atlantalarry

Atlanta's Railroads -- TV show with footage of Franklin Garrett

Photo from Find-a-Grave and the East Point Historical Society

Franklin Garrett (September 25, 1906 – March 5, 2000) was the official historian of Atlanta, and wrote the first two volumes of Atlanta and Environs.  Those volumes are often a good starting point when researching people and events in Atlanta prior to 1950.  He was a fixture on the Atlanta history scene, and I remember in particular his talks at Oakland Cemetery celebrations in the years before his death.

While browsing the Internet Archive I found this video, from a series on railroading called All Aboard, that was at one time hosted by bliptv.com.

The episode is about Atlanta's railroads.  It's interesting in its own right, but the most unique feature of the video  is a series of segments in which Franklin Garrett talks about the role of the railroads in the founding of Atlanta.

 

 

Exploring the Internet Archive -- Atlanta's own Spaghetti Junction in video

This morning I decided to do a search on the word "Atlanta" in the Internet Archive, that massive, glorious repository of assorted stuff.  The first thing that caught my eye was a video called simply "Atlanta Traffic".  It was part of the OurMedia series on the Archive,  described as "an initiative devoted to creating and sharing works of personal media."

I couldn't find out who had uploaded the video, but it is a 3 minute 26 second scene of a drive approaching the Tom Moreland interchange, also known as spaghetti junction.  Spaghetti Junction is the interchange of I-85 and I-285 in north Dekalb County, near its border with Gwinnett County.  It was created to solve congestion problems associated with an earlier cloverleaf road design.

I'm not  fond of Atlanta's automobile culture, and I view the very existence of that interchange as evidence of how insane our dependence on automobiles has become.   It is a hideously ugly structure.  There are many roadways, including interstate highways, that could be retrofitted and given design elements to make them seem as though they were built by a culture that values beauty and dignity.  It is hard to image any makeover of spaghetti junction that would be anything more than the proverbial activity of "putting lipstick on a pig."

It's a short, clever video, and I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Tracking bicycle commuting