Streetsblog Capitol Hill

When it comes to job sprawl, few regions have been as gung-ho as Atlanta. During the 2000s, Atlanta area employers sprawled at twice the national average. At the end of that decade, only Detroit and Chicago had a greater share of jobs further away from downtown.

Coca-Cola is planning to move 500 jobs from the Atlanta exurbs to downtown -- a major break with historical trends. Image: Waymarking.com

Just one in 10 jobs in the Atlanta region is in the urban core, Elizabeth Kneebone of the Brookings Institution told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But some Atlanta companies are rethinking the suburbs. Coca-Cola recently decided to move 500 jobs from exurban Cobb County to downtown Atlanta. Other companies, including Panasonic, Athenahealth, ExactTarget, and Asurion Insurance Services have done the same in recent years.

“There’s no stampede yet back to the city,” wrote Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, in an editorial for the AJC. “The long-term thinning of jobs continues.” He noted the Brookings study’s hypothesis that “job sprawl” slowed during the Great Recession mostly because job loss was greatest in outlying areas. “That was more true in the metro Atlanta area than nationally,” LeRoy said.

Brookings reports that 88 percent of the Atlanta region’s low-income population lives in the suburbs, but only one-third of the region’s suburbanites have access to transit. The suburban residents that do have transit access can still only reach about 17 percent of the region’s jobs within 90 minutes, according to another Brookings study.

Coca-Cola also moved its Toronto offices downtown, according to the Globe and Mail.

Okay, the preliminary stuff is over. It’s round two of Parking Madness — our hunt for the worst parking crater in an American downtown. By the end of this week, we’ll be ready down to the Final Four. But first things first: Atlanta takes on Dallas in our first Elite Eight match-up.

As a refresher, we’ll post the photos and descriptions we showed in the first round.

This is the picture that helped Atlanta beat Denver in the first round:

Read more…

In the race to the bottom that is Parking Madness, Streetsblog’s Sweet 16-style tournament of terrible downtown parking craters, 10 cities have faced off so far.

But there are more, so many more awful parking wastelands in otherwise proud American cities. In this post, the match up is Atlanta versus Denver. Remember to cast your votes at the bottom.

Let’s start with Atlanta:

The most shameful thing about this asphalt field is that a MARTA rail station is smack dab in the middle of it. So much for transit-oriented development, huh? Atlanta transit advocate Ashley Robbins sent us this description:

One MARTA stop south of Five Points, the downtown epicenter of Atlanta, stands the Garnett station in a sea of underutilized parking. The Garnett plaza garden over the heavy rail and Greyhound stations, while being near the federal building, the Atlanta Municipal court, and the popular Castleberry Hill neighborhood, is surrounded with unkempt parking, abandoned buildings and is known for lurid activity, giving Garnett one of the worst reputations of any MARTA station.

There’s nothing quite as threatening as a darkened parking lot at night.

Meanwhile, on to Denver. Commenter Jack Shaner sent us this aerial photo of the northern edge of downtown in the Mile High City, in which you can see a collection of craters:

Read more…

Civic pride, attachment to community — what does that have to do with how you get around? According to a recent study commissioned by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, possibly quite a bit.

People who use MARTA to get around Atlanta report feeling a stronger connection to the region. Image: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A survey of more than 800 residents from the 10-county Atlanta area found those who use MARTA reported a stronger connection to their community. A total of 51 percent of MARTA riders reported they felt a strong connection to the Atlanta region, compared with just 23 percent of those who do not use the transit service. In addition, 72 percent of MARTA riders said they had a strong connection to their neighborhood, compared to 65 percent of drivers.

It’s easy to imagine how daily strolls to the transit station and riding around the city in the shared space of a train car could inspire feelings of community — even in a town like Atlanta, which isn’t known as a transit haven.

Many of the newspaper’s interviewees testified to that effect:

Some MARTA riders say riding the buses and trains exposes them to more people and places, as opposed to the isolated transport of riding in a car.

“I meet people from everywhere — Ethiopia, Jamaica, Canada, Michigan,” said Angel Lemond, 23, who commutes from Riverdale to classes at Georgia Perimeter College. “I talk probably every day with somebody just to pass the time on the train.”

