Amsterdam-ize Atlanta
By Walter Brown
A bicycle parking deck in Amsterdam. Courtesy: Airbete/Wikimedia Commons
In two weeks, a MARTA board member, a former county commissioner, a retired UPS logistics engineer and I will trek over to the bicycle capital of the world and geek out on wheels.
Our mission: Return from the world’s largest showcase for micromobility with a fresh set of ideas for solving our transportation woes.
We’re at a critical juncture for mobility in Atlanta. More and more people in the urban core mean there will be less room for automobiles. And most of the people already here would prefer a human-scaled city rather than one tailor-made for cars.
When it comes to carrying high volumes of travelers, particularly over long distances, nothing can replace mass transit – at least not yet. That’s why BAT is encouraged by Mayor Andre Dickens' proposal to install four heavy-rail infill stations along the Beltline and to build a 10-mile, crosstown bus-rapid-transit line from Ponce City Market to the soon-to-be-redeveloped site of Bowen Homes.
But if we’re going to move away from allowing the automobile to dominate every aspect of urban life we’ll need to address the problem with every tool available. In short, we’ll need to reinvent the wheel.
That means seriously examining cutting-edge technologies such as autonomous shuttles. It means more robust on-demand services to link riders to mass transit lines. It means leaning into equity with fresh policy ideas, such as “mobility wallets” for people who don’t have cars.
And it means laying the groundwork for an emerging array of small-vehicle solutions – most obviously electric bicycles. Micromobility can and should be a big part of the solution.
< Walter Brown and his trusty e-bike.
I’m lucky. I’m an intown creature.
For years, I’ve had access by foot to nearby services and amenities. And I rode my trusty, conventional, pedal-powered Specialized Sirrus Pro for exercise, fun and occasional errands.
Until four years ago, however, I wouldn’t have pedaled the four miles for a dentist’s appointment. Now, the idea of driving the four miles from my home in Candler Park to my dentists’ office in Colony Square seems completely ludicrous.
My e-bike obsession – which I picked up at the age of 63 during Covid – has changed my world. I’ve turned into an e-bike evangelist.
While the cost of all other forms of transportation are skyrocketing, the price of e-bikes and other human powered devices have dropped by nearly half in the last 5 years.
Mobility aside, the personal benefits of e-cycling are staggering.
“Stronger muscles, improved longevity, better heart health, and arriving at a location relatively sweat-free are all proven plusses,” as National Geographic put it in a recent article.
More difficult to measure are the psychological, even spiritual, benefits. I feel them almost daily as I ride the Beltline. Relaxed smiles replace the stress and scowls of car commuters. Riders nod happy “hellos” to each other – as if to say: “Hey, man. Isn’t this an outrageously fun way to get to work?”
But the experience is rarer than it should be. Cyclists still put their lives at risk when they pedal along roadways. Paths, including the Beltline, seldom connect to major transit lines. And protected “light individual transportation” (LIT) lanes remain very much the exception.
What does the Eastside Trail really need?
Separate tracks for “wheels” and “heels”.
As transportation modes, walking and biking have always been underappreciated. Now, though, the potential has skyrocketed. You need not be a fitness freak or have a shower at work. Specialized electric vehicles make micromobility available even to the elderly and disabled.
Pedestrians, scooters, bikes – both electric and conventional – and other small vehicles on the Beltline’s Eastside Trail already outnumber ridership predictions for the first leg of the controversial Beltline streetcar.
Traffic counts by the PATH Foundation show that more than 5,000 people a day already cross Irwin Street on foot or by micromobility – about the same number of people will ride the entire streetcar once it’s extended past Ponce City Market, according to an almost certainly optimistic 2014 projection.
At the same time, micromobility is dramatically less expensive than other modes of transportation. Converting a single car lane into a two-way buffered bikeway costs around $500,000 a mile. An entirely separate multipurpose trail runs around $1 million per mile.
Compare that to the anticipated per mile cost of the streetcar – $100 million and climbing (and that doesn’t even include the high operating cost of light rail). Even bus rapid transit, which costs around a quarter the amount of streetcar rail, is far pricier than multipurpose trails and bike lanes. And installing bike lanes takes much less time and is less disruptive to users and nearby businesses.
The bottom line: Micromobility is already taking a lot of cars off the road and, compared to other transportation modes, it’s costing very little.
The problem is that we have yet to fully embrace it. Like all bureaucracies, transportation departments and transit agencies gravitate toward what they know best: moving hulking steel machines along wide ribbons of asphalt.
Peachtree Street
re-imagined as a place hospitable to cyclists and pedestrians.
Courtesy: Midtown Alliance
The good news is that’s changing.
Take, for example, Atlanta Councilmember Matt Westmoreland’s advocacy for the state’s first e-bike rebate program. A modest version of his idea sailed earlier this year through City Council.
Now, the Atlanta Regional Commission, which will manage the rebate program with the help of PropelATL, is proposing to expand e-bike rebates across the metro area. ARC has been joined by three other Georgia cities in applying for $42 million EPA grant that could help fund the purchase of more than 20,000 e-bikes across the four regions. By my math, that’s like removing nearly 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Plus, of course, there are the benefits of healthier streets, less congested roadways and human-scaled communities!
