Aging infrastructure in first ring suburbs.

Infrastructure is kind of a hot topic right now.  The American Society of Civil Engineers released its 2009 Report Card for Infrastructure, giving the nation a cumulative grade of “D”.   Obama has been pushing for infrastructure improvements as a way to improve the economy while any mayor with a half baked, “shovel ready” project salivates at the thought of freely flowing federal funds.  One of the questions asked at the monthly CQRGC Healthy Places meeting was about suburban vs urban infrastructure investment. Specifically, they were interested in the investment split between the first ring suburb of Gwinnett County and the urban core of Fulton County. The speaker, Paul Moore from Glatting Jackson, answered the question with an example that I had particular experience with – the Parisian suburb riots of 2005-06.

During my last year of undergraduate Architecture at Georgia Tech, I studied abroad for 10 months in Paris. I lived in the northern portion of the 18th arrondisement, which is better known for the artist’s district Montmartre and the graceful cathedral of Sacre Coeur. For me, it was also nervously close to ‘les banlieues’, or suburbs of Paris. Despite their proximity to downtown, the neighborhoods are separated from historic Paris by a literal ring of disinvested rail tracks that remain under utilized in order to remain available for military use in case of the city’s attack. And while I can’t vouch for the relevance of this motive, I can say that the elevated rail line does a great job at separating the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’ in the city.

Peaceful Protests.

In fact, the phrase ‘les banlieues’ is now recognized as a euphemism in the French press to describe low income housing projects that the government practically forced immigrant communities into during the 1970s and 80s. Petty crime has also increased in France, with much of it blamed on juvenile delinquency fostered within the banlieues, as a result the ensuing areas are perceived as being unsafe places to live. During the early 1990s, tougher law enforcement and immigration control measures were enacted, and partly as a reaction to those increased penalties without a perceived increased in assistance, the area imploded with riots in the Fall of 2005.

Now, some might say that Buford Highway would never come to such extremes, but a quick pass at the area:

• Its aging infrastructure that was never built to be adaptable, a key tenant for sustainability. Atlanta had similar growth issues during the 1950s.

• However, at that point, Atlanta had the tax revenues to support re-investment. Currently, Gwinnett County is experiencing decreasing  tax revenues each year.

• The changing demographic of the Buford Highway strip, is startling similar to the immigrant based Paris suburbs.

With the current mortgage crisis, economic downtown, and rising prices, its not out of reach to think that we might have similar problems in our own back yard. As these first ring suburbs age, and traditional disenfranchised communities growing larger, this purely infrastructural issue can spill over and really start affecting communities.

 

In the beginning, we knew it was coming.

The CQRGC Healthy Places January monthly meeting’s topic was the Connect Atlanta plan, the city’s new comprehensive transportation plan. The presentation was enlightening in multiple ways, but one notable piece of information eschewed my perception of a piece of Atlanta’s transportation development history. When the Connect Atlanta plan came out, many people I knew lauded it as Atlanta’s first transportation plan, and while this is true in many ways, Atlanta has had several transportation planning initiatives already. What really got me, was that planners recognized the inefficiencies of the freeway system early on and called out the necessity of a balanced transportation plan. And this was before construction even started on the 1950s freeway system!

Jammed.

The speaker, Paul Moore from Gladding Jackson pulled a 1958 graph of Atlanta city transit ridership statistics. The early planner’s mindsets were eye opening. I have continually heard in my education that this city was ‘designed’ to grow entirely around the highways with no alternative methods of transportation.

As it turns out, during the initial studies, planners recognized that the coming freeways could only support Atlanta’s growth if, if and only if, transit ridership remained at the same rates. In 1958, this was at 50%!! Yes you read that right, 50%. Incredible. Still, the pre 1950’s graph pointed out quite clearly that the city had three options:

• It could, in a best case scenario, increase transit ridership from current levels.
• It could, in what they projected to be the most likely scenario, keep transit ridership levels at the same rate.
• Or, in a worse case scenario, transit ridership could decrease 20%.

Unfortunately, we all know how that one turned out. Atlanta city transit ridership decreased an astounding 43%, down to 7% of total trips taken by the year 2007. Wow.

Now, if the 1950s planners had only had the foresight to create policies that would keep transit ridership at similar or increasing levels, rather than relying on chance to keep them there, we’d be in a different place than we are today. But what would those have been? I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the rise of the 2^nd and 3^rd ring suburbs and subsequential growth of perimeter job centers at that early stage of planning, but the simple act of keeping the downtown street car networks would have been a good start.

I wonder, what are we doing today that will seem so short sighted in the future?