There’s a great post this week on the Atlanta Studies website from Joseph Hurley who works as a Data Services and GIS Librarian at Georgia State University Library. Read it here: Atlanta’s Parking Problem Revisited.Here’s a quote from it:…most of downtown has become dominated by substantial parking desk structures and surface level parking lots, which are placed immediately alongside one-way streets that are often four to five lanes wide. Cars regularly treat these exceedingly wide streets as urban highways, traveling at speeds that are unsafe for an area that should cater to pedestrians. Courtland Street is a prime example of how providing “convenient parking” and the removal of on-street parking to allow for “greater street traffic flows,” exactly what both reports recommended, has created undesirable urban environments.As Hurley points out, is Courtland Street in Downtown Atlanta (in the middle of the GSU campus) is truly an undesirable place for anyone outside of a car:In these two images he’s contrasting Courtland’s state in 1954, when it had two traffic lanes and street-side parking, with its current state of four traffic lanes. Also notice the narrow sidewalks. This is a supremely unpleasant place to walk, in my experience (and I’m a fairly hardy urban traveler). The wide lanes promote high car speeds, and having those fast cars fly by while you balance on a skinny sidewalk is sometimes terrifying, particularly if you have a child in tow. The street-side parking provided an important buffer for pedestrians in 1954 – one that disappeared when ‘maximum car flow at all costs’ became the priority.I’ve taken a photo of Courtland before myself, when I was walking alongside it and noticed how scary it was to watch pedestrians cross – even with the right-of-way – in front of a line of stopped cars that were all ready to storm through a light as if they were on an interstate entrance ramp.By coincidence, Tim Keane, the new Commissioner of Planning and Community Development for the City of Atlanta, tweeted a photo of Courtland recently. He seems appalled to find a street this dead and uninviting. Just look at how the buildings don’t ‘address’ the street even through they are next to it:Courtland is one of many one-way, multi-lane streets in the city center that should undergo a two-way conversion and streetcaping – maybe with bike lanes as well. If we can’t manage to put anything inviting for pedestrians and cyclists along the street in the form of ground-level retail, at least we could make their experience of maneuvering it outside a car safer and less frightening.A 2008 Atlanta Business Chronicle piece reported that city planners were keen to convert Courtland (and some other one-way, large streets nearby) to two-way traffic as a way of encouraging more pedestrian and cycling traffic, but some owners of large downtown facilities and hotels fear that doing so would prevent the flow of customers in cars that they’ve gotten used to.But if Atlanta is serious about becoming a city that is friendlier to cyclists and pedestrians, and thus to transit riders who are all pedestrians at some point in their trip, these one way monstrosities have to go – if for the sake of safety alone. According to a piece in Planetizen, the stats are clear: two-way streets are safer for everyone:The risk of collision or injury doubles when driving through a neighborhood of one-way streets. In total, the 22 Census tracts with a high concentration of one-ways had 2,992 additional collisions and 792 more injuries requiring medical treatment—some causing loss of life. Moreover, if you are riding a bike or walking, you are also more likely to be injured on a one-way street.Also, a fascinating article on the origins of Build a Better Block programs. Includes this great passage: ““When the streetcar went away in 1956 two of the major streets became one-way, so you lost 50 percent of the [retail] visibility and made it an unsafe, high-speed corridor. These blocks were built for people, but the environment around them became inhospitable.”It’s time for these blocks to be for people again, and not so dominated by concerns about car flow.