Thoughts from a 20 Mile Ride Around Atlanta

The Beltline of course is great, but it can be incredibly hard to bike with any pace during peak times due to crowding. Imagine saying this 10 years ago.

The section of Beltline next to Piedmont can’t open soon enough! Due to festival, no bikes were allowed in the park and had to detour along Piedmont Ave’s sidewalk which was not fun!

Once I got back to the park the new boardwalk and Beltline section are amazing! The newer section heading toward Armour Yards is in full bloom and looking great. Traffic on Buford-Spring is not.

Riding through Ansley park has its challenges but most of the roads are quiet and 25 mph. The hills suck when a car gets behind you though.

Opted to take the sidewalk through Atlantic Station. It just felt safer.

The bridge renovation can’t come soon enough. Hopefully they’ll be some restriping and protection along the rest of 17th too.17th street west of Northside..YIKES. I’m thinking there will at least be a path with the waterworks park plan.

Howell mill will be better soon which will really compliment the Brady Ave cycle track. This area has some of the best mix of buildings and development in the city.

We’ll need another solid E-W route on 14th and/or 10th to really take it to the next level.

Parkway through Georgia Tech is just perfect.

There’s some interesting configs along Centennial Park.

I realllly can’t believe we’ve actually got buildings coming out the Gulch! Shoutout Centennial Yards & South Downtown.

Forsyth’s final striping should be installed soon! Bike lanes with protection similar to the other South Downtown streets is coming.

MLK Cycle Track! We need the extensions to the East and West of the main part ASAP.

Woodard is a pretty good temporary option until memorial is redone – which may be soon. The crossing at Boulevard almost got me killed though. There may be a light added here one day with the Boulevard complete street project. I’m interested to see what will be the long term play for the 2 blocks between Pearl & The Beltline. Curb to curb there’s no width to restripe like the rest. The sidewalks are wide enough to be shared but lots of utility poles muck it up.

Overall a great time and perfect weather! Love this city, man!

Phil Veasley is a Professional Engineer working to design safer multimodal infrastructure in cities throughout the US.  My goal is to create cites that are safe and effective for all people to move about outside of cars. To achieve that we have to focus on creating equitable, dense, and vibrant cities full of walkable neighborhoods with a various mix of housing choices, schools, restaurants, and services. We cannot have safe multimodal infrastructure without the density to support it and we cannot have equitable density without safe multimodal infrastructure. Outside of designing safe streets, my passions are sketching ideas for infill neighborhoods, floor plans, urban photography, and exploring our cities on foot or bike. Please check out the menus above for all of my ideas and also check out my YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter accounts.