Atlantans would be healthier if the Georgia capital and metro area were more friendly to pedestrians, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at Georgia Tech, director of the university’s urban design program and a leading urbanist. In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she explains why.
Q: Is it fair to say that we would be healthier, as well as happier, if pedestrian access were better in American cities like Atlanta?
Ellen Dunham-Jones: We can certainly say that we would be healthier. Urban sprawl and human sprawl (obesity) correlate. In fact, one of the first studies on that was done by Professor Lawrence Frank at Georgia Tech specifically looking at the Atlanta metro area. People in more walkable places walk more and are less overweight. There is evidence that people in walkable neighborhoods are more likely to know their neighbors and experience lower levels of chronic loneliness and higher levels of social capital. Both of these are good indicators of being happier, as is losing weight.
Q: Can you explain how the lack of walkability and dangerousness of walking affect the overall health of the city?
EDJ: Perhaps the best example is Buford Highway. The waves of immigrants living along it have traditionally had some of the lowest levels of car ownership in the area. While sidewalks and Hawk crossing signals have been installed in patches over the past 20 years, it still has one of the highest rates of pedestrian fatalities in the state. It does have public and private forms of transit, but the lack of crosswalks at a reasonable distance means too many people try to run across the road to catch a bus or get to shops.
Q: Which parts of Atlanta are safer for pedestrians?
EDJ: The most walkable parts of Atlanta are downtown and midtown where block sizes aren’t larger than about 350 feet by 450 feet. This allows pedestrians to take relatively direct routes to get places. However, Atlanta’s suburban developments were almost all designed assuming that all trips would be made by car. The block sizes are huge, with many cul-de-sacs, making for very long curlicue routes. And the efforts to keep cut-through traffic out of residential neighborhoods means that most subdivisions don’t connect to each other and have only one or two entrances, mostly to a six-lane arterial road that is designed to be high-speed (when it isn’t clogged with traffic).
Dunham-Jones is the author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, (Wiley, 2009, 2011).
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