But the paper said there was still a question of cause and effect. Does MARTA make people more civic-minded or do more civic-oriented people gravitate toward MARTA?

Either way, the AJC said strengthening the “social fabric” might be one more benefit transit provides to the region. Unfortunately, MARTA customers are now facing a third fare increase in just four years.

Despite the national outrage over the Raquel Nelson case, officials in metro Atlanta continue to treat pedestrians like criminals.

Simply crossing the street can, and often does, land Atlanta area pedestrians a citation. Photo: Creative Loafing

Last Wednesday, a 35-year-old woman was hospitalized after being struck by a vehicle while attempting to cross a road in northwest Atlanta. A local Fox affiliate reports that the woman suffered injuries and is in “stable” condition. But police have already decided she, not the driver, was at fault. The victim is being charged with ”pedestrian in the roadway,” a legal term for “jaywalking.”

Sally Flocks, director of Atlanta’s pedestrian advocacy organization, PEDS, says it is not unusual for police officers in the region to cite and fault pedestrians involved in collisions, even as they’re lying in hospital beds.

“For the cops, I think it gives them closure” to fault one of the parties, she said. “They could cite the driver for failing to show due care. They tend not to do that.”

Part of the problem is that Georgia has one of the most draconian pedestrian laws in the country. Last year, the Georgia legislature passed a law that made it illegal for pedestrians and runners to use the roadway if there are sidewalks on the road.

“It’s being interpreted by police officers to make it illegal to cross the street,” Flocks said.

The sad fact is that many of Atlanta’s sidewalks are in terrible condition; the city had to pay $4 million in injury settlements last year as a result. Meanwhile, in the suburbs, pedestrians get cited for crossing the street outside of a marked or unmarked crosswalk. But “jaywalking” laws aren’t really designed to be applied outside of downtown areas, Flocks said.

PEDS documented at least one case earlier this year where police misinterpreted the law and wrongly charged a pedestrian. The organization has since begun a campaign to properly inform police officers and judges that every intersection is a crosswalk, even if it’s not marked. Under Georgia law, pedestrians are only required to be inside a crosswalk if they are between two signalized intersections, Flocks said.

Even worse, despite discrimination claims around the Raquel Nelson case, local pedestrian advocates have reason to believe the law is being applied unevenly. Flocks said the citations tend to be concentrated in low-income and Hispanic neighborhoods. Streetsblog has submitted a public records request with the Atlanta Police Department inquiring about the races of those cited for “pedestrian in a roadway.” We will report those results when we receive them.

Atlanta was named the 11th most dangerous metro for walking last year by Transportation for America.

The impaired hit-and-run driver who struck and killed her son on a metro Atlanta road in 2010 has been released from prison by now, but Raquel Nelson is still being prosecuted for her purported role in the tragedy.

The Georgia Court of Appeals upheld the homicide conviction of Raquel Nelson, whose four-year-old son was killed by an impaired driver in 2010. Photo: MyFox8

The single mother of three was injured trying to prevent the collision that killed four-year-old A.J. Newman. That didn’t stop an all white jury from convicting the African-American woman of vehicular homicide last year. Prosecutors brought charges on the grounds that Nelson and her children were not in a crosswalk, though the suburban arterial that separated her apartment complex from a bus stop had no crossing nearby.

Nelson faced three years, while driver Jerry Guy, who has glaucoma and admitted to drinking and taking pain killers before the crash, was sentenced to just six months. After the trial attracted national media attention, a Cobb County judge offered Nelson a reduced sentence of one-year probation or a retrial.

Wanting to clear her name, Nelson chose a retrial. She has since teamed up with high-profile Atlanta defense lawyer Steve Sadow, who took on the case pro bono. Sadow asked an appellate court to throw out the conviction for lack of evidence. But late last month the Georgia Court of Appeals upheld the decision, according to legal website Law.com. “[We] conclude that the evidence presented at trial was sufficient to support the jury’s guilty verdict,” wrote Judges Charles B. Mikell, M. Yvette Miller and William M. Ray II.

The court cited a state law which “says that any person who causes the death of another, without an intention to do so, by violating traffic laws commits the offense of homicide by vehicle in the second degree,” according to Law.com. Sadow argued that the driver of the vehicle, not Nelson, caused A.J.’s death.

