Fresh Loaf

The Atlanta Regional Commission held its inaugural Fifty Forward Forum, a gathering of leaders in sustainability and urban planning, two weeks ago at the Blank Foundation. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, right, discussed how his city has taken steps to become one of the vanguards in the sustainable movement. Click here to watch his presentation and to suggest what metro Atlanta needs to do if it wants to follow Seattle’s lead.

(Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Regional Commission)

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This one goes out to all the wonks in the audience.

The Atlanta Regional Commission released its 2008 Freight Mobility Report this afternoon, all 122 whopping pages of it. Lots of interesting aspects to it, including:

• The region is one of the top five logistics hubs in the country — pretty notable judging that we’re landlocked. Atlanta, Dallas and Chicago are the three largest inland distribution centers in the country.
• Lots of tractor trailer operators rarely — or don’t — use the heralded Georgia Navigator system.
• The bottlenecks you’d expect freight operators to gripe about — Spaghetti Junction, Peachtree Road, etc. — are terrible for moving goods and are getting worse. Oh, and Howell Mill Road sucks for truck drivers.
• Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport ranked 10th in the nation and 25th in the world for annual tonnage moved in 2005.
• Heads up, Metro Chamber: “It was noted during stakeholder interviews that shippers are starting to look outside the Atlanta metro region for distribution facilities due to congested conditions. As they do so, Atlanta will retain its competitiveness relative to other areas (such as Macon, Valdosta, Chattanooga and Charlotte) because the region’s advantages outweigh its disadvantages.”

Check it out here. Really thorough report. The ARC board voted today to adopt the recommendations of the report, which include increasing driver education, double-track the rail corridors between Atlanta and Chattanooga and Savannah and Memphis, and eliminate or reduce at-grade crossings at bottlenecks, among others. Lots of suggested infrastructure fixes listed in there, too.

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Awesome news coming in from the Atlanta Regional Commission. The region, as part of its Livable Communities Initiative, selected the Vine City MARTA station area as the focus of a $90,000 study to examine the feasibility of making it a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly transit node. Here are the details from the press release:

Vine City MARTA Station
Award Amount: $96,000
Sponsor: City of Atlanta

The Vine City MARTA Station study encompasses an area approximately one-third of a mile in diameter around the transit station, along with an additional corridor extending eastward connecting to the Ashby MARTA station area. This study will formulate strategies to create an urban scale, mixed-use node that exemplifies pedestrian-friendly design, provides multimodal transportation choices and creates an efficient regional east-west connection linking the City Center to activity centers such as the Beltline, Washington Park, the Historic Westside Village and the Atlanta University Center. The strategies will assist surrounding neighborhoods and employment centers with streetscape improvements and increased connectivity, while leveraging the area’s proximity to the Georgia Dome and Georgia World Congress Center to create an integrated and vibrant 24-hour community.

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Water management a la personal finance:

“You don’t have to be a banker to know that if you spend 75 percent of your savings, and then all of your income, you’ll soon become bankrupt,” said Dan Sheer, a bearded and expressive Maryland hydrologist.

That was the analogy Sheer dropped to illustrate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ mismanagement of water resources during a meeting yesterday of top water planners and experts at the Atlanta Regional Commission. Sheer, who has been working with King and Spalding, the district’s legal counsel, was one of several speakers who briefed members of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District on the water-shortage situation as well as an update of the 18-year legal proceedings among Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

And the dominant message of the afternoon was clear: “Don’t blame Atlanta. Blame the Corps.”

(more…)

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For the moment at least, the age-old image of Atlanta as a maelstrom of sprawl appears to be changing.

The Atlanta Regional Commission released a report that says conversion of forested and agricultural land in the 13-county metro area has slowed by 70 percent in the last two years. In addition, the ARC was able to identify nearly 170,000 acres of protected greenspace in the 20-county metro area. That’s roughly the size of DeKalb County, the report says.

The ARC attributes the reduction of forested- and agricultural-land development to the recent housing-market slump and, to a lesser extent, the growing popularity of living intown and mixed-use developments. Instead of cutting down trees and building in a new area, developers will convert or build on previously developed property.

According to the report, voters are also in favor of preserving greenspace — no special ballot measure geared toward greenspace acquisition or protection has been voted against in the 20-county metro region since 2003. Paulding County has the most protected greenspace in the region, at 16 percent, with Rockdale, Bartow, Cherokee and DeKalb following at 8.9, 7.8, 6.5 and 6.2 percent, respectively. An interesting fact judging that a couple of those counties, notably Cherokee and Bartow, are often considered some of the biggest examples of sprawl in the region.

To view the report, click here.

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Mayor Shirley Franklin rolled out the red carpet for the public yesterday and announced Connect Atlanta, the city’s first comprehensive transportation plan. Officials say the city-specific project will employ a wide range of options — public transit, roads and transit alternatives — to improve the transportation crunch for which the city has long been notorious. Funding in part is provided by a grant from the Atlanta Regional Commission.

The plan kicks off with a 13-month study geared toward including the public, a move that city officials hope will endear it to the community and solidify its importance with Franklin’s political successors. We’re looking at you, Clark Howard.

To apply to become a stakeholder in the plan for your community, visit the Connect Atlanta website. Public meetings start in December. The site just launched and is littered with a bunch of “coming soon” messages, but bookmark it and keep tabs as we’ll be doing the same. For a timetable of the study, click here.

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Everyone in Atlanta has an opinion about our traffic woes. If your laments typically fall on deaf ears, or at least the ears of the ineffectual, here’s your chance to change that.

Two online public meetings set up by the Atlanta Regional Commission will allow metro Atlantans to chat directly with transportation planners and policy makers. ARC officials will consider what the public says during the online meetings in its 25-year, $66.5 billion — yes, that’s billion with a “b” — transportation plan.

If you think the Beltline transit-and-trails project and a seriously beefed-up MARTA are more important than widening highways and pouring more and more asphalt, it’s time to have your say.

The online meetings will take place Thursday, Aug. 16, from 7:00-8:30 p.m., and Saturday, Aug. 18, from 10:00-11:30 a.m. Click here to register.

Can’t make either of those time slots? You can still add your two cents by visiting the ARC’s website or e-mailing transportation@atlantaregional.com before Aug. 23.

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