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Having recently written a Rampway article on the latest developments on the Belt Line and Carl Patton’s new involvement with it I spoke highly of Dr. Patton’s vision.

Another demonstration of this vision can also be illustrated by two articles written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Downtown’s streets are suddenly paved with students. Students who are not spending their gold.

Some 3,000 attend class each day at a new Georgia State University building in a prominent block off Peachtree Street. They have yet — despite expectations — to make a dent in the struggling retail community surrounding the structure.

Boosters of the once controversial building predicted the volume of students coursing through Atlanta’s central business district would spur a resurgence in area restaurants and retail shops. That hasn’t happened in the month the Helen M. Aderhold Learning Center has been open.

– David Pendered for the AJC, October 7, 2002

Today, Pendered ate his words:

Downtown has proved in the past year that it can rebound. A bustling restaurant row has emerged on once-blighted Broad Street, a block west of Peachtree. The catalyst was a classroom building that Georgia State University opened in the historic Fairlie-Poplar District.

– David Pendered for the AJC, May 31, 2004

Parking meters make sense. Many cities use parking meters to off-set the cost of maintaining streets, paying for police, and to make public improvements in their cities.

However, the city of Atlanta is acting foolishly. Its new parking meters are
massively overpriced. They cost $25 cents for 7.5 minutes!

Compared to local parking garages, which provide shade, security, and are well lit, the meters become counter productive.

As with all resource matters, the key is to garner the largest marginal benefit for the marginal cost. One must make the appropriate laffer curve for the situation. If you charge nothing to park, you’ll reap nothing. If you charge $5 per hour, you’ll also reap nothing. So the answer must be somewhere in between. I believe two dollars per hour is too high.

Why? 1) There are less expensive, higher quality substitutes. 2) One must pay the $2 per hour in nickels, dimes, and quarters. One faces structural problems of payment. Many people don’t have $4 in change for a couple of hours and the
machines fill up very quickly. 3) People generally seem to believe that there is only a small chance of incurring consequences due to enforcement. At such high prices they are willing to flaunt the meter.

The result is that the city makes people angry with the high prices AND reaps less revenue.

The city would be better off lowering the price to either 75c or $1 per hour. People would be able to use the meters more effectively and would feel that the risk associated with flaunting the meters was not worth the cost.

In the mean time, this is one of Mayor Franklin’s few mistakes.

This is the story of two bars. Both from midtown Atlanta. One alive and well, another just a memory. What links them is that the one that’s alive and well wants to be a ‘dive bar’, a secret, a place that intimidates regular people.

Halo lounge is a fancy place. They brag of their deconstructionist architecture and their excessively fancy well bottles. This is a far cry from the Stein Club, which was one of the few true bars in Atlanta history. That’s right, no food. The Stein Club lived in Midtown until about 2000 when the very nature of having been there was no longer provocative.

In 1985, if you went to the Stein Club, you were taking a risk. That section of Midtown was seedy and perhaps a little dangerous. While the Stein Club was marked, it was also a place that had a reputation. You only went there if you were from the neighborhood or were desperate enough for cheap beer that you would risk the drunks to get it.

Then came the anouncement that the Olympics were coming. Then came the revitalization of midtown; its Disneyfication. Suddenly, the new lofts were there. Suddenly, the dump had been turned on the Mitchell House, and suddenly all the people in the neighborhood wanted cosmopolitans and not PBR.

Whither the Stein Club. Instead a new type of bar replaced it. Halo does have a small sign, but it would be tough to recognize if you were just walking by. It’s also hard to find the door.

One gets the feeling this is intentional. On the night I visited, a majority of the clients were women who had to be making in the upper 5 figures or more. The place seems designed to intimidate and keep out people whom these women would not want there…. and there is the rub of truth.

A real dive bar is one in which ‘you’ are not low enough to really be there. The moderne/urbane dive bar is one in which generally ‘you’ are not high enough.

I’m not sure the latter is better; after all, it’s hard to dive upwards.

The city of Atlanta is on the verge of possible transportation progress. Recently, Mayor Franklin and Cathy Woolard held a news conference to update interested folks in the beltline.

Were the full promise of this project realized, I think it could create a second kind of donut around the city.

Right now, I-285 serves as a donut effectively demarkating the city from the burbs. To get outside 285 without a car is really tough. Your options are limited. What the beltline and similar projects may do is create a revitalized city where people who want to live outside their cars move and a group of suburbs where the cul-de-sac mentality pervades.

Some facts:

• If fully realized the beltline will have about 22 miles of track

• The city, as of yet, owns none of the track
• The Atlanta Regional Commission has put the project in its plans to achieve by 2030 and funded $150M worth of developement and research
• Congressman John Lewis (Dem. Ga. 5) and GSU President Carl Patton are on board.
• As planned, the project would also include green space and connections to bike paths.

What was astonishing in the press conference is the number of agencies whose fingers would be in the pie, and the amount of coordination it would take to get something done when the entire project sits in one municipality. In the Press Conference over a dozen agencies were mentioned.

It’s also amazing that the benefit here is not obvious universally. In any situation, it’s key to find the baptists and the bootleggers. The baptists are Mike Kenn, the pavement lobby, and folks in rural Georgia. Right now, it’s tough to tell who the bootleggers are.