Comments on: Atlanta Is Kind of Walkable

By: CSD Snowflake

CSD Snowflake — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:25:22 +0000

Here’s another impressive site to look at how obese we’ve becom as a nation, everywhere but especially the South. This is truly shocking.

http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

By: Ridgelandistan

Ridgelandistan — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:50:52 +0000

Musical chairs is only fun until the music stops.
Now that we are in a worldwide post-peak oil decline. A chair has gone away. The foolishness of this fifty year experiment of a society built exclusively on single passenger gasoline automobiles is going to come crashing down around the ears of city planners who are not ready to offer options. This is why “walkability” has suddenly become an important factor. We specifically chose to live in Decatur to be near a Marta station, a short walk to the city center and within biking distance of our Atlanta jobs. We paid more for less house to do it.

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:11:46 +0000

Things need to get alot more walkable all over the south. Case in point:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1909406,00.html

By: Brad Steel

Brad Steel — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:39:35 +0000

I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m not sure that your assertion stands up.

E.g. LA crushed their street-car system and public transportation in the early ’50′s and LA has been economically and socially vibrant and continues to grow faster than almost all US cities. Atlanta has offer F-all for “sustainable and properly scaled transport infrastructure” and yet Atlanta’s metro-GDP and in-migration are second to none for going on 3 decades.

By: GAK

GAK — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:49:28 +0000

Interesting to juxapose Detroit with Berlin and what has happened post WWII. This blogger sums it up nicely. http://www.planetizen.com/node/24841

Reporting on a presentation by John Norquist, President of the Congress for the New Urbanism:

“Norquist used two sets of images to effectively convey a point about urban disinvestment in America. The first set of images was of Berlin and Detroit circa 1945. Unsurprisingly, the Berlin image displayed a war-torn and rubble-strewn city, while the Detroit image revealed why it was once called the Paris of the Midwest — it was simply elegant. However, the second set of images displayed the same two cities 60 years later. It was as if Detroit had been through an epic war and not Berlin. It was the perfect and perhaps most extreme example of America’s substandard and deleterious post-industrial urban condition. There it was on the big screen, Detroit as the poster child for all things wrong in urban America.”

By: Ridgelandistan

Ridgelandistan — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:18:21 +0000

Detroit is in an interesting position.
It’s economic decline was so spectacular and complete that it is primed for a remake and redesign.

http://www.m-bike.org/blog/2009/07/05/city-of-detroit-americas-best-urban-biking

By: land234

land234 — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:53:30 +0000

Having lived in both Detroit metro and now Decatur area i would say there are many many more opportunites to live in a walkable communitiy close to an employment center with good schools and safe interconnected areas than there are in Atlanta…

just to defend Detroit a bit as an Atlanta native…

Downtwon Detroit may have a lot of parking lots…but so does Atlanta!!!

By: Ridgelandistan

Ridgelandistan — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:23:37 +0000

Of course it’s fair. People always required “walkable_scale settlements”. Some cities abandoned these principals to embrace a singular mode of transportation that was known even back in 1955 to be unsustainable. They chose a profitable and easy temporary solution at the cost of a vibrant future.

Fairness aside, walkability is just one quality of life issue for an area. Just like average home prices, crime rates or school performance. Cities that work to offer sustainable and properly scaled transport infrastructure will attract citizens and businesses that value those things.