Atlanta’s Interstates: destruction of city fabric in the 1950s, mobility woes today
The above photo shows the area southeast of Downtown Atlanta in the 1950s, when demolition was just beginning for Interstate 75 & 85. See a larger version here.
The photo below — of the exact same area — shows what we have today, with the Mechanicsville (lower left) and Summerhill (lower right) neighborhoods fairly decimated and cut off from the city to the north. It was no accident that this decimation happened in places largely populated by African American residents. As Doug Monroe noted in Atlanta Magazine: “The interstate highways were designed to gouge their way through black neighborhoods.”
This section of Atlanta is basically unrecognizable now, compared to its previous state. A decadent amount of car infrastructure has taken over historic neighborhoods, while disconnecting pedestrian connections in the process.
Urban planner Andres Duany once said this about the damage that’s been done to the urban fabric of our cities by highway construction:
“The Department of Transportation, in its single-minded pursuit of traffic flow, has destroyed more American towns than General Sherman.”
Sherman may have burned mid-19th century Atlanta, but in the mid-20th century we took that reconstructed city and dissected and destroyed its center with interstate highways — until what remained of neighborhoods ended up being separated like little islands, all of them fairly dependent on cars for transportation.
In the process of being uprooted from those gouged neighborhoods, many black residents lost not only their homes but also their central location near jobs centers and services.
Three big mistakes we made with interstate highways:
1.) Putting them through the middle of cities.
Kaid Benfield wrote a piece a few years ago about the origins of the US interstate highway system. President Eisenhower never intended for these to become roads for regular commuter traffic in the middle of cities.
“Running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against [Eisenhower’s] original concept and wishes…he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way…and that he was certainly not aware of any concept of using the program to build up an extensive intra-city route network as part of the program he sponsored.”
Though the interstates were originally well intended, putting them through cities as a means of conveying daily traffic for all car drivers was a bad idea — they aren’t efficient as transport in heavily-populated areas, as Metro Atlanta has found out the hard way.
2.) Building our suburban growth along them.
Atlanta’s interstate highway system was originally envisioned as a means of transportation and, surprisingly, as an urban growth boundary. The I-285 perimeter highway (or “beltway” as it was called during planning) was intented to mark the boundary of heavy urbanization, which did not happen. From the 1998 report “Consequences of the Interstate Highway System for Transit”:
Originally, it was thought that the [Atlanta’s I-285] beltway would define the limit of urbanization, but this has not been borne out. by the time the beltway was completed in the late 1960s, suburban development had spread well beyond it in several directions, eliminating the possibility of using it for an urban development boundary.
Instead of having I-285 serve as a growth boundary that could have helped to shape a more compact urbanized area, the interstates that lead away from the center city ended up defining the lines of outward growth that turned Atlanta ino the “poster child for sprawl.”
3.) Relying on them for commutes.
You don’t even have to go as far as looking at the 2017 collapse of an I-85 bridge or the 2014 snow jam to see the loss of resiliency the Atlanta region suffers from our dependency on interstates for commuting. At this point, the common sense of the need for greater options in our mobilty should be clear for all the the hundreds of little reasons that pile up every day.
Car-centric development and interstate commuting simply do not scale upward well when coupled with big gains in population.
Can we retrofit resiliency into this situation through transit expansion?
The Atlanta region was carefully and calculatedly designed around interstates, intentionally using them as our main arterial roads for commuting. Given this, it’ll likely require some hard decisions on the regional level to intentionally re-design growth in a way that accommodates transit alternatives.
In short: transit expansion is definitely needed, but it can’t happen in a silo apart from development.
There is a glaring mismatch between Atlanta’s sprawling urban footprint and its transit service, with the MARTA rail system limited to Atlanta’s core. Most commuters don’t have good access to a train or even a bus that leads to one.
While we’re waiting for regional action, one key to correcting the mismatch between access and population is getting that “core” area of Atlanta to house many more people than it does, with a focus on equity and diversity.
After having carpeted a massive section of North Georgia with relatively-low density development that can’t be served well by transit — putting more people close to existing transit is at least as important as expansion of the MARTA system. The part of the city that already has rail transit needs to have some thoughtfully-designed, livable, lovable, good urbanism built inside it in order to accommodate a greater number of Atlantans.
