Piedmont Avenue Re-do

31 Jan

A virtual one, anyway. Below is a potential reconfiguration of the five-lane, one-way section of Piedmont Avenue that runs through Downtown and Midtown, created with Streetmix. Two lanes have been reversed to reinstate two-way traffic, with bike “sharrows” added to the outside lanes. The center lane was removed to make room for a median and to widen the sidewalks enough to accommodate bus stop shelters.

If you’d like to give it a try yourself, there’s no shortage of candidates. Spring Street, West Peachtree, and Courtland/Juniper, for example, all have at least four lanes of one-way traffic slicing through Midtown and Downtown as well.

Streetmix: Piedmont Ave.

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2 Responses to “Piedmont Avenue Re-do”

  1. Andy McBurney 02/01/2014 at 9:57 am #

    Intriguing. I don’t know if I’d divvy up the space the same way.

    Also, which section of Piedmont are you talking? I think Piedmont and Juniper vary considerably in their width.

    I assume you would have on-street parking where the bus stops are not present?

    What is the current curb-to-curb width? Road diet schemes are much easier to implement if they do not alter the curb line or require moving storm drains.

    http://thewhitefolder.blogspot.com/

    • OO 02/01/2014 at 12:38 pm #

      Yeah, there are a dozen different/better ways that it could be redone than what I managed to toss together. The section that I was looking at runs between Harris/John Portman and North Avenue. It goes down to four lanes as it crosses North Ave., then the on-street parking starts at Piedmont and 3rd, which effectively reduces it to three lanes and even two in some places

      I’d just like to see:

      1. People drive more slowly on that section of Piedmont. It looks like an expressway, so lots of people drive on it as if it is.

      2. Arrange the street in a way that’s conducive to establishing bus service. There’s currently no bus service on Piedmont between Decatur Street and 14th Street. That’s almost three miles of a heavily traveled street with a LOT of dorms, apartments, condos, houses and businesses on it, not to mention Piedmont Park.

      I looked high and low (perhaps in the wrong places) but I couldn’t find any specs on how wide the street is there. I guess I could just go measure a couple of the lanes myself.

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