So I’m back, and with a continued reverence toward my friends who are able to find something to blog about at least once a day.

While I was “away,” an article appeared in the AJC about yet another development doomed to tragic shortsightedness:

Cousins Properties has filed plans with Fulton County for a possible 30-story condo tower next to the landmark “King” and “Queen” office skyscrapers in the Concourse office park at Ga. 400 and I-285.

The Cobb County developer has asked the county to rezone an 11-acre corner at Concourse to allow for two buildings with as many as 650 condominium units, some shops and restaurants, and about 1,800 parking spaces at the intersection of Hammond Drive and Peachtree Dunwoody Road.

Anyone who knows Dunwoody, especially the near-pill-hill section, knows what a mess traffic tends to be around there. Even worse is the inadequacy of the Medical Center MARTA station toward mitigating any of that mess. For anyone who may use the station, its primary advantage is that if you already have a monthly MARTa pass, you don’t have to drive your car to any of the nearby hospitals and pay to park. An added benefit: as long as you’re going to the hospital to get healthy, the least you can do is walk there.

As long as Cousins wants to build residential units in the area — which is not a bad idea on its face, considering the wealth of other uses in the area — it would be a much better idea for them to push to build as close as possible to the Medical Center station. It would reduce their need to build more of these expensive, ugly parking decks, and it would reduce the need of Atlanta commuters to drive just to get anywhere.

Cousins, and all the other developers have recognized the need and demand for dense urban living in this town. The key phrase is “linking transportation and land use planning.” I heard that phrase mentioned at a recent RTIA meeting, where regional heads of local governments shuddered at the idea, as though the last thing many of them wanted was healthy communities in their cities and counties. I also read of the idea several times over the course of the research I was doing for my class the other week.

I read a fairly large pile of research that’s already been done out there in the field. Cities have been poked and prodded, compared and contrasted. Some of these papers agreed on some things, but not others. Of all the reasons why people choose to ride rail, personal characteristics — race, gender, income — were not highly rated with very strong correlations. Income had the strongest correlation among the personal characteristics throughout the literature, but the correlation wasn’t huge.

The structural environment was the single most influential factor nearly everywhere in the literature. Ming Zhang pointed out that there is a bit of a debate in the literature between folks who say “Get the land use right” and folks who say “Get the pricing right.” The “price” folks claim that if the price of each mode of transportation reflected the real costs of that mode, then there would be more people using transit. It’s an argument that makes sense only as long as real choices exist in the marketplace. What Dr. Zhang found in his research, among other findings, is that mode choice under the land use model shows varying effects depending on the densities of origins and destinations, and whether different modes were used for work or non-work travel. The effects of travel costs, meanwhile, are more uniform across the other variables. Zhang’s essential finding, which has strong policy implications back here in Atlanta if we want to get our transportation right:

Pertinent implications of the Hong Kong experience lie in the fact that Hong Kong’s land use offers desirable attributes for nondriving travel, but the city still needs a strong fiscal policy to restrain the growth in demand for auto use. This means that land use is necessary but not sufficient to influence travel. This implication is essential to the current policy debate. If the advocates of “get the land use right” want to make land use a more effective mobility tool, complementary policies such as transportation pricing should be adequately incorporated. If the advocates of “get the price right” want to improve the feasibility of implementing pricing policies to reduce driving, providing viable travel options is the place to start—which requires deliberately planned and designed nondriving-friendly land uses. The two form a pair of tactics that are more feasible and effective in combination than either implemented alone.

…

In the search for policy solutions to the growing demand for driving, the debate between “get the land use right” and “get the price right” should focus not on which one is more effective, but on how the two can be integrated as complementary policies.”

It seems an obvious solution when you think about it. Here in Atlanta, our developers would have a key role to play in getting the ball rolling: push a build up of all areas that surround existing transit stations.