolton/Marietta, and Hamilton E. Holmes MARTA station area). This program was developed as a necessary tool to implement the Regional Development Plan that returned the Atlanta region to conformity with the federal Clean Air Act. The City as a whole and many of its constituent communities – both LCIs and others – have much in common with the other cities and towns in the region. Compared with unincorporated suburbia, these jurisdictions tend to be denser, more diverse in both ethnicity and income, share historic mixed use development patterns, have deteriorating infrastructure, have suffered greater public and private disinvestment, yet are more intrinsically attractive to the now growing markets among young people, empty nesters and seniors for community living. All of these characteristics are consistent with reducing overall the numbers and lengths of drive alone trips and with providing choices in how to travel. The City could provide leadership among regional municipalities in bending regional and state transportation funding priorities into better balance to respond to these market choice shifts by redirecting more resources to maintain and enhance the concentrations of trips we already have, instead of continuing to watch these resources flow to build new low density subdivisions ever further outward.
Inventory And Assessment
The transportation element of the Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP) provides a framework for comprehensive transportation planning and serves as a policy guide for implementation of such planning efforts. This element of the CDP is divided into eight sub elements: (1) aviation, (2) surface streets, (3) limited-access highways, (4) mass transit, (5) bicycle facilities, (6) pedestrian facilities, (7) parking facilities, and (8) freight.