[conductr]

I feel like comments like this always come up. Basically reducing it to, why not just become Manhattan?

They want a solution for today, not decades from today which is what urban planning would take. But also they likely want the neighborhood they built/moved to. They don’t want to live in a super dense mixed use plaza. They also want solutions that the plethora of communities like theirs can replicate. They just want a little upgrade to their bucolic life. They don’t want to hit the reset button. It seems way more reasonable to upgrade than try to reinvent it.

[carbotaniuman]

You don't need to become Manhattan to have density and mixed-use? I used to work at a place with a restaurant next to it (allowed by a reduction of parking minimums). Guess where a lot of my fellow employees are?

[pylua]

Maybe I am missing something — But what problem is it really solving? They want a hamburger quicker? I personally enjoy the dichotomy between the burbs and city personally especially in Atlanta.

[conductr]

I don’t think quicker is necessarily the motivation. But currently they’re likely using DoorDash which requires a human and a very large automobile so I think it’s an optimization of that. It may also be quicker since it can more effectively work in parallel

It seems to me like the delivery bots you may see around some places. Except those things are pretty slow and I feel like they’re always involved in accidents with automobiles.

[NegativeLatency]

Classic straw man argument, there's a pretty big difference from a walkable and incrementally more dense neighborhood and Manhattan.

We're not going to tear down and rebuild everything all at once, it's going to take time and work to get us out of the massive car dependent hole we've dug for ourselves. It seems Atlanta has massively oversupplied (to it's own detriment) parking and prioritized space for cars, and neglected to consider that cities depend on attracting a sufficent density of humans.

https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2022/07/11/atlanta-...

> Studies conducted prior to the pandemic indicate that only 30% of nearly 100,000 parking spaces in Downtown Atlanta are used during peak hours.

[dingnuts]

Your quote only adds to the GP's point -- Atlanta is so far from being walkable that it will take half a century of very good urban planning before the problem solved by the article is solved in the way that would make the r/fuckcars posters that show up in every thread on this site about transportation would like it to be.

People arguing that Atlanta should just permit "denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km" as a short-term solution to the massive sprawl that is Atlanta have absolutely no idea of the gargantuan undertaking they are proposing and it's sort of ironic that they propose that undertaking as an "easier" solution to the problem than the one in the article.

I think it's telling that the person who made this comment used km -- it's obvious they are not American, and know very little about Atlanta or about the suburbs around it or how people live there. I, on the other hand, have first-hand experience.

Don't ask me about it though, I don't read replies to my comments on this hellsite

[mym1990]

Atlanta as a metropolitan area should not be used to set a bar for walkability. It is a massive city. Instead, one should take neighborhoods and start there. Atlanta certainly has walkable neighborhoods, what it lacks is efficient infrastructure to get from one neighborhood to another.

[keyboard_slap]

I'm American and have lived most of my life in American suburbs. I don't like them very much, and I don't like the imperial system.

I don't think denser development is a short term solution, but I don't like short term solutions either. Short term planning is part of what made traffic in cities like Atlanta so bad. And IMO it seemed like a fair suggestion because extending these tunnels to every house in suburban Atlanta wouldn't be a short process either.

[yawnxyz]

Most people move to Atlanta for the burbs! They move away from dense cities like Manhattan to have a yard and some space, without having to pay a lot of money for it, but still be close enough to the city.

But the jobs are all in the city, and they all want to drive in, which is why traffic sucks and midtown/downtown is one big parking lot.

[pylua]

I don’t think they all want to drive in. There’s no choice. For instance if you live in Gwinnett you have to commute to doraville for rail— it’s not a giant time save if at all any time save. They said it would take 30 years to get heavy rail to Duluth at a minimum ! Maybe my grandkids could benefit.

There’s also missing Marta stops such as Atlantic station, Cobb galleria, and ponce city market. Using the buses seems to be the short term work around but it is rather absurd.

[TylerE]

Yeah, 5 minutes outside in the summer heat would change their mind on that. Walk even a few blocks in August and you a shower.

[conductr]

It's not mutually exclusive, we can implement this while working on urban planning/re-design since that takes so long. But, we should start that in places already primed for it, like the straw man you mentioned, Downtown Atlanta parking lots.

[wizerdrobe]

There’s nothing straw man about it, it’s reality of suburbanite life.

I’ve worked in “walkable” office parks and have the time the guys at the office would get in a car and still drive elsewhere. It doesn’t solve for the overall problem.

The only way to actually eliminate the drive-to-a-place problem is dense Manhattanesque cities where vehicles are prohibitive for the average Joe and robust public transit exists to allow Joe to make a quick jaunt down the road.

[pharmakom]

It’s less than a mile. Just build a nice bike lane / footpath.

[conductr]

I think automation is a particular motivation of this project.