Erosion of cities by automobiles entails so familiar a series of events that they hardly need describing. The erosion proceeds as a kind of nibbling, small nibbles at first, but eventually hefty bites. Because of vehicular congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow, staggered-signal systems are installed for faster movement, a bridge is double-decked as its capacity is reached, an expressway is cut through yonder, and finally whole webs of expressways. More and more land goes into parking, to accomodate the ever increasing numbers of vehicles while they are idle.

No one step in this process is, in itself, crucial. But cumulatively the effect is enormous.

…

One seemingly logical step is taken after another, each step plausible and apparently defensible in itself; and the peculiar result is a form of city which is not easier to use and to get around in, but on the contrary more scattered, more cumbersome, more time wasting, expensive and aggravating for cross-use.

– Jane Jacobs, 1961

This is Part Four in a series on the Atlanta Streetcar. In this series, I’m taking the time to respond to streetcar critics. Later on, I’ll have a few comments and criticisms of my own.

Read Part One.
Read Part Two.
Read Part Three.

Critic: The streetcar will cause congestion.

And there’s hardly any congestion in Atlanta already. Pardon my sarcasm, but how did we get all this congestion; by building streetcars?

To conquer traffic, it is necessary to focus on conquering automobile dependence. Conquering automobile dependence means building infrastructure that gives citizens the opportunity to use other means of transportation.

Until very recently, planners and local and state officials have hardly given any thought to linking transportation and land-use policy. Land use is land use, and transportation is transportation. Lay out the land according to Euclidean principles — don’t just separate incompatible land uses; separate all land uses! Once the land uses are separated, figure out how to lay out the roads afterward. A simple formula will tell you how much traffic will need to be acommodated from every point A to every point B. When the formula doesn’t work, planners will speculate that it’s because the lights aren’t timed, or there are bottlenecks… any excuse will work as long as the traffic engineers don’t have to interface with real people.

The point here is that if you think of transportation only in Euclidean terms, you’ll only think about transportation as a problem of moving cars and trucks. It is more useful, instead, to think of transportation as a problem of moving people and goods. The streetcar is one tool out of many in the transportation toolbox.

The most conservative estimates show continued growth in the Atlanta metro area: 5.1 million in 2010, 5.9 million in 2020, and 6.97 million in 2030. So far, the metro region (and the City of Atlanta in particular) has exceeded the projections. Infrastructure development could continue to focus on a set of assumptions that are more appropriate for the 1950s or 1960s — when growth wasn’t as much of a concern, energy was cheap (and consequences of its over-consumption were unknown), and cars were “futuristic.”

How can Atlanta transform itself into a pedestrian-oriented city, one that considers the issue of congestion mitigation as a problem of moving people and goods? The answer may be one corridor or one project at a time. In any case, the most logical place to begin is the Peachtree corridor. (This is not to dimish the importance of other projects — the Beltline, C-Loop, commuter rail, etc., are all also crucial. Each fit within the context of a single transportation network.)

In the 1950s and 60s Jane Jacobs watched the erosion by automobiles of New York City as Robert Moses tore through established neighborhoods and uprooted tens of thousands of citizens at a time with new highways. Many commuters in the New York metro still endure the induced demand for travel. Today, we have a choice: either follow the same model and deal with more of the same tired non-solutions, or build the alternative.