Sign the Petition To Make Scott Boulevard Safer for Students and Walkers
Decatur Metro | December 9, 2015 | 9:02 am
As a daily walker along Scott Boulevard, I can report back to you that it’s no picnic. I’m sure you’re shocked to hear that.
It’s especially gripping along the strip of ‘walk pictured above where someone once decided that there is no problem with running a sidewalk within two feet of a speedway. The makeshift memorial for the driver killed earlier this year at the intersection of Ridley and Scott is a daily reminder that your pedestrian fears are justly founded.
Over the years, the city has made some small gains to make Decatur’s only highway safer for its pedestrian-minded community. You may recall that in 2011, the city finally got GDOT to connect the sidewalk on the eastern side of the street between Garden Lane and Clairemont. Additionally, the reopening of Westchester Elementary has generally slowed traffic along the stretch in the morning, provided there’s a police officer present.
But more can certainly be done.
“Yeah, OK. But WHAT?”, you ask.
Well lucky for you, the Westchester Elementary Safety Committee has compiled a specific list of recommendations to make the area friendlier to other forms of transportation, beyond the almighty internal combustion engine.
Short term plans include making improvements to crosswalks and intersections in the area, adding a “hawk light” and crosswalk in front of the school, place more signage alerting drivers of the school zone, and creating a direct source of funds to monitor speeds along Scott.
Longer term plans include widening Scott’s sidewalks and commissioning a walkability study for the area.
Sound like a good place to start? You can sign THIS PETITION put together by the Westchester Elementary Safety Committee to show your support. The petition already has over 600 signers, but I’m sure we can get that number up to at least 1000.
State roads, like Scott Boulevard, are notoriously difficult to alter thanks to the need for GDOT’s sign-off on any and all changes, so it’s great to see a concerted community effort to tackle this important safety issue in our city.
Let’s not stop there. N Decatur is just as bad and that intersection of N Decatur/Scott is probably the worst intersection anywhere in the area. It is barely possible to get a car safely through that intersection let alone pedestrian traffic (which is supposed to increase as the suburban plaza and Fuqua developments go up).
A past transgression on this stretch of Scott Boulevard is the most egregious example of Georgia DOT’s obliviousness to anything except moving cars. Prior to the 1990’s, there was a steel guardrail between the curb and sidewalk that ran from Westchester to Coventry Road. It wasn’t pretty but it provided a physical barrier to protect pedestrians from fast moving cars. Let’s remember the pedestrians were mostly elementary school students.
DOT decided the guard rail was dangerous to drivers and removed it!
That guard rail made it into the mid 90s until it was deemed to be no longer meeting code. I recall that it was only on the Westchester side of the street at that time. The community did manage to convince the DOT to reduce the speed limit on Scott from 45 to 40 in response. Does anyone know why the speed limit decreases to 35 just outside the Decatur city limits into Druid Hills?
Good suggestions from the safety committee at the school. They might want to make one minor correction–it’s Clairemont Avenue inside the city and Clairmont Road beyond the city limits. But they did spell Clairemont correctly. And DHer’s memory of the guard rail parallels mine. It went all the way from Coventry to Clairemont on both sides of the street, providing more safety for pedestrians whether they were going to the school or not. I remember the DOT also saying that cars could be damaged if they hit the guard rail. That’s pathetic, but at least they were honest–they don’t care much for pedestrians or their safety.
This problem has been caused by uncontrolled development on Clifton – which our public officials are deaf to do anything about. N. Decatur is a parking lot at rush hour – God help us all if there is a terrorist event anywhere in the area. The WalMart and the new apartments at Scott and N. Decatur will only make this worse.
If there a problem with unsafe pedestrian traffic, then how about making the developers solve the problem. Failing this the taxpayers will have to foot the bill – another example of upside for large corporations while the taxpayers pay the price.
The new Suburban Plaza development plans required developers to fix their sidewalks and widen them. It actually looks much better and safer now that they have redone them, but the rest of the road is nowhere near matching it.
We live on N Decatur and can attest to the daily parking lot, both in the morning and afternoons. Hell, by just typing this now @ 3:47 on a Wednesday, I bet there is standstill traffic out in front of my house. I hope and pray that MARTA gets the new light-rail corridor through the area. It would help a tremendous amount and I would no longer be among the victims of this daily traffic.
