Atlanta development plan gets national honor

A program for reshaping metro Atlanta’s development has won a top national planning award.

Livable Centers Initiative grants, doled out by the Atlanta Regional Commission, fund transportation projects that use transportation more efficiently. The program won the American Planning Association’s National Planning Excellence Award for Implementation. The commission, metro Atlanta’s official planning agency, called the award the planning profession’s highest honor.

The Atlanta program’s goal is to cut down on developments that require more asphalt for fewer people — like distant suburban cul-de-sacs surrounded by sprawling tracts of stand-alone single-family houses. It rewards “mixed-use” development that pushes homes, businesses and entertainment closer together, and so decreases the amount travel.

The American Planning Association, which made the award, said in a statement that its judges emphasize “long-term, measurable results.”

The grants have in past years come under attack by traditionalists in Georgia who said they were an inefficient way to use transportation.