ThreadATL Podcast, ep. 4: land-use & transportation

The podcast discusses the relationship between land use and transportation in urban areas. The guest, Phil Veasley, talks about the importance of creating a cohesive environment where housing development and transportation complement each other. He mentions that while there are some areas in Atlanta that come close to achieving this, there is still room for improvement. Narrow streets, smaller setbacks, and mixed housing types contribute to creating vibrant and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Veasley also addresses concerns about parking and traffic in denser areas, explaining that increased density can actually lead to less traffic over time. He emphasizes the need for better transportation infrastructure, such as bike lanes and wider sidewalks, to support a car-light or car-free lifestyle. Ultimately, the goal is to create more livable and affordable neighborhoods that prioritize walking, biking, and public transit. You're listening to the Threat ATL podcast. I'm Darren Gibbons. Today we're talking about the intersection of land use and transportation. There are so many times when I hear people talk approvingly of great strides in urban transportation types such as bike lanes or transit but they're not on board with the type of density that really makes those transportation modes work well and vice versa. Sometimes people will be on board with added density apartments and mixed use developments but they don't really understand that at the same time you need to change the design of our transportation systems to allow that added density to be navigable, I'm going to say, outside of a car. We're talking with Phil Veasley, transportation engineer for Tool Design Group and he's Urban Connector on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube and I highly recommend following him. He lived in Atlanta for 17 years. He knows the city very well and I'm very happy to be talking to you today, Phil. Thank you for having me. So let's start off by giving people a picture of what success looks like when it comes to housing development and transportation works that really complement each other well. Can you describe a place in Atlanta that gets this right or kind of right? Yeah, I don't think anywhere in Atlanta gets it completely right yet. Obviously, the Beltline is great and the development around it between like Ponce City Market and the Krogh District is starting to feel cohesive enough to feel like a complete, vibrant neighborhood but even that, it's more of just like a linear thing. I think as development along that stretch evolves and the streetcar comes into play, hopefully North Ave, BRT, and we get more neighborhood connections established, I think that area may be the first to get there. If we're talking about like a standalone neighborhood or like an individual neighborhood, Glenwood Park, except for the Kroger part and the highway ramps, is pretty great. Despite Bill Kennedy Way having the I-20 ramps and a bit of traffic, it is calmed, there's speed cushions, it's narrow, and it probably has the best stretch of on-street bike infrastructure in the city. And there's also a fantastic mix of housing. You have apartments, condos, townhomes, single family, all have small setbacks, rear entry garages, hidden parking. And then some other neighborhoods that come to mind are Cabbage Town and Reynolds Town because they have the narrow roads, the small setbacks, a good mix of housing. But even there, then you have to deal with some really bad sidewalk apps or some really old sidewalks that are like the old tile style and the roots just rip those up. And then not necessarily City of Atlanta, but downtown Decatur checks almost all the boxes too and doesn't get a lot of credit. They have direct transit access. They have some pretty good on-street infrastructure. They have some pretty good housing types in their downtown core and really good access to services. And I want to dive into something you said there about narrow streets being good when you talk about Reynolds Town and Cabbage Town. What is good about the narrow streets there? Right. So a lot of those streets are probably around 20 feet. And then you have like a line of parking on them for the most part too. So if you're driving down a 20 foot street and you have to pull over when another car is coming the other way, the maximum you're really physically able to do, unless you're a maniac, is 15 to 20 miles per hour. Now if you're driving through a street that has 36 feet of right-of-way, kind of no delineation between the lanes and uses, you're going to feel pretty comfortable going 35, 40 miles per hour, even if it's a neighborhood street. And we need less of that. Yes. And that's one of those things I think that people need a little help with understanding, right? Because if you've got slower cars moving through a place, that makes it safer for people who are on bike or people who are walking around, which is great for a dense city environment, because you want to get as many people out of cars as possible and going onto sidewalks, getting in buses and using bikes, because that's the kind of transportation that works best for a city, right? Absolutely. And there's always going to be outliers. Like you might see somebody going 40 miles per hour down a Cabbage Town or Reynolds Town street and say, see, look, that doesn't work either. But if a street is wide, if you feel wide open, you're going to feel comfortable going fast. But for normal human beings, if your vision is kind of centered along a narrow road, you're going to feel like you need to go slower. You're going to feel like you need to focus. And so in that way, the actual design of the road is affecting people's behavior so that their driving behavior is sort of more empathetic towards people who are not in cars, which is the perfect way to be