Atlanta has streets like no other. Unlike most cities, Atlanta is a city that never planned to grow. It still hasn’t planned. But why plan when you can have Atlanta streets?
The first trick to making an Atlanta street is to make the lanes only fifteen inches wider than the average car. This helps drivers drift into other lanes, the hallmark of Atlanta driving.
The narrow lanes are complemented by placing all utility poles about three and a half centimeters from the curb. For extra helpfulness, the poles are often tilted toward the street. If you weren’t going to drift into the next lane already, the prospect of losing your right hand mirror will help you buck up and play ball.
If this weren’t enough, it seems it is punishable by law to plant a tree somewhere other than directly under a power line. This has several helpful effects. For one, it makes it near impossible to widen a street without cutting down a small forest. Second, trimming the trees to avoid the power lines gives Atlanta’s arboreal streetscape its unique chopped, hacked, and lightning-struck look. When they are chopped and hacked, that is. Many are left untouched so that the power flashes whenever the wind blows.
Especially successful older trees will kindly grow into the street, occasionally outleaning the utility poles. The root structures of these older trees also play their part, turning up the pavement.
New trees play their part too. Though it seems impossible, at least eighty-seven percent of the trees planted in Atlanta over the last twenty years are Bradford pears. Atlanta’s air quality is second to most, and the annual month-long spring dusting of Bradford pear tree sperm pollen adds a pleasant floral aroma to the smog.
Happy spring driving, Atlanta!
Chutney,
Oh, I’ve been missing your series on transportation! But oh I do have so much to say!!
Well, on this subject let me say that any real city buries its utility poles. They’re unsightly and they inhibit development and transportation and are just in the way. But Georgia Power’s policy is that they *have* to use above-ground utility poles because they are legally required to use the least-cost method to serve their customers. This is something I think we need to change with legistation. Here’s my idea: Georgia Power has to match dollar-for-dollar, the money of anyone who wants to bury their lines. So if a city or a developer wants to bury lines, Georgia Power pays half the cost.
Needless to say, this would make the trees very happy.
And yes, we need to get rid of all the Bradford Pears. I think they’re on their way out, eventually…. I don’t know anyone who plants them anymore…
Well I take exception! The Wellses were on the ground floor of an important expansion of Atlanta urban livability.
Inman Park.
Sure that was more than a hundred years ago, but Georgians never forget!
Oh, yes. I’ll never forget when we first came house-hunting in Atlanta. The rental car agency didn’t have our reserved compact car, so put us in an SUV instead. I’d never driven a large car and thought I was going to hit anything and everything. Just a few more inches in each lane would have made a world of difference.
My favorite parts of Atlanta driving and navigation, though, are the streets which change names every few blocks (or at least change spellings, i.e. Clairemont to Clairmont).
Have to mention this one –
Spring Street is one-way south in Midtown, but one-way north in Downtown. Somewhere there is a space-time warp that prevents all of these cars from colliding into each other at full speed…
AU, I had no idea about the GP policy. That explains so, so much.
Scott, it isn’t the Inman Parks where it’s a problem—it’s the major streets. (By the way, I live just down the way from Inman. Nice neighborhood your family built there.)
Ruth, a friend of mine was in Atlanta for a few weeks, maybe a year or two back. He drove a truck, and driving in Atlanta freaked him out. I had an easier time driving in Boston, and I say that now after have lived here longer than I lived in Boston (so it’s not a lack of familiarity).
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