Teaching the ARC "Reverse Urbanization"

A great article in tomorrow's AJC by Maria Saporta describes the Atlanta Regional Council's recent visit to Vancouver. They were blown away by the city's success in what I call "reverse urbanization". They want density and traffic jams. They refuse to expand any road in downtown by even a single lane, and they are the only city in the northeast to not have a major highway running through the center of town.

I've always thought the downtown connector was Hartsfield's greatest blunder. If anything, he could have at least broken them up and put the downtown strip in between them. The way they see it, gridlock is good. Bad traffic convinces people to get out of their cars and onto transit. They've also made all their roads extremely pedestrian-friendly, with "wide sidewalks bordered by trees, and crosswalks are well defined."

Vancouver has designed their city as a "cradle-to-the-grave" city rather than a "where-ya-from? (...before moving here)" city like Atlanta has always been. Here in Atlanta the reality of building more roads to solve our problems has resulted in the development phenomena "if you build it: they will fill it" meaning that in a city as spread out as we are, any new lanes will encourage more driving rather than ease traffic congestion. This idea of taking away roads from drivers would seem the logical opposite to our 'city of dreams' , and it sounds crazy without any explanations to back it up, but I think this is genius.

Imagine how different downtown would be right now if we never had highways going through the center of Atlanta. It would be one big sanctuary of a city! Here's downside to Vancouver though. "The lack of affordable housing, the number of homeless people, the prevalence of drug addicts and the growing number of immigrants have strained the urban area." We do not have most of these problems right now. However, if we follow the 4 rules that Vancouver follows, maybe reverse urbanization can succeed where the highways have failed.

Vancouver's 4 rules for a Successful City:

1) Protect Green Space
2) Develop in Compact Areas
3) Increase Transportation Choices
4) Build Complete Communities

Source: AJC - Maria Saporta