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Atlanta 1950s and now
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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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I'm not American so I might not fully understand the repercussions of this. (houses being demolished and stuff)
But I honestly prefer the current version. It seems to have more green spaces. The highways could be shit, but if it meant better public transportation them I'm all for it (buses for instance). Maybe kill a few lanes and get a train going there or something...
I don't know, the old layout seems very claustrophobic to me. The newer one seems to have more potential.
Edit: Upon reviewing the picture again, I think the previous version had a lot of parks that seemed "claustrophobic" but it's just because it's a B&W picture... So maybe I'd change my mind and go with the older one.
they demolished a medium density neighborhood for highways so suburbs can commute in and out of inner city. when you destroy neighborhoods and create "green space", people don't just stop existing. they either get pushed to the suburbs if they can afford it, or (most likely) the ghettos.
and how does highway create public transit?
highway is a mechanism to separate the undesired that cannot afford cars. kill a few lanes and build trains would mean "those people" can reach "our neighborhoods".
Back when they built highways, they used them to segregate neighborhoods. Also, the US has dog shit public transit. Buses are terrible and trains are barely existent. The entire country is built around automobiles.
Yeah, I sometimes complain about my country's public transportation but you guys have it worse...
You have public transport only because you did complain
I live in Florida, too. It's the worst here.
Nope! The very area we're looking at here used to have an extensive streetcar network:
The notion that the US was built around automobiles is a goddamn scurrilous lie. It was built for walking and transit just like everywhere else, and then it was demolished for automobiles!
I really like donoteat's video for why this is a problem
https://piped.araozu.dev/watch?v=rseaKBPkRPU
It's not about the 'feeling' claustrophobic or not having green areas, it's about the US's obsession with cars and it's consequences in the people
I haven't checked the video yet (but I 100% will) but that's absolutely how I feel too. I'm from Europe and the big cities are usually easily navigated without a car. Smaller cities maybe not so much BUT, you can still kindof easily walk to ride a bike somewhere.
I'm always surprised when watching American movies that there's not sidewalk if you leave the city centers. That's is absolutely incomprehensible to me lol I can walk from my city to the next 3 or 4 neighboring cities all by walking and using the sidewalk.
The scale is the issue. You won't find many places in Europe where the next town over is over 100 miles (200 km) away. Get even 150 miles from the coasts in the US and you can easily find places where that is the case.
I don't think that's the case. My country is also big, cities are apart by hundreds of km. But our cities still are dense, there are (almost) no suburbs, and roads are not giants. In my city (2nd largest in the country) the largest roads have 6 lanes. There is only 1 street with 8 lanes. A lot of important busy streets have 4 lanes. Most streets have only 2 lanes.
There are still sidewalks (many streets even have more sidewalk than road), there aren't huge parking lots everywhere, public transportation is everywhere.
Indeed, but even within the city, I've seen places where the sidewalk just disappears.
Distances are absolutely massive in the US though, yeah...
I'm not American so I will say that this is still terrible.
If you want to live in green space, move to soviet-era district:
Those "green spaces" are worthless freeway medians that do nothing but attract homeless camps. Here's a street view of some of it -- complete with panhandlers and tents in the background -- so you can see what I'm talking about.
Edit: LOL, nothing like downvoting a local for telling you the truth.
The homeless don't think those "green spaces" are worthless. Without them, where do you think they go? Just disappear??
You're not actually suggesting we should accept people living on freeway medians instead of building proper housing for them, are you?
No, quite the opposite. Your choice of words...
...comes across as disgusted, as if we can't have the homeless out here visible. I'm all for helping them and have volunteered and donated accordingly, though I could do more.
A green, shaded spot to camp is a lot better than many homeless have it I'm afraid. Better than a freeway underpass if I had to choose personally.
Of course I don't want to see homeless people there, because I don't want there to be homeless people there. And you shouldn't either! WTF is wrong with you, that you want people to be homeless?!
Can you read? Of course I don't want people to be homeless, nor did I say anything to suggest that.
You're the one advocating for them to be relegated to fucking freeway medians, not me!
I wanted the city to not close the Peachtree & Pine homeless shelter so that we wouldn't have this problem in the first place!
You should be fucking ashamed of yourself for dishonestly trying to shoot the messenger for the grievous sin of merely pointing out the goddamn problem!
Nothing I said suggests they should be relegated there. I do not believe they should be driven out when they have no place else to go. Too many places want to break up their camps without giving them any alternatives... making them miserable so they'll go elsewhere. I'm all for providing shelters and raising taxes to do it. As I said, I've volunteered working with the homeless many times when I used to work in and live near a downtown area. I hope to do more in the future though at the moment live a long ways away from an urban area to do so.
Bullshit. When I implied that it was bad for them to be there (an idea that's nothing more than common fucking sense), you attacked me for it. You have been uncivil and accusatory to me from the very beginning. Again, WTF is your problem?
? I hadn't even read your comment until now.
I don't mind your guy's opinion at all, that was what I wanted to know when I left a comment. I even started by saying that I'm not even a local precisely because I wanted the locals opinions.
You all went out of your way to downvote me though, I'm not even quite sure why.
Also yeah, those underpasses look nasty af.
Apologies; my edit was directed at someone else, then.
Still, I think your comment earned its downvotes because suggesting the vast wasteland of parking lots and freeway medians has "potential" while calling the walkable, human-scale devlopment it replaced "claustrophobic" is... frankly, just objectively incorrect. I'm not sure you realize just how zoomed-out the view is, but for the record, those two prominent horizontal parallel roads (Memorial Dr and Fulton St) are about 1/4 mile (0.4km) apart. That means if you're trying to, say, walk from your house at the southeast corner of the image to the State Capitol just off the top of it, the majority of your journey is along a 5-lane stroad overpass above a busy freeway. It's among the least-pleasant pedestrian experiences one could imagine, short of not having a sidewalk at all.
Yeah I see what you mean. I had to go on street view to get it. I hadn't even realised that it was an overpass lol. Thought it was just a road but even so, it would be a boring walk.
With the old layout you'd have a more pleasant one through the neighbourhood and such.
Also about my initial comment, even though the parks looked claustrophobic to me, I said it was likely the black and white colors messing it up for me, and yeah we're zoomed out a lot. Also, parks are almost never claustrophobic anyways, I just meant how it looked from above I guess.