Walkability in Atlanta shouldn’t be a privilege, but too often it is.

Let’s not limit access to good urbanism only to those who can afford certain neighborhoods. I’ve written up a short list of recommendations for positive change.

Darin Givens
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read
Good sidewalks on North Avenue in Midtown Atlanta

On Saturday my family took MARTA to the High Museum. Afterwards, we walked 2.5 miles home, stopping at two different stores for a a couple of bags of groceries. We also stopped for lunch. Here’s one of the nice sidewalks (North Avenue) that took us home.

The built environment in our part of Atlanta allows us to safely make these kinds of long walks and to pick up necessities along the way. It’s a privilege that many people in our city don’t have, due to absent sidewalks, lack of neighborhood grocers, and various safety concerns.

Good urban form and pedestrian safety should not be privileges limited to people who can afford to live in certain neighborhoods. They should be common-sense expectations that our cities fulfill for all residents.

How do we make walkability in Atlanta a priority for all neighborhoods?

Getting to a place where we can fulfill those expectations of good urban form requires a lot of work.

For example, we need for city council to create a Department of Transportation and also establish sidewalk maintenance as a city responsibility (it’s currently the property owners’). Councilman Andre Dickens is spearheading a study of doing exactly this — let’s keep an eye on the effort and make sure the city follows through.

Bad urban form: a MARTA bus stop with no sidewalk or crosswalk anywhere to be seen. Huff Road.

We need the city to take some road width away from cars and give it to tree-lined, wide sidewalks. There are too many streets with MARTA access (like the one pictured above) that lack sidewalks, even where there’s plenty of right-of-way for them. Narrowing or reducing car lanes to provide pedestrian paths has proven to be a struggle at times, but we have to prioritize safety rather than car flow.

We need bold rezoning that allows retail like corner grocery stores in all neighborhoods. This is currently not allowed by zoning in much of intown Atlanta, which has a lot of space thats required to contain residential structures only. Atlanta’s zoning code rewrite will hopefully address this, but we have to be adamant about this being a priority with the process.

And we need for the city to eliminate all parking requirements so that corner stores can be easily built without the progress-blocking burden of expensive construction of parking. We’ve got a bit of a parking addiction in Atlanta and it hurts our urbanism in many ways, including the development of small, neighborhood-focused businesses of a type that people could walk to.

I don’t pretend to know all of the the things that need to be done — there are surely many other changes that would be helpful. These are just a few ideas that I tend to think about regularly.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need all Atlantans to understand the importance of transformations that lead to walkability and allow these changes in their neighborhoods. You don’t have to be a knowledgeable Urbanist to be on the right side here — you just have to not actively fight good urbanism.

Darin Givens

Written by

ThreadATL co-founder: http://threadatl.org || Advocacy for good urbanism in Atlanta || atlurbanist -at- gmail.com

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