On Sunday, I braved the mobs of smiling people on the Atlanta Beltline by bike to pick up some groceries with my kids. Our short sleeves at sunset made the region’s two-inch snow debacle back in January seem a distant memory. But it’s important to understand what went wrong.
At first we blamed meteorologists, as if they were also accountable for our response to their predictions. Later, we blamed planners without the nuance of differentiating between planning and our region’s consistent rejection of planning as a valuable professional practice (a recent stadium proposal comes to mind, which has never made ink on any regional plan).
We also pointed at the dysfunctional lines of communication across our increasingly fragmented regional politics, even though our second snow in February proved that those challenges can be fixed.
What was most curious to me is that we never pointed at ourselves.
The collective “we” of regional Atlanta should own up to our problem. After all, isn’t this exactly what we wanted? We built a car-dependent region because we wanted it, and the events of Jan. 28 simply underscore the inherent consequences of those decisions. In the parts of the region that have access to transit and live more compactly in walkable areas, people fared reasonably well. They should; they’ve been investing in transit for more than 40 years.
But if we’re honest, we have to say the car-dependent areas of the region also fared well under the circumstances. It’s not like anybody died.
But what if we had also lost power? Imagine if it had been two feet snow, or a chemical spill, or a terrorist attack. What if we had to go for weeks without driving? The distances most people live from where they need to go, and the disconnected nature of our roadway network, would leave most of the region stranded. The consequences of our car dependency would be much more dramatic. Our economy and our way of life depends on people being able to get around, and in most areas of our region, we rely exclusively on an infrastructure that gets jammed up in any emergency.
The midday panic of closing schools and icy streets immediately gridlocked a system that is simply not designed to handle such a crisis. It works OK most of the time, but what happened that day is simply a more spectacular variation of what happens every day at rush hour. The system gets jammed up. Most of our region is built around a system that is incredibly inefficient for emergency response, and also for day-to-day matters like going to work or school, or conveying water, electricity and other utilities to our spread-out way of life.
We chose to build it this way. We wanted it like that, and we consistently refuse to diversify our system with transit and other ways of moving around. That’s fine, I guess, but it has consequences. It has made us vulnerable.
So, yes, we’ll learn to communicate better not only in emergencies but in our day-to-day commutes. Technology can help. But it is important to note the irony that without controls on sprawl, any measures to make roadways more efficient, like streamlined intersections or automation, will only create more sprawl and therefore more congestion.
The best way to protect the quality of life in communities defined by sprawl would be to stop building more of them. We should instead focus on creating a more diversified transportation system through transit investments in the compact parts of the region that can handle more growth. This will both invigorate existing centers and protect the free flow of roadways that much of our region’s economy depends on.
While we may not be able to un-choose the infrastructure system that we built for ourselves over the last 60 years, we can choose to build a better system to support the next million people that will make Atlanta their home.
Let’s at least do that.
Ryan Gravel is an urban designer at Perkins+Will and writes at www.gravelblog.com
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