“While we have the greatest sympathy for [Nelson's] plight, this court must interpret the law and apply it with an even hand; the appellate process affords us no latitude to make adjustments for the ill-earned good fortune of the lucky, or as in this case, the heart-rending misfortune of the unlucky,” the judges said.

Cobb County Solicitor General Barry Morgan has said he will continue to prosecute Nelson. In a brief filed with the Court of Appeals, Morgan wrote: ”When a pedestrian chooses to cross a divided highway … outside the protection of a crosswalk, she risks her own safety [as] well as the safety of those with her.”

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the case will likely end up before the Georgia Supreme Court.

The Atlanta Beltline project isn’t going away. Project staff want to make that clear. Sure, last week, Atlanta turned down — by a wide margin — a major transportation spending package that would have awarded $600 million to the Beltline project. But this project – an innovative transit and trails corridor that will circle Atlanta’s central city — has seen big setbacks before, says Ethan Davidson, the Beltline’s spokesman.

The Atlanta Beltline, a planned ring of trails and transit circling the central city, won't be stopped by the failure of last week's transportation referendum -- just delayed, says a spokesperson. Photo: Beltline.org

For roughly five years, Atlanta Beltline, Inc., the group charged with moving the project forward, has been collecting revenues from a special tax district that was conceived as the primary funding source. And the vision for an “emerald necklace” for urban Atlanta, first envisioned by a Georgia Tech grad student, is already starting to be realized, Davidson says.

Using revenues from the special tax district, plus money borrowed against future revenues, the group has already secured much of the right-of-way for the rail corridor: roughly 10 miles. In addition, 11 miles of trails, out of the planned 33, have been constructed, and many of them are open to the public. Between the tax revenues, bonding, a handful of government grants and some assorted private donations, more than $337 million has been raised.

True, that amount is shy of the $427 million they had hoped to raise by this time, said Davidson, but not bad considering the housing market crash that took place in the intervening years.

In addition to trail development, the Atlanta Beltline group is currently focused on establishing the right land use conditions for walkable, transit-oriented development, Davidson said. The Beltline group has plans to build some 4,500 affordable housing units around the corridor. About 120 of those have been built or are under construction.

Read more…

The Tea Party declared victory in Atlanta yesterday, after a sweeping transportation referendum was defeated. Photo: AJC

Well, the Atlanta region has spoken.

The proposed one-cent sales tax hike to support $7.15 billion in spending on transit and roads was roundly defeated Tuesday, with 62 percent opposing. Though approved by Atlanta city voters, none of the 10 counties considering the measure gave it the thumbs up, according to unofficial results.

The defeat “leaves the Atlanta region’s traffic congestion problem with no visible remedy,” wrote Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Ariel Hart. “It marks [a] failure not only for the tax but for the first attempt ever to unify the 10-county region’s disparate voters behind a plan of action.”

The immediate implications are huge. The most urgent is the funding situation at MARTA, Atlanta’s already threadbare transit system, which sees half a million daily boardings.

MARTA will most likely see fare hikes or service reductions in the next fiscal year, said Ashley Robbins, executive director of Citizens for Progressive Transit, which advocated for the spending package. The region’s transit agency, which receives no state support, has been spending down its reserves. Even with the $600 million earmarked for MARTA in the referendum, the agency was still facing a $2.3 billion shortfall over the next 10 years.

In addition, the region’s suburban express bus service, GRTA, which serves about 10,000 daily, will most likely be forced to close. And Clayton County, a largely urban county south of Atlanta that lost its transit service altogether two years ago, will have no means to restore service.

And Atlanta can forget about expanding rail service in the short term. By state decree, the entire $600 million for MARTA in the package was for capital needs, not operations, according to a MARTA spokesman. The referendum’s failure is a major setback for the Beltline, Atlanta’s innovative plan for a greenways and rail corridor that would circle the central city (though the region’s downtown streetcar project is moving forward with federal funds).