First, no local official can control the CDC. The federal government is immune from local development controls. They can build anything/anywhere/anyhow they want. Second, Emory employment may be growing some, but their student population is stagnant over the past 20 years. Emory Healthcare is the other major employer on Clifton. The new hospital will have virtually the same number of beds as the existing hospital. CHOA is moving most out-patient facilities to I-85 and North Druid Hills. The Emory Point development is filled up with people who would otherwise commute through surrounding neighborhoods to Clifton.To say that Clifton development and local officials are the problem is a bit myopic.
The area needs a MARTA line. That is the only viable solution. That problem is bigger than DeKalb, but involves other governments and other economies.
The county should limit any more parking decks at Emory and/or the CDC until both entities pay to have MARTA extended, and to build sidewalk barriers and pedestrian overpasses on Scott by Westminster Elementary. Lowering the speed limit on Scott will only make the traffic on N. Decatur worse.
Historically, the large office and shopping development on Briarcliff and the 85 was nixed by public outrage due to the bad traffic effects. The development at Emory Circle was also nixed by similar public outrage. Somehow more recent developments have avoided meaningful review processes with our elected officials signing off on them. We all need to fix DeKalb County government to serve the needs of the taxpayers instead of the institutions and large corporations that seem to operate without any government oversight in our communities.
Are you familiar with the DeKalb County Comprehensive Plan, 2005-2025, which emerged from public process and was updated in 2013? If you review it, you’ll see that the area you’re referring to is *intended* to develop as it currently is. It’s identified as a major employment center and for high density residential and high intensity commercial. That means county policies are aligned to support what you’re seeing develop now. They are implementing on the plan.
That’s not to say you have to agree with the vision or with how it’s being carried out or whether it’s being properly served from a transportation standpoint (I actually share a number of your critiques). Just that development follows policy (or absence of policy). People think the way to influence development is to don red shirts and pitchforks (and that is one way to try) but more lasting results often come from involving yourself in policy-making on the front end. Unfortunately, that’s the boring part and a lot of people don’t have the time or interest.
I guess my point is that what’s happening at Emory is neither arbitrary nor reflective of political malfeasance. Large institutions and developers are playing a dramatic role, in essence, because they’ve been encouraged and enabled by *we the people* to do so.
This is not a pitchfork and red shirt protest, rather comments on simple observations that N. Decatur is a parking lot at rush hour, and schoolchildren are being put at danger at Westminster Elementary. Anyone who lives in the area knows that these traffic problems have gotten dramatically worse in the last couple of years, coincident with the aforementioned development. If there was a development plan from 2013, then it obviously did not properly consider the increased traffic due to the new developments, and thus proper studies and signoffs have not been done. These are a part of having a proper plan.
I know many neighbors who have tried to make their voices heard, and I’ve even seen signs posted on their front lawns. I’ve also tried to make my voice heard – and have even speaken at the BOC. Unfortunately our voices have not been acknowledged or considered and we’re now in this mess.
As to being involved in the planning process, the reality is that most of the people who live in the neighborhood have got to keep slogging to their jobs each day in order to support their families and pay their taxes. We don’t have time or funds to hire lawyers to attend these meetings on our behalf. We rely on our elected officials to represent our interests, and to plan ahead so that excessive development doesn’t block our roads.
To put forward a plan which ends up creating these types of problems, and then relies on taxpayers to fix the problems is not responsible government in my opinion.
I think you missed the part where I said I shared a number of your positions. 😉
I’m not making any assertions as to the rightness or wrongness of what’s happening. My point was only that we’ve seen it coming, to the point of cultivating it as a matter of public policy, for quite some time. And traffic impacts are certainly acknowledged within that policy. What we’re experiencing now is the disconnect that occurs when different parts of a plan are managed/implemented by different interests or regulating bodies with different pots of money (or lack of money).
I’m not suggesting you’re protesting. All I said was that people generally gravitate more towards back-end protest than front-end policy setting and, in my experience, that brings less satisfaction all around. This is not to say that DeKalb conducted a good front-end process. I don’t know the details of that.
Great work by all and much appreciated.