a driver when you're in a city. It's a behavioral match with the transportation design and with the land use design. And it just all sort of comes together. You mentioned one more thing that I want to come back to. You use the word setback. What does that mean? Yeah. So think about like a typical suburban neighborhood where they have the big green front lawn that they don't want nobody to step on. They spend hours taking care of every weekend. The setback of that house usually is about 40, 50, 100 feet. But when you go into these nice classic neighborhoods that were designed usually in pre-World War II, you know, those houses are right up on the street. And now you're starting to see it in like new neighborhoods as well. Those houses are right up on the street or you have a town home right up on the street. You have no waste of that front lawn. And that seems like it's probably a good thing for making a city a little bit more dense so that it can be more pedestrian friendly, probably when you've got less land being taken up by setbacks. Not only that, it helps create that vibrancy. It helps create that sense of community. If someone's walking by your sidewalk and your house is 100 feet off the road, you're not going to say hello to them, but you're going to meet your neighbors if you're sitting on your front porch and it's only 10 feet off the sidewalk. That's something that I've noticed a lot. And I've mentioned that a lot in my posts online where if I'm walking around the city and there is a door or a window up against the sidewalk, it just, it feels more hospitable than, you know, 20 feet of landscaping and the door is way back there. Or if you're, the worst case scenario is where you're walking on a sidewalk and there's a big parking deck there and big blank walls and whatnot. It just feels nicer for me as a pedestrian when there's this sort of welcoming presence of what I'm going to call human activity there behind doors and windows close to the sidewalk. It just feels good. Absolutely. Probably the first thing we hear when anyone proposes higher densities in Atlanta is complaints about parking and car traffic among people who live in those neighborhoods. People will push back on density and new apartments and whatnot because they fear a traffic nightmare or a parking nightmare is coming. How can we address these concerns that people have so that we can allow for the new density to happen in Atlanta without exacerbating these pedestrian hostile places, the status quo of a car-oriented street? Yeah, this is always a tough one because I honestly think it's a mix of ignorance, disinformation, classism, selfishness, and even at that time, racism. I do think we're really making inroads since COVID as people really have started to realize how much better car-free and car-light areas are and people are realizing that it's not only about the size of your house, but the quality and livability of your neighborhood. What people often fail to realize when these proposals come through is that over time, density actually leads to less traffic. It may seem counterintuitive, but the more density we're able to build within neighborhoods, that's going to lead to more services, more great neighborhood restaurants, more stores, more small businesses. And over time, that's going to reduce VMT. Instead of you driving across town or even to the next neighborhood to go to the grocery store, if you're adding density to your neighborhood and now your neighborhood supports a grocery store, you might be able to walk around the corner to that grocery store. In addition, it leads to more residents who live car-light or even car-free lifestyles. So instead of you thinking, we're going to have to have two cars for our family, you might be able to save that $1,000 or I think it's even $1,200 a month on average, all-in cost of a car by getting rid of one for your family and just having one and maybe a couple of cargo bikes or something. And that will tie into the parking nightmare scenario. Less cars is less need for parking, which would also bring down housing costs. But the density also makes safe street infrastructure more feasible, such as bike lanes, wider sidewalks, more parks and more green space, because if you have more people out and about on foot or on bike and less people in the street, that just builds the case for being able to do that stuff. Meanwhile, maintaining the status quo of single-family housing is also what has led to our affordability crisis. It increased displacement pressure, increases traffic and park problems, and it also it's everything that leads to people ignorantly saying we fool. Right, the we fool thing. You mentioned something in there that I think is really important. You said reduce VMT, and I believe that's vehicle miles traveled. There were so many times when we talk about reducing the usage of cars in cities and encouraging people to get out of their cars, people will hear that and think, oh, we're trying to make cars illegal. We're trying to take away privileges from people or we're trying to ban cars. We're talking about reducing the amount of miles that we travel per capita per year. It's not like I want to steal people's cars, right? I want people to just drive less so that the city can be the best of what a city can be, a place for people to walk around and to feel safe walking around. Yeah, so it's like maybe scaling down the number of cars we own or maybe scaling down the number of miles we drive and ramping up the number of miles that we walk or bike or use transit to get around in. And there's another thing that you mentioned, single family housing. And that's been like a hot button issue in Atlanta before because we actually had our previous planning commissioner tried to do a really great zoning rewrite that was going to allow apartments to be built where they're not allowed before. When we talk about