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MARTA Meetings: Today and tomorrow

16 May

Yikes, almost forgot: MARTA is holding public hearings at 7 p.m. today and Tuesday.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

  • MARTA board members will outline the agency’s budget for the 2012 fiscal year
  • Proposed service changes to bus routes 3, 25, 50, 51, 99, and 181 proposed for September
  • Fare increases proposed for October
  • Security improvements 

Today’s meetings are at the South Fulton Service Center in College Park, which is served by the route 180 bus, and at the Fulton County Government Center downtown, which is served by the route 49 bus. There’s also free shuttle service to the downtown meeting.

Tuesday’s meetings are at the DeKalb Maloof Auditorium in Decatur, which is one block west of Decatur Station, and at the North Fulton Service Center in Sandy Springs. Take route 87 bus from Dunwoody or North Springs Station to the North Fulton Service Center.

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Idea of the Day: Pedestrian Propulsion

12 May

Have you ever noticed how a long walk feels much shorter when you’re in a densely-built urban area with a lot of other people on the street? Festivals or other events that create novel and rapidly-changing scenery around you can have the same effect. There’s a name for that: “Pedestrian propulsion.”

Areas that rank highly in pedestrian propulsion also have high rates of “compensation” – the visual and social payoff received in exchange for the time and energy required to walk.

That’s why it seems to take weeks to walk past a strip mall or just a block or two like this:

while walking somewhere interesting seems to take less time than it really does.

Speaking of pedestrian experiences, the vision for the “Midtown Mile” is being revamped. The idea of replicating a place like Chicago’s Miracle Mile is out the window, with planners now aiming for a area of shopping and restaurants that’s more everyday than special occasion. They hope to make it a constant draw for residents in and around midtown as well as the thousands office workers who come and go daily instead of a place mostly catering to tourists and the very well-off.

A similar re-think is afoot at the Streets of Buckhead project. The “Rodeo Drive of the South” concept, with high-dollar hotels, restaurants and boutiques intended to draw people from all over the region, is being toned down and will eventually even have a different name.

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Old film, new bus schedules

28 Apr

From Pattern Cities, a 1908 film shot from a Barcelona streetcar. Either Barcelona’s pedestrians and bicyclists were utterly fearless in their zeal to be in a movie, or the camera was mounted waaay out in the front of the streetcar.

Also, changes to routes and/or schedules for 25 MARTA bus routes went into effect Saturday. Toss out those old schedules. Again.

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What happened at Allen Plaza, plus an ARC transportation “wish list” database

18 Apr
W and 12 hotel and residence buildings

An undeveloped parcel of land on Ivan Allen Boulevard sits in the shadow of Allen Plazas W hotel and condominium tower and Novares Twelve Centennial Park

Rachel Tobin wrote a brief but through history of downtown’s troubled Allen Plaza development for Friday’s AJC.

Developer Hal Barry summarized the events leading up to the recent foreclosure of one of the project’s buildings. It’s a story that’s become all too familiar in the last few years:

“We did well and made a lot of money…[a]nd we turned around, as risk-taker developers do, and reinvested a lot of it in operating expenses and project investments. And then the market hits you broadside.”

Also on Friday, the AJC published an overview of the Atlanta Regional Commission’s transportation “wish list,” with a database of all the prospective projects on the region’s list .

Among the items MARTA requested are a variable regional fare system (sometimes referred to as “zone fares”) , on-board security cameras for all buses, trains and paratransit vehicles, an advertising system for the agency’s 10 miles of tunnels and the establishment of a cloud computing system to assist in post-disaster recovery and service continuity.

The 436-item list, with projects totaling about $29 billion, will be pared down first by the GDOT’s planning director, then by the 21 members of the Atlanta Regional Roundtable. Voters in each of the state’s 12 regions will decide during primary elections in 2012 whether to approve a new one percent sales tax to fund their regions’ projects.

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Public comment meeting on MMPT proposals is March 30

17 Mar

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Although the Georgia Department of Transportation announced its choice for the development group for the MMPT project Monday, the agency has scheduled a public comment meeting on  March 30 from 4 to 7 p.m. at GDOT headquarters at North Avenue and W. Peachtree Street.

If you can’t make it to the meeting, contact GDOT about the project here.