Read more…

Left: A rally in support of Atlanta's transportation referendum yesterday. Right: A rally in opposition. Photo: AJC

It was fitting that yesterday, the eve of the Atlanta region’s historic transportation vote, the Georgia NAACP filed a civil rights suit against the state Department of Transportation alleging discrimination in contracting. Meanwhile, the head of the DeKalb County NAACP has come out against the T-SPLOST tax proposal, saying it will hurt minority-owned businesses. He even took a shot at Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, a dogged supporter of the referendum, saying “certain blacks” had been duped into supporting the tax proposal.

The proposed one-cent sales tax to support $7 billion in road and transit projects has drawn opposition from some seemingly unlikely places. Considering that this spending package represents a significant investment in rail and bus service for a region with notoriously poor transit options (the funds split fairly evenly been transit and road projects), the fact that the Sierra Club of Georgia is against it may surprise some. The group has been one of the biggest critics of the plan, saying the “haphazard” project list does not constitute a cohesive transportation strategy and is too heavy on roads. Add to that the opposition of some of the black leaders in urban DeKalb County, and tack on the Georgia Tea Party, which draws its strength from the farthest reaches of the exurbs.

This image, showing transit systems in global cities, has become a viral meme for the historic transportation campaign in Atlanta. A second, opposing meme, turning this one on its head, shows the maps with images of apples superimposed in front of Paris, London and New York City. An orange appeared in front of Atlanta.

Meanwhile, the spending measure enjoys overwhelming political and business support in Atlanta. Coke, Home Depot, Delta, UPS, Clear Channel, Turner Broadcasting, and Georgia Power Company have all given money to support the $8 million campaign for its passage.

Yesterday, Georgia’s Republican Governor Nathan Deal held a rally with Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Kasim Reed, making a last-minute appeal to voters in the 10-county Atlanta region. Neither man was pulling any punches. Without this new tax, they said, metro Atlanta’s transportation system — and perhaps the whole regional economy — is headed in a bad direction.

If the referendum fails, “we simply don’t have the resources to ensure that Georgia has an adequate transportation network,” said Deal.

Reed dismissed the Sierra Club’s assertion that if voters turn down the package of 157 projects, a new, more transit-heavy list could be produced and passed quickly.

“It took four years to get a bill that you all could vote on,” said Reed. ”If we fail, nobody better come and ask me to do it again.”

Read more…

There’s a lot at stake for metro Atlanta on July 31. That day, voters will go to the polls to decide the fate of a proposed one percent sales tax that promises some $8 billion in transportation funding, to be split relatively evenly between transit and road projects over 10 counties. If it fails, experts warn, the only fundable transportation project going forward could be toll roads.

The Altanta Beltline -- a circular rail and trail system -- is one of the projects that would receive funding under the $8 billion transit referendum coming up at the end of this month. Photo: Curbed Atlanta

Early voting started last Monday and poll results have been all over the map. Some have shown the referendum trailing badly and others give passage a slight edge — but with high rates of undecided voters.

It’s been a long, heated campaign. Promoters of the spending package, namely the local chamber of commerce, have spent some $8 million crafting a message they hope will sway the public. But the issue has been divisive. An odd coalition of opponents has come together including the local Sierra Club, the DeKalb County NAACP and the Tea Party Patriots, according to WSB in Atlanta, raising objections to everything from road expansions to the lack of rail investment in communities of color to the whole premise of raising taxes.

But if there’s one thing everyone agrees on it’s that Atlanta has a big problem when it comes to transportation. The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce has called the region’s notorious gridlock the biggest threat to the region’s prosperity. Four years ago, Forbes said that the city’s traffic problems are the worst in the country, noting that only five of the 13 counties that make up the Atlanta region even have transit service.

And that was before a budget crisis did away with transit in Clayton County, just south of Atlanta — where the household average income is less than $20,000 — roughly two years ago. Meanwhile, MARTA, Atlanta’s underwhelming rail system, is dealing with a crisis of its own. While $600 million from the referendum would be earmarked for MARTA maintenance, that still leaves the agency with a projected $2.3 billion backlog over the next 10 years, just to keep its system in working order. Its reserves are set to expire next year. MARTA is the largest transit system in the country that receives no state support.

“Part of what has made this city so great is a sense of excitement about the future,” real estate executive Clark Gore, of Cassidy Turley, wrote in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, “but unless we deal with our traffic, our best days may be behind us.”

Read more…