Urban threads

Buford Highway to get safety upgrade (FINALLY):

A coalition including state government and Hispanic community advocates is working to make Buford Highway less deadly for pedestrians. At least $15 million in construction is planned to improve the commercial corridor known for immigrants and their shops, the coalition announced Thursday at a news conference.

The highway needs a sidewalk, traffic lights and a median, said Michael Orta, program manager of PEDS, a nonprofit group that advocates for pedestrians and is leading the safety effort. A bike lane is also on the wish list. And safety advocates said a consolidation of strip shopping center driveways would help. The state Department of Transportation will hold a series of public hearings this summer before installing infrastructure changes. The Buford Highway safety coalition included the Governor's Office for Highway Safety, the Latin American Association, DeKalb County Commissioner Kathie Gannon, Royal Bus Lines owner Carlos Ochoa, MARTA and PEDS. The targeted area is five-miles from Lenox Road in Atlanta to Shallowford Terrace in Chamblee. The project may take five years to complete.

From 1996 to 2005, 34 people were killed and 305 injured from car crashes on the strip, said Bob Dallas, head of the Governor's Office for Highway Safety. "We know we can do a better job" in protecting pedestrians, he said.

Jane Jacobs died last week. I only just read The Death and Life of Great American Cities recently - that puts me in the second or third generation of planning students to be influenced by her thinking. NYT Obit here and somewhat provocative NYT article saying it's time to move on here.

Perhaps her legacy has been most damaged by those who continue to treat "Death and Life" as sacred text rather than as what it was: a heroic cri de coeur. Of those, the New Urbanists are the most guilty; in many cases, they reduced her vision of corner shops and busy streets to a superficial town formula that creates the illusion of urban diversity, but masks a stifling uniformity at its core.

For those who could not see it, the hollowness of this urban planning strategy was finally exposed in New Orleans, where planners were tarting up historic districts for tourists, even as deeper social problems were being ignored and its infrastructure was crumbling.

The answer to such superficiality is not to resurrect the spirit of Robert Moses. But in retrospect his vision, however flawed, represented an America that still believed a healthy government would provide the infrastructure — roads, parks, bridges — that binds us into a nation. Ms. Jacobs, at her best, was fighting to preserve the more delicate bonds that tie us to a community. A city, to survive and flourish, needs both perspectives.

The lesson we should take from Ms. Jacobs was her ability to look at the city with her eyes wide open, without rigid prejudices. Maybe we should see where that lesson leads next.