The Paving Committee has attached itself to a new word that is popping up everywhere these days, in a dizzying lack of logic and conflicting arguments.
"Marginal" is the word of the month.
"Any changes to the park would attract a marginal increase in usage." Can somebody tell me what "marginal" means? How many more people per hour? Twenty more? One hundred more? Will they arrive in cars? Or take MARTA? Carpool? How do they know? Have they done a study? Did they do a comparison with another park that made a change to their amenities?
OR did they just make this up?
Yes, I thought so.
Path Committee Member: " I think that it (paved sidewalk) could attract marginally (as long as it was “in scale” as we discussed) more traffic in a decidedly safer environment is better than marginally less traffic in a decidedly less safe environment."
What?
How does higher traffic make for safer streets? The paving proponents have ignored the unassailable fact that there has never been a pedestrian injury on Wesley Drive in its entire history, (nor even an auto accident in anyone's living memory) but that doing things to increase the traffic and parking on Wesley may definitely make it much more likely. Certainly making changes based on gut feelings (like the ill-conceived 3-way traffic stop which has turned out to have increased pedestrian danger) can have opposite the hoped-for effect.
And will we force people not to walk on the streets or cross the street once the paving is done? (Has anyone noticed that lots of people walk on the natural dirt path now and enjoy it just fine, by the way? Why is walking on a dirt path "a decidedly less safe environment?" )
But I digress.
Explain how we can make improvements that will most certainly be touted all over town, and on the internet-- City Hall parks site, tourist sites, jogging sites, Mom sites, dogwalking sites, Yelp.com (just see what's being said here!) and various others, word of mouth, and is literally across the street from the soon-to-be built Beltline, and yet that is only going to attract a "marginal" increase in traffic to the park?
The promoters of this project are either self-deluded, if they think it is only going to be known and used by the immediate neighborhood, somehow because it is "in scale," or they are trying to fool the membership in order to sell it.
Every day, people come to Atlanta Memorial Park from all over the area to use this relatively small park the way it is now. Possibly the attraction is limited to people who prefer a more natural, undeveloped setting, people who are willing to walk around a muddy spot or a bump in the path. Some of them do jog on the asphalt rather than on the softer dirt and grass. If they don't care for the "dangerous" street, why in Hades do they drive all the way here? They are adults, at least many of them. (The legal age for a driver's license in Georgia is 16.)
Chastain Park has a concrete path, and it is estimated to have more than 200 users per hour. (Apples to apples: They aren't coming to use the tennis courts or the golf course. They are joggers, walkers, baby strollers and bikers.)
"If you build it, they will come."
Saturday, June 7, 2008
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3 comments:
The Gadfly's points are well taken. I think it is now an ego thing with the path committee, almost like a dog feeling compelled to mark its territory. They can't stand the thought of others getting in their way, and that makes certain members hang on to the path notion like a bulldog onto a piece of meat. What will it take to make them let go?
I got into a conversation in line at the polls last November with a woman who said (in a very disgusted tone) after I told her where I live that she would never set foot in Memorial Park until it was "brought up to standards." I asked her what she meant and she said it should have sidewalks and gaslights all through it, for starters. I told her it wasn't going to happen, as Memorial Park is all a floodplain. I didn't add that we wouldn't be sad about losing her business either.
Thanks for the reminder about flooding, another issue which the paving will undoubtedly only increase "marginally". That will be reassuring to our neighbors on the other side of Peachtree Creek. They will be happy to hear that instead of 3 feet of water in their living rooms, it might only be two-feet ten inches.
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