these things, we're not trying to ban single family housing or say that all single family detached homes are bad and nasty. What we're trying to do is to allow for some gentle density to be added, some duplexes and triplexes and small apartments. Do I have that right? Yeah, absolutely. Like if you're able to build, let's say, a fourplex on a corner lot where right now you're only able to build a single family home to justify the land costs that you're going to pay for that lot in a nice area in Atlanta. The only single family home that you're really ever going to be able to build is at this point probably a million dollar twenty five hundred three thousand square foot single family house. But now if you're able to build four townhomes on that lot or a duplex with two ADUs in the back, you're able to rent those ADUs out for probably under probably something that's affordable for like 80 percent AMI, depending on where you're in the city or if you're in a lower income part of the city, you can probably build that to be attainable for 60 percent AMI and then two medium priced townhomes. I just I can't understand how that's not seen as a win to most people. Yeah, yeah. Same here. And I think that we have to keep messaging this in the right way so that people understand that we're not trying to do anything hostile here by changing the urban environment. We're trying to include more people. We're trying to be inclusive and allowing more people to have access to the city and helping the city become a bit more dense with people. And at the same time, easier to walk around in and bike around. And it's it's something that helps the city become a great place in a way that only cities can be versus suburbs or rural areas. Absolutely. And back to the car point, even real quick, I truly believe you're never going to be able to convince maybe like 50 percent of people to go car light or not even car free. But if every person in the city is driving 10 miles per day right now, if we were able to build enough multimodal infrastructure and enough density for there to be services enough for the average to drop to like two miles per day, that's one fifth the amount of vehicles on any given road. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, if we if we're driving cars at the same rate in the future that we are now, as the city population increases, that's terrible. I mean, it's just going to be the traffic nightmare. We'll have the traffic nightmare that people hear. What are some of the key elements that many Atlanta neighborhoods are missing when it comes to promoting walkability? What is it that you see about these Atlanta neighborhoods that maybe some people who were embedded in there don't see? What are they missing? Yeah, Atlanta has so many great neighborhoods and it's something you kind of don't realize until you move away. For me, the big piece is the lack of cohesion between the great neighborhoods of Atlanta. And I kind of refer to it as dartboard development. You have good stuff here. You got good stuff here, here, here and here. But a bunch of bled in between, even if the distance in between some of those places is walkable to most people, let's say a mile. Oftentimes it's not an enjoyable or a safe mile walk or even bike due to barriers such as roads like Moreland Ave, highways like I-20 or disconnected infrastructure. A couple of like really flagrant examples are downtown to the Beltline. Now, it's only about two miles apart. And, you know, normal city people or normal people walking in a city, two miles feels like nothing. But for that walk, there's only a couple of dedicated routes connecting them. And the only dedicated bike route forces you to cross Freedom Parkway. It also forces you to cross Boulevard with two dangerous slip lanes. And then you have to travel along Freedom Parkway for the last stretch. And it's really just a corridor of nothingness. There's nothing to see. You're not going to pass very many people. You're not going to pass very many storefronts. And it just makes it feel like it lasts forever, which it's so weird because you're talking about two of the most built up parts of a major top 10 city in the country. And then the other the other options are unprotected bike lanes or an impossible walk around Ponce or along Ponce Boulevard. And then there's a few other unprotected quarters along like Edgewood and Irwin Street connecting downtown and the Beltline. I love that phrase that you use, dartboard development. Definitely going to start using that myself. I've noticed that before when I'm walking around the city, the gaps are a problem. They make you feel like you're in a spot where you don't belong. You know, my family used to live in the middle of downtown Atlanta on Forsyth Street and in a really wonderful, dense, pre-automobile area, really. And we would walk blocks and blocks and blocks to go out to eat or to get to a mortar station. And it felt like nothing. It was not a problem at all. And where we live now, close to the empty, long, empty Civic Center, many, many acres of dead space. If we have to walk past that, it just feels like so much further and so much of a chore because you're walking past a fence with barbed wire on top with an empty building behind it instead of, you know, like I was saying earlier, those windows and doors close to the sidewalk where you feel welcome. I think that's it. You know, like where you feel welcome as a pedestrian, walking as a joy, you know, and where you don't feel welcome as a pedestrian, walking as a chore and distances just seem so much further. And dartboard development just really nails that. And I see that has happened in Atlanta a lot. We've made some great progress in turning these old industrial areas, like you mentioned, Atlantic Station, which was a heavily industrialized area, and turning into mixed-use spaces. And that's happened on Huff Road as well. But those industrial areas happened, you know, far away from the core urbanism of the city usually. And so we're building up these bits of density and islands that don't really connect with each other. And with the kind of urban fabric that you expect, is that something that we can really improve on? Do you think that it's possible for us to sort of weave a better fabric between those dartboard developments? Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're close. Like one example, the 17th Street Bridge, they're looking at plans for really revamping that, adding a lot of street trees, better bus lanes, better bike lanes. And I feel like that can really close the gap between Atlantic Station and Midtown, because then you're talking, again, two just absolutely fantastic places on their own, but they do nothing to interact with each other. And then also, if we're able to figure out something with Northside Drive and you're able to get all that development that's going on Howell Mill, which is some of the best, most unique development in the city, but they're really kind of on an island out there. They're chopped up by the rail lines. They're chopped up by Northside Drive. And it's just there's really a lack of grid over there. So they're just really kind of on their own, not really interacting with much of the city. Same thing with the stuff going on on Huff Road, which we're also going to be taking a look at what we can do to make that corridor better pretty soon. I think bottom line, focusing on safe crossings and cohesive connections between all of our neighborhoods is what's going to get us to that level to truly thrive. You mentioned a phrase earlier, I want people to really know about, you mentioned Strode's. And that's just like such a great concept because it really nails the problem. This concept of Strode's, which I think comes from Charles Marone of Strong Towns. I think he came up with that. And it just nails this whole disconnect between urban development and the type of transportation, the type of road design that we offer. Can you let people know what Strode's is? Yeah. So basically it's a combination of a street and a road. So streets are for people, streets are for exchange. They're for people walking around, getting places, they're for business. And then roads are for connecting point A and point B. Now, Strode's are things that try to do both. So think of like Memorial Drive through East Atlanta. Moreland Ave is a perfect example. They're like little five points. It's just they're trying to do both and end up just horribly failing at both of them. Yeah, exactly. They try to do both things. They try to have that urban development alongside the road, but they also try to have a road that is primarily geared towards car flow and getting as many cars as through as possible at the highest speed possible, which is not what you want to see in a city at all. Absolutely. And we're starting to see a lot of those kind of transition at the end of day. Some of them, it's going to be hard because the way the city is set up, people still do have to get from point A to point B. So it's always a push and pull. There's always going to be drawbacks and have to meet in the middle because, you know, a lot of times the naysayers really still outnumber the people who want safe streets. Yeah, I think we can change the city. I think we can change the minds of the naysayers, you know, as we build up new examples of great places to walk around. I think people will come on board. My ThreadATL colleague, Matt Garbett, has this wonderful way of phrasing it. He calls it strollability versus walkability, where in a mixed-use development, you can stroll around within the development, but you can't exactly walk there from the outside or walk to another neighborhood outside it. You know, you kind of drive there and stroll around. Right. That's a good one. Yeah. It's good to introduce strollability to people so that they can see what it's like to get out of their car. But at some point, we have to really sell people on true walkability where you can not just park and walk around one mixed-use development where you're actually walking longer distances or even biking longer distances or riding an e-scooter longer distances across neighborhoods, across these developments, so that you can really get to various destinations outside of a car, not banning cars, but just reducing the amount of time we spend in a car thanks to the better marriage of street design that focuses on pedestrians plus density that is complementary to walkability. Yeah. And I think that's what a lot of the naysayers miss. It's all about options. Like, let's say we're able to get half the people out of their cars. A lot of naysayers don't understand how much easier that would make getting around the city for the people who want to or need to hold on to their car. Yeah, exactly. It benefits everyone. I mean, there are always going to be people who absolutely have to be in a car for one reason or another because of the type of trip they're making or for various reasons. And there are people, of course, who live in very car-dependent places outside the city who need to get to the city. Their lives are going to be improved if, within the city, we're getting people out of cars and onto sidewalks and bike lanes, right? There's going to be less car traffic all around. It just seems like something that is sort of a common-sense benefit for everyone. Thanks for talking with me today, Phil. This has been great. I love being able to talk to an actual professional who knows what they're talking about, as opposed to, you know, me and my amateur abilities and my amateur knowledge of urbanism stuff. I really appreciate hearing your thoughts today on this important subject. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening. 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