peachtreekeen: Traffic only affects those stuck in it, right? Once all cars go electric, essentially eliminating inter-city air pollution, then there will be no more problems for pedestrians, right?  Wrong!! Probably the biggest problem with cars in cities is that they require huge amounts of land for storage (a.k.a. parking). Here is a photo of Midtown Atlanta between 5th street and 12th street. This is one of the densest and most pedestrian-friendly ares in the entire state of Georgia. The red blocks indicate parcels of land that are 100% dedicated to car storage. Dedicating all this land to car storage basically reduces the density by about half, doubles the average distance between locations, and reduces walkability. Throw in the 16-lane interstate and the 45+ mph traffic on most of these streets, it becomes exceedingly hard to believe that this is one of the most walkable areas in the entire state. Such is life for pedestrians in a car-dominated city. It wasn’t always this way. Atlanta, like all cities, used to be walkable and people actually lived IN the city instead of commuting 50 miles every day. But as more people moved away from the city, the more Atlanta had to become like a suburb, being retrofitted to handle all the automobile infrastructure required by a million 40 hour-a-week temporary citizens. The result of this retrofit is a wasteland of asphalt and isolated neighborhoods, a slow decimation that has rolled along since the innovation of the automobile. How cars have killed Atlanta And this map doesn’t even cover all the parking (the Publix parking garage and pretty much every condo building’s parking garages don’t make the map. Though I will say with them you get a mixed-use infrastructure and it looks better than a big parking lot. The AGL lot across from the Midtown MARTA station is a particular eyesore at night.)
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peachtreekeen:

Traffic only affects those stuck in it, right? Once all cars go electric, essentially eliminating inter-city air pollution, then there will be no more problems for pedestrians, right?  Wrong!! Probably the biggest problem with cars in cities is that they require huge amounts of land for storage (a.k.a. parking). Here is a photo of Midtown Atlanta between 5th street and 12th street. This is one of the densest and most pedestrian-friendly ares in the entire state of Georgia. The red blocks indicate parcels of land that are 100% dedicated to car storage.

Dedicating all this land to car storage basically reduces the density by about half, doubles the average distance between locations, and reduces walkability. Throw in the 16-lane interstate and the 45+ mph traffic on most of these streets, it becomes exceedingly hard to believe that this is one of the most walkable areas in the entire state. Such is life for pedestrians in a car-dominated city.

It wasn’t always this way. Atlanta, like all cities, used to be walkable and people actually lived IN the city instead of commuting 50 miles every day. But as more people moved away from the city, the more Atlanta had to become like a suburb, being retrofitted to handle all the automobile infrastructure required by a million 40 hour-a-week temporary citizens. The result of this retrofit is a wasteland of asphalt and isolated neighborhoods, a slow decimation that has rolled along since the innovation of the automobile.

How cars have killed Atlanta

And this map doesn’t even cover all the parking (the Publix parking garage and pretty much every condo building’s parking garages don’t make the map. Though I will say with them you get a mixed-use infrastructure and it looks better than a big parking lot. The AGL lot across from the Midtown MARTA station is a particular eyesore at night.)

Source: peachtreekeen