Atlanta ranks 143rd in population density among U.S. cities & that’s not good

The common misperception that Atlanta has gotten ‘too dense’ is about cars, not people.

If you go to Wikipedia’s List of United States cities by population and sort the chart of cities (with a population of at least 100,000) by their density, the City of Atlanta comes in at number 143, just underneath Visalia, CA and Sterling Heights, MI.

That’s a startlingly low level of of people-per-square mile for a major city — and yes, these stats are about cities proper, not metro areas.

[BTW, I output the Wikipedia table to a spreadsheet program to be able to number the rows in the density sorting.]

This is something that plays directly into the choices we have for getting around Atlanta, including the fact that far too few people here have good access to transit as an alternative to driving.

For instance, if we want to have a city where expansion of rail makes more economic sense, we have to dense the heck up so that we can supply rail with riders. Same deal if we want to create more walkability, more foot traffic for neighborhood businesses, and de-center cars in our city. Dense up.

Buses are great. I love them and ride them weekly. But we could use more rail to compliment the system. The bottom line: rail is more expensive to operate than buses are. To make it cost-effective, we need higher passenger demand, which means (among other things) a higher density of people near transit stops.

I know some of you are thinking: “but we’re already too dense in Atlanta; I can tell because car traffic is awful.”

Nope. The fact that so many are dependent on cars is an indicator that we’re not supporting transit well enough, with density and urban design, for it to carry more people. It also indicates we’ve got too much parking: a study of transit systems points to the availability of cheap or free parking as the biggest contributor to reduced ridership.

We’re not full of people in Atlanta. The statistics show the opposite. What we’re too full of is car-centric, suburban-type places that don’t prioritize walking and biking and transit, thus generating a glut of car trips and and outsized demand for parking spaces.

Atlanta doesn’t have to reach for NYC levels of urban density (they’ve got 29,298 people per square mile, compared to our 3,686). But we do have to reach higher than Sterling Heights.

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For some great reading on how Atlanta’s problematic, low-ish density was very much designed, read this post on the Atlanta Studies site called “Atlanta’s War on Density.” It details the intentional land-use changes that formed our suburban-style city density.