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Students See Potential in Northside Corridor
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Imagine Northside Drive and you probably see a street that you’d rather steer clear of lined with dilapidated buildings and overgrown weeds — or at least that’s what the students in Mike Dobbins’ studio envisioned when he mentioned the street to them.“At first, they couldn’t understand why I wanted us to examine Northside Drive; they said ‘there’s nothing on it,’” said Dobbins, a professor of practice in the School of City and Regional Planning. “Until they realized that there is.”Northside is actually a diamond in the rough when it comes to the role it could play in improving transportation and providing development opportunities in Atlanta. The street serves as the west frame of Atlanta’s downtown and midtown core, connecting Cobb County to Atlantic Station, Georgia Tech, the Georgia World Congress Center, the Georgia Dome, the Atlanta University Center, West End and points south.“Northside should be a grand transit boulevard, a seam between east and west, not the divide that it is,” Dobbins said. “Our goal is to help change that.”Dobbins became familiar with Northside’s potential while working as commissioner of planning for the City of Atlanta from 1996 to 2002. For the studio, he partnered with Emory McClinton, a board member of the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), to develop the studio program.“A lot is happening in the Northside corridor,” Dobbins said. “The State Road and Tollway Authority’s strategically located site at 17th Street is up for sale without conditions that would serve transit connectivity. Tech is seeking to establish better programs and physical linkages with its westside neighborhoods. The multimodal passenger terminal could be built in the future. A new stadium is in play. Why wouldn’t now be a good time to plan comprehensively?”So during fall semester, with funding from the GDOT, the city, the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District, Midtown Alliance and Tech, city planning and civil engineering students in Dobbins’ studio took on the challenge of creating a plan for Northside Drive.Some of the recommendations include:
- Creating a consistent well-lit, tree-lined boulevard, from I-75 to West End, that would accommodate cars, transit, bicycles and sidewalks suitable for serving a mixed- use, higher-density development future.
- Establishing planning and zoning policies to shape the boulevard’s development trajectory to support the goals of its many stakeholders, including neighborhoods and the Atlanta University Center to the west, and Atlantic Station, Tech, Midtown and Downtown to the east.
- Untangling the street’s many confusing and disorienting intersections.
- Introducing a pedestrian park and street crossings to connect Tech and Marietta Street.
- Providing bicycle, pedestrian and possible streetcar connectivity over the Means Street bridge.
- Creating programs that link pending new developments, such as a multimodal passenger terminal or a new stadium, with tangible support for neighborhood jobs, infrastructure and other development.
- Increasing green space.
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- Workflow Status: Published
- Created By: Amelia Pavlik
- Created: 02/19/2013
- Modified By: Fletcher Moore
- Modified: 10/07/2016
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