Tag Archives: Ellen Dunham-Jones

Retrofitting suburbia —Ellen Dunham-Jones

There are many jobs in this. The Five Points redevelopment is an example of what she’s talking about. It’s a lot better than building more sprawl: safer, less expensive, more jobs, less energy cost, more energy independence, better health, and more community.

Georgia Tech Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones spole January 2010 at TEDxAtlanta, Retrofitting suburbia

In the last 50 years, we’ve been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. And I’m going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is, the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially, retail sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.
Here’s the video: Continue reading →

Do we need more of the same unsafe roads?

Many T-SPLOST projects submitted by Lowndes County would make traffic safety worse.

More from Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones of Georgia Tech:

Even Buford Highway, she says, could be transformed with medians, trees and buildings set closer to the road. Changes that are known to slow traffic. But outside of the ivory tower, change does not come easily. Or quickly.

Last year Georgia spent more than two billion dollars on transportation, but only a tiny fraction, less than 1 percent, went specifically to pedestrian safety.

And what Lowndes County has sent in for T-SPLOST funding includes: Do we need more of the same unsafe roads?

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Why should traffic safety not be a pertinent fact?

We’ve seen that traffic safety is a big problem in Atlanta and elsewhere, and Virginia is leading the way in traffic redesigns to fix such problems. Meanwhile, Lowndes County doesn’t consider it even pertinent:
Traffic on Old Pine will be regulated by the amount of people who use the highway; traffic on Bemiss since you and I moved out there forty years ago.
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I’m not going to argue Bemiss Highway, it’s not a pertinent fact.

That’s right, traffic and traffic safety are considered not pertinent to building subdivisions, according to the Chairman of the Lowndes County Commission, and the actions of the Commissioners and staff. The developer gets to consider only their one property and the neighbors get to deal with all the effects on all the related roads. Privatization of profits and socialization of problems such as traffic accidents. Does that seem right to you?

If not, it’s going to go on until more people argue and debate. In fact, many of Lowndes County’s T-SPLOST tax request would make the problem worse. See next post.

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Suburbia dangerous for pedestrians

Maybe people are starting to notice that far more people die in traffic accidents in the U.S.A. than in foreign wars. The projects submitted by Lowndes County for TSPLOST funding would make this problem even worse, except the bus system, which wouldn’t require road widening.

John Larson and others, PBS, 22 July 2010, Profiles from the Recession: [VIDEO] Dangerous Crossing: A new suburbia as economy changes:

In recent years a little noticed shift has been transforming suburbia: the home of the middle class has become the home of the working poor. As a result, roadways that were built for the car are now used by a growing population that can’t afford to drive. The consequences can be deadly.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

According to a recent report, by two national transportation groups, about 43 thousand pedestrians were killed in the U.S. in the last decade; “the equivalent of a jumbo jet going down roughly every month.”

Of course, the problem didn’t start with an increase in pedestrians. Continue reading →