H/T to Creative Loafing.

If you’d like to see the full presentation the slideshow images were chose from, it’s here [PDF].

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Gulch redevelopment proposals: Summing up the summaries (Updated)

16 Mar

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The three development teams short-listed to develop the multi-modal passenger terminal (MMPT) in the downtown “gulch” area have submitted their proposals to the Georgia Department of Transportation staff, the AJC reported Friday. The DOT posted summaries of the proposals in the MMPT section of their Web site.

The summaries are pretty short on details, but I pulled out a few highlights.

Continue reading →

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Catching up: A TSPLOST primer, mobility banks and City Hall East

9 Mar

 

This photo, taken as a cloud hovered over the Bank of American tower on North Avenue, isn’t related to today’s content at all, but art has been a bit sparse lately.

Heartier, more nutritious posts are in the works, but for now:

  • If you still haven’t quite gotten a grip on the whats and whys of the proposed 1-cent sales tax for transit that will be up for a vote next year, there’s a concise but detailed explanation of it in this post at MARTA Rocks!

 

  • From The Urbanophile: Jens Ludwig and Steven Raphael at the Brookings Institution propose the creation of  “mobility banks (PDF)” to assist unemployed or underemployed people who are shackled to an upside-down mortgage or who lack money to move to an area where their skills are in demand. The bank would function much as federal student loans – repayment is deferred until borrowers have secured employment.

 

  • Green Building Chronicle has a few details from Green Street Properties’ (long, long,) long-awaited adaptive reuse renovation of City Hall East. GBC reported that Green Street Properties President Katharine Kelley expects that the developers will finalize the purchase of the property from the City of Atlanta within a month, with clean-up and demolition to begin in early spring. H/T to Creative Loafing.

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Braves Shuttle back from the not-quite dead? Plus, more bus route changes

3 Mar

In a move that’s likely to surprise about six people, MARTA is considering reviving the Braves shuttle. The free shuttle, which runs from Five Points Station to Turner Field on Braves game days, was a casualty of service reductions the agency undertook last fall to address a large and long-running budget gap.

“Putting the money into the shuttle instead of some other service can seem unfair to some…” Citizens for Progressive Transit’s president Ashley Robins told the AJC. “This is not life line service” that would provide needed access to employment or healthcare-related destinations.

MARTA will solicit riders’ input on the shuttle’s fate as well as service changes on bus routes 2, 87, 99 and 181 at hearings on March 21 and 24. (MARTA’s notice says “Monday, March 21” and “Monday, March 24,” but March 24 is a Thursday.) The proposed bus route changes would go into effect June 18.

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Coming in March: Phoenix Flies tours

23 Feb

Cross-posted with Metblogs:

Phoenix Flies logo

Phoenix Flies logo by APC

The Atlanta Preservation Center’s seventh annual Phoenix Flies tours will run March 5 to March 20 this year.

Phoenix Flies, which APC describes as “city-wide celebration of Atlanta’s vibrant living landmarks,” features tours of historic landmark buildings and neighborhoods all over the city.

I’ve been meaning to take the “Unseen Underground” tour for years, and I’ll admit to not being sure where Castleberry Hill even is, so I probably ought to get to that one too.

Most appear to be walking tours, but there’s also an approximately three-hour, 10-mile bicycle tour of downtown historic districts on March 5. All the events are free, but some require reservations.

Have you taken any of the Phoenix Flies tours? What did you think?

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Vehicles 5, Fixed objects 1

6 Feb

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A little enhancement to yesterday’s AJC story about the morning power outage in Midtown:

A few minutes before 9:30 a.m. there was a muffled explosion, quickly followed by another explosion, which was accompanied by a reddish-yellow flash of light. Believe it or not, I didn’t think much of it. It had been raining for two days. When I lived in Peachtree Hills, there was a transformer that could be relied upon to blow up in a shower of silver-blue sparks at least a couple of times whenever it rained for more than 24 hours.

But when I looked outside about 10 minutes later, the street was blocked by three police cars, a fire truck and an ambulance to the south. A large, black Chevrolet pickup truck with a utility pole right in the middle of its hood was straddling the curb to the north. There were also two small trees missing.

Continue reading →

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