The common refrain is that “Atlantans want to drive to Downtown.” Is it anti-transit bias that makes all these people want to drive? Or is it the low price of parking? The lack of housing options close to Downtown jobs? All of that plays a part.

I suspect that the largest part of the stigma against transit ridership stems from the fact that so much of our city was built to match personal-car ownership. Atlanta’s low density population (highlighted in a recent Curbed Atlanta post) rests largely within a car-scale environment, which leaves transit users at a significant disadvantage. Note in the image below, all the yellow zones that are zoned for single family homes. These are basically intown suburbs that are — with notable exceptions (like West End) — largely designed for car mobility.

From Streetsblog, a zoning map of the City of Atlanta highlighting single family detached homes in yellow.

Within that environment, just getting to a bus stop or a train station on foot in an environment built for cars can be a trial and can make a person feel like a second-class citizen compared to their car-driving peers.

A bus stop on Atlanta’s Chattahoochee Avenue, with no sidewalk and no steps to help get safely to the street level for boarding.

We need to make sure that leaders, citizens, developers and business owners all buy into the goal of re-shaping the entire structure of the city so that it better accommodates pedestrians, with compact and walkable development being the goal. Getting to your home, business, store or to a park from a transit stop has to be a good experience. Walking through a car-centric jungle of arterial roads, parking lots and highway access ramps is never going to be something that competes with a car trip.

We also need a massive boom in residential housing of different types in Downtown near transit. This map below shows institutional properties in Downtown in blue (those are government offices, GSU campus, churches, etc) — commercial properties are in red, and residential is in yellow.

You can barely see the yellow, right? We have a piddling amount of housing here (and I mean housing that isn’t meant specifically for GSU students). That’s wrong. The housing we do have stays 95–97% occupied. Demand is high and supply is low. Leadership should be prioritizing that problem.

And while we’re building new housing all over Downtown, raise the price of parking near transit and provide incentives for MARTA use and decrease car trips. Do all that stuff. Be a real city, through and through — not just a place with a “world class” sheen because we have transit and some skyscrapers. Fill in the weird spaces that separate us from destinations at any scale other than one for cars. Connect the dots.