“We’ve tried to be known, ” said Georgia Tech professor Mike Dobbins, “as the city too busy to hate. Maybe we still shun hate, but with the level of congestion we now face, we sure do have a lot of time on our hands.”
At the curb, a Hummer limo waited for someone. It’s L.A. of course, where many people are defined by their style of transportation. Inside the Pasadena Conference Center, the 2005 version of the Congress of the New Urbanism was under way. Dobbins, a former planning director for Atlanta, was paired with William Fulton of Solimar Research, Ventura, California, in an effort to compare Atlanta and L.A.
Both places are prisoners of gridlocked freeways. The contrast lies in L.A.’s history. It grew up as a collection of small cities with real centers. “Today,” Fulton said, “the region revolves around the freeway system, but underneath it remains the world’s largest arterial grid.” Today both regions rely on their freeways, but in Atlanta there’s no real driving alternative.
Those old cities in the L.A. region offer another advantage, Fulton said. Citing Torrance as an example, Fulton claimed there are huge areas, aging and awaiting infill development. With endangered species laws creating the equivalent of urban growth boundaries, L.A. is out of land. Urban infill is where much of the action is today. Atlanta, by contrast, appears destined to stretch out toward Charlotte, Chattanooga, and Birmingham, according to Dobbins.
Dobbins recalled the stand-off with the EPA in 1998, and the 18 months when the region went without any federal transportation funding. He said the region got religion for a brief period. The settlement agreement included more funding of transit and funding for Livable Centers Initiatives — hundreds of millions of dollars over five years. Today, “we are backsliding,” We’re still building these centers — he cited Columbia Park at the Avondale MARTA site as a good example — but “we are essentially at war between funding transit corridors and centers and reverting to massive highway building.” This despite the fact that most of the Atlanta region’s employment centers are actually close to the MARTA transit lines.
Fulton pointed out that Atlanta’s density of people per square mile is one-fourth of the Los Angeles region. Both places have sprawled, but in different ways. Fulton shows a slide of eastern sprawl — houses sprinkled in a sea of spacious grass. Then one of western sprawl — huge tracts of houses so close they nearly touch.
When this session ended, the Hummer was gone. Likely its large cabin left with a low-density load.