ARC also is pressing for more multipurpose trails. The 20-county region’s Metropolitan Transportation Plan calls for more than $4 billion for “active transport” between now and 2050, including more than 4,000 miles of trails.
But even that isn’t enough. We need to think about micromobility as an integral part of our transit planning. Of course, we need to get going on mass transit projects, whether that means bus rapid transit, autonomous shuttles or improvements in MARTA heavy rail.
But, meanwhile, we need to move much faster at giving people active, small-scale transportation options. The way forward is being modeled by the Midtown Alliance, which has been at work for 10 years on a reinvention of Peachtree Street. A “complete streets” project designed to slow speeding traffic, share the road with cyclists and widen sidewalks is set to transform Atlanta’s signature artery.
It shouldn’t take so long to do the right thing. Our leaders and government agencies must make micromobility a higher priority.
We need to work right now on the thousands of small details that add up to big improvements – and that, by the way, transform places into exactly what people actually want. Case in point: The Midtown Alliance’s Community Survey shows that 98 percent of respondents would prioritize funding pedestrian projects while 88 percent would prioritize transit, and 83 percent bikes and scooters. Automobiles? Only 50 percent would prioritize them.
To complete the transition, elected officials, planners and the public must get a better idea of the best practices. What, for example, would a “micromobility hub” next to a mass transit station be like? How can we protect children, the mobility impaired and other pedestrians from scooters and bicycles? What can we do to limit the number and location of unused, often hazardous rideshare vehicles littering our paths and sidewalks? How do we keep up the momentum for change while avoiding the NIMBY outrage of residents who still depend on their cars drive to places that aren’t served by transit or micromobility?
There’s an obvious place to hammer out these best practices: The Atlanta Beltine. Along the 40-foot-wide right of way currently reserved for a streetcar that serves no credible transportation purpose, we could install a walking path to separate “heels” from “wheels.” This would allow cyclists and scooters to get to their destinations more quickly without jeopardizing the safety of pedestrians.
Once two already-planned bus rapid transit crossings are completed and if the mayor’s vision of the crosstown BRT and four infill stations becomes reality, rapid transit will intersect the Beltline at 10 locations. Each should become a hub, where travelers would transfer from a transit line to a “last mile” corridor or visa-versa.
Best of all, an entire micromobility loop for the Beltline could be completed in less time, with less disruption and at a fraction of the cost of just one mile of the streetcar!
Walter Brown has a history riding bike in the Netherlands. He wasn’t so happy when his mother was driving, however.
Off the Beltline, it will take more imagination to weave micromobility, on-demand shuttles and mass transit together into a seamless system.
There isn’t a single solution. And, in a city that has grown up around the automobile, many steps along the way are complicated and conflicting.
For instance, land uses must encourage access within a reasonable distance from the house or apartment to shopping, services, entertainment and other basic needs. Planners have been working on this for decades, and developers have shifted their offerings toward density and mixed uses.
But more people and more density also bring more congestion – a major inconvenience for people who still need to travel to areas with less density. That can spark angry reactions and calls for wider roads and less of an emphasis on transit and micromobility.
At the same time, we know that, when asked, Atlanta residents say they want to rely less on cars. It’s a conundrum.
But just as a limited streetcar route finally finished in 25 years from now won’t bring about the changes we need now to alter the balance of cars vs. people, burying our heads in the sand will get us nowhere.
That’s why my three friends and I are joining a couple of thousand enthusiasts at Micromobility Europe next month in Amsterdam. The city itself is already a model for independence from the automobile – as is the rest of the Netherlands.
I’ve envied that fact on countless visits to my own Dutch relatives. Having never gone down the road of complete automobile dependency, they think of hopping on a bike, a bus or a train as the first, second and third options for many of their trips.
Our openness to reform today will affect generations to follow. When roads allow pedestrians, cyclists and cars to move as equals, the Dutch don’t have to label them “complete streets.” It’s just normal. In a city where the car is king, continuing as we always have will extend the automobile’s reign forever.
Think about it this way: Today’s children will be either the car drivers of tomorrow, or its urban bike and transit users.
The small steps we’ve already taken are shifting things ever so slightly in the latter direction. You can see it as hundreds of school age children ride bikes every day to all the schools linked by the Beltline. That wasn’t happening 10 years ago.
We need to take more of those steps more quickly. It’s fundamental that we talk to each other about big and small ideas, that we we keeping an open mind to who we are serving with our transit and streetscape dollars, and that we educate ourselves about other places and new technologies
So off my three friends, I and a couple of thousand people go to learn from the masters of alternative transportation. Our little Atlanta contingent will do a couple of extracurricular activities: We’ll meet with the Dutch Cycling Embassy in Utrecht and urban planners in Rotterdam. We’ll ride bikes between cities. And we’ll keep wondering how we can make Atlanta – at least in this respect – more like the Netherlands, except with hills. Wish us luck and stay tuned soon for our posts from across the pond. Maybe you can join us next year!
Walter Brown is the president of Better Atlanta Transit. A native Atlantan, he’s worked for decades toward a more sustainable in city, state and local governments and for nonprofits. Currently, he’s a green building and urban design consultant.
