After having both fallen asleep and woken up during daylight, only to find out that I had indeed slept for fourteen hours, I wasn't exactly eager for another lecture in Geography (which has turned out to be more about public policy than where Tashkent is). Today's class was more interesting to me than usual, though, in that I learned what I didn't already know about, which was Curitiba and its approach to urban transit.
We watched a documentary with the very topical title of A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil. It shows many ways in which the city's government has improved the lives of its residents, but what most captivated me was its transit system. It is a hierarchical bus network: red articulated buses travel in the center of two-way roads and stop every 500 meters at what I think are very cool-looking stations, grey buses stop every 2-3 kilometers on other streets, and orange buses travel between satellite towns and terminals in Curitiba.
What does any of this have to do with Atlanta? I'm not sure. The very layout of Curitiba is antithetical to our city. It is far denser than Atlanta, at 4,159.4 inhabitants per square kilometer in what is considered the urban area in 2008, compared to 1,224.5/km2 in Atlanta in 2010. What used to be Curitiba's busiest automotive thoroughfare, Rua XV de Novembro, was closed to cars in 1972 and reopened as a long pedestrian-only street, something Atlanta has almost never tried; indeed, since the inexplicable opening of the Comfort Suites at Five Points, the brick-paved center of Alabama Street has, at one spot. been intermittently blocked in typical Atlanta style by a row of valet-parked cars.
Still more foreign to Atlanta's sensibilities is the stated aim of Curitiba's transit layout to spread businesses and residences evenly along the bus lines, in order to alleviate crowding downtown. This stands in stark contrast to MARTA, whose focal point is fixed at Downtown Atlanta. The city's parks commissioner, Hitoshi Nakamura, stated in the documentary that "...downtown is for people. It is a meeting place." I would like to see such a philosophy applied more aggressively in our own downtown, which is bursting with infrastructure and office space, but can feel impersonal sometimes. The Elevate! project and its art is a good start.
The most important and easily applicable lesson Atlanta can take from Curitiba is "if you build it, they will come." Business owners protested the conversion of XV de Novembro to a pedestrian-only street, until the pedestrians it brought began to patronize the businesses in increased numbers; afterwards, businesses farther north of the project lobbied for its eventual expansion. For Atlanta, and Downtown Atlanta in particular, to become more inviting to the average person, more businesses need to take a leap of faith and extend their hours; more residents along pedestrian-unfriendly thoroughfares need to lobby for sidewalk widening, or even closing certain streets to cars; and more artists need to present offers to the city to beautify unsightly surfaces. An improved living space for everyone in this city won't magically, spontaneously happen.
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