Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
And for those that want a suburban lifestyle with suburban amenities and never want further suburbanites to drive their side of town and magically remove all freeways...
Dream on...
...Or try to understand the point of the exercise in discussions.
But we are not waiting for any of that. If you want us to wait for some imaginary threshold of transit before we discuss scaling back roads you have already lost.
Then you cannot use other cities as your model. Because they do not meet even your basic qualifications. You are pushing a model that exists exactly nowhere. And you know why it doesn't exist anywhere? I'll give you one guess.
Quote:
Intown has already been effectively scaling back roads and seeing positive results.
On a very, very, very small scale. Tell you what...give me five examples. Of major scale-backs and their positive results.
Quote:
As this closure shows, roads are not a need, they are a nice to have and ask people to pay more (in time or money) they will find other options that are more efficient / economical like transit or different timing of their commute.
Ummm..this closure has shown that traffic will just direct to other roads and clog them up. My drive home at 9pm tonight, which should have taken 25-30 minutes on that route, felt like rush hour after I exited 85. I had meant to take 285 but missed the exit due to heavier traffic exiting (strange for 9pm..I wonder why!). When I got off at Cheshire Bridge and tried to use Sidney Marcus to get past the break, it might as well have been 5pm on a normal day. The drive ended up taking 36 minutes. My normal drive on 85 at that time of night is 22 minutes. So, the drive was 63% longer than normal I85, and 20-30% longer than that particular route normally.
This morning heading to work, I took 285 instead. At 11:15am, it was as bad as it normally is at 8:00am. Westbound was a parking lot. I didn't top 60mph and mostly went 30-40mph all the way from Atlanta Rd. to the I85N exit. After 11am. That is not normal. And we're still in spring break mode. Just wait for next week.
This closure has shown exactly what we thought it would: heavier traffic elsewhere.
Quote:
If you are wanting reducing roads to be held off, you already lost. We tried your strategy for 50+ years and it just got us some of the worst traffic in the world. Time to reverse a lot of these mistakes and get people some real transportation options.
Uhhhh...that's what I said. Build more transportation options.
Supposedly Buford connector south was just opened from Sidney Marcus
I thought I saw that tonight! Good to know!
Quote:
Originally Posted by whodean
Yep, this whole exercise is pretty misguided. What is really needed is to route through traffic, especially freight, further away from Atlanta.
I-20 crossing Atlanta: 18 miles. Shortest I-285 route, 28.5 miles. An outer-perimeter route? Likely 40-50 miles. Good luck getting many people to go 10 or more miles out of their way.
This isn't misguided in the slightest. It will never happen and we all know this, but this exercise could teach you alot and make you rethink things, if you let it....
Kind of like how JSVH and occasionnally JSVH say really obsurd things that will never happen but are designed to get people to think.
This model we're discussing is actually a better model had it been done from the get go. We realize this won't actually happen.
The reason you can't simply rely on I-285 and routes further away, is simply the problem Atlanta has always had... we kept putting all our eggs in one basket. Then people complain about how big the basket is.
People need to get from the north to the southside. It isn't just traffic passing through the region. During peak hours a good 80% of the traffic on the roads is from within the metro. A far outer perimeter would be good for new exurban areas, but not for the bulk of people. I-285 is already at or near capacity going N/S. So to remove freeways from the core for through-traffic across the region, something new would need to be done.
This model creates multiple cross-town routes and gives smaller routes into the core that no crosstown traffic would ever want to use. It fixes a number of problems many here have complained about for a long time.
I know it will never happen, but I'm tired of others' arguments in this forum that have gotten rather osburdly unfair to most across the region. These 'urbanites' (cough cough ITP suburbanites from smaller Southern cities that really want small time living with a few big city perks) need to stop having their cake and eating it too. They're essentially arguing for small town living in the core, but trying to fix things with a limited amount of condo options and thinking transit will be magic for the whole region as a complete replacement to roads. The staunch single family home ITP Nimbyism .... I want to be in a suburban neighborhood close to the core and not have people drive through my streets and I want the freeways removed is horribly overplayed.
This is one of many ideas people in this very forum need to consider more. Not because they need to want this to happen, but because this makes some blunt trade-offs with some of the other aggressive things some have been saying. This is an idea to challenge people to think about trade offs. People need to start considering some of the trade-offs to more aggressive opinions and ideas.
I agree that the desire of some Intown and ITP residents to have the existing freeway system removed is unrealistic at this point in time, particularly with the scarcity of crosstown and cross-regional arterial routes both ITP and throughout the Atlanta region at-large.
While understandably derided by many Intown/ITP residents for its adverse impacts on the quality-of-life of many Intown neighborhoods during its construction and first few decades of existence, the existing Atlanta freeway system has also brought an unparalleled and unprecedented level of prosperity to the Atlanta region, both ITP and OTP.
Atlanta's then newly-expanded freeway system (along with Atlanta's MARTA Heavy Rail Transit system and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport) was one of the major reasons cited as to why Atlanta was awarded the rights to host the 1996 Summer Olympic games by the International Olympic Committee.
Ironically, Atlanta's existing freeway system (and the massive amount of economic activity that it has facilitated and continues to generate) is also one of the major reasons why (along with many OTP suburban and exurban areas) many Intown and ITP neighborhoods are increasingly viable from both an economic and a quality-of-life standpoint....Because of the relative access that the freeway system (even despite the growing amount of traffic congestion on it) provides to employment opportunities all around the Atlanta region.
Just as the early days of the freeway system in Atlanta and most major U.S. city/metros made it possible for people to live in the outlying suburbs and exurbs and commute to work in the urban core, the freeway system also makes it possible to live in the urban core and commute to work in areas of growing economic opportunity in outlying suburban and exurban communities.
With that said, it is understandable that many (if not most) Intown/ITP residents (not necessarily unlike many, if not most residents in OTP suburban and exurban communities) want to minimize (reduce and slow-down) the amount of automobile traffic that drives through the neighborhoods where they live (often with children) and have made such major financial and emotional investments.
Intown/ITP residents have every right to want to enjoy (and even demand) the type of small-town, suburban lifestyle that OTP residents have demanded and enjoyed for decades since the start of the post-World War II era of mass suburbanization of American cities and metros.
Now will a small-town/suburban lifestyle be completely possible at/near the very center of a large major metro area/region like Atlanta? Maybe, maybe not? But even if a small-town suburban lifestyle might not be completely possible in urban core neighborhoods, those residents still have the right to pursue the highest quality-of-life that may be possible for their communities and if that means desiring a small-town/suburban type of lifestyle then so be it.
It should be noted that Atlanta is not the only major city where urban core residents are known to display a robust form of "NIMBYism" in desiring to enjoy a small-town lifestyle at the very center of the urban core of a large major metropolitan area/region.
Earlier this week I read an article that criticized the reportedly "extreme NIMBYism" of inner-city/Intown residents of Seattle, a city that (not unlike Atlanta) is also known for its extremely strong and highly-desirable urban neighborhoods.
What makes the neighborhoods in major cities like Seattle (and San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, New York, Chicago, etc) so highly-desirable is that many of those urban neighborhoods function like small towns in a way with their own village-like downtown areas and their own clearly-defined sense of community that is a subset (both physically and psychologically) of the larger city and metro areas that surround them.
It should also be noted that one of the major reasons that many of the major U.S. cities cited above have such strong urban neighborhoods may be because of the freeway revolts that stopped the construction of additional urban freeways through urban neighborhoods in many of those cities from about the 1960's through the 1980's.
Like here in Atlanta (like has been discussed before on these boards), Georgia state government actively pushed plans to build more through arterial routes through the urban core in the form of urban freeways through Intown neighborhoods ITP pretty early on.
But with the exception of Freedom Parkway, those plans to build more urban freeways (like the I-675/GA 400 and US 78 Stone Mountain Freeway extensions through Intown East Atlanta) were mostly halted and defeated by the spirited activism of local residents in those areas who did not want their neighborhoods to be destroyed and aversely affected by the construction of freeways through them....Which was and continues to be the real motivation for the opposition of Intown residents to large-scale road construction and road expansion of any type through their neighborhoods....That they don't want the neighborhoods where they live to be destroyed.
It doesn't matter if it is a factory, or a landfill or a multi-lane freeway, residents of Intown neighborhoods in Atlanta and every other major city just don't want their homes and their lives to be destroyed and/or negatively affected.
They don't care about whether suburbanites and exurbanites and/or other urbanites and out-of-town/out-of-state motorists can drive through the city easier without encountering traffic congestion.
Their only concern (understandably) is whether they and their neighbors will lose their homes, their schools, their parks, their trees, their quality-of-life, their lives as they know them and like them.
Now that doesn't mean that it is a bad thing for regional transportation planners to want people to be able to move through the urban core of the region more quickly and more conveniently....Because it is not a bad thing to want and desire for people to be able to move through a congested area more quickly and conveniently.
Though, we will have to be respectful of existing neighborhoods and communities' rights to desire the highest quality-of-life possible as we move forward to plan and implement strategies to move people (not just automobiles) through the region in a quicker and more convenient manner.
Proposing to demolish urban neighborhoods (particularly urban neighborhoods with a strong sense-of-community pride) to construct new segments of urban freeway ITP is about as realistic as proposing to decommission/remove ITP segments of Atlanta's physically limited freeway system.
With the political inability of Atlanta's road network to be expanded, even on a modest scale in many cases, metro Atlantans are going to have to accept the reality that they likely are going to have to find new ways of getting to work (like carpooling/ridesharing and transit).
On the other hand, in exchange for successfully deterring government from further expanding the road network ITP (and even in some cases, shrinking the road network ITP) and likely getting government to support the expansion of transit over roads in the long-term, Intown/ITP metro Atlantans may likely have to accept the expansion (largely vertically) of an existing superhighway like I-285 as a means of moving vehicles through the region more quickly and conveniently while attempting to accommodate growing amounts of vehicular traffic (particularly truck traffic) that is being generated by a population and economy that continues to grow at a robust clip.
In approximately 10 years we'll be able to close all of the interstates ITP. Good riddance. Turn them all into Freedom Parkway esq boulevards and use the remaining extra space for transit, residential development, and parks.
In approximately 10 years we'll be able to close all of the interstates ITP. Good riddance. Turn them all into Freedom Parkway esq boulevards and use the remaining extra space for transit, residential development, and parks.
I want some of that stuff you're smoking.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
