Does Atlanta want to be a sustainable, transit-oriented city? The answer has a lot to do with how it addresses parking.
Following up on "Atlanta's Parking Addiction," a recent column in the alt-weekly Creative Loafing, Darin at ATL Urbanist points out that much of the city's new downtown streetcar route is lined with vehicle storage, rather than housing and businesses.
Creative Loafing reported that over the last 30 years, “the availability of low-cost parking” was “the second strongest indicator of the lack of success " of urban rail in the U.S. Darin says local leaders must recognize that giving streetcar riders fewer places to go hampers ridership and hurts the system's chances for growth.
The image above shows a section of the streetcar line on Luckie Street in Downtown Atlanta. Everything that isn’t shaded in red is either a parking lot or a parking deck.
This is important. We have a $100 million starter line for modern streetcars in Atlanta and much of the track runs beside properties that contain facilities devoted to car parking instead of destinations for pedestrians. If this seed is going to grow into a larger, successful system of street rail -- and there are proposals for that -- city leadership needs to get off its collective ass and give the line a chance to work as it should.
I am in general very excited to have a streetcar here and hopeful that it will end up, some day in the future, serving a thriving neighborhood of new residential and commercial structures that replace our downtown parking blight. But there are also days when I walk these streets, where I live, and cynically think: “In Atlanta, we love parking so much that we built a $100 million streetcar line to show off our parking facilities to tourists.”
Elsewhere on the Network today: The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia reports on an egregious case of victim-blaming on the part of local police and media; and Streets.mn says that, contrary to newspaper headlines, Minneapolis hasn't stopped building infrastructure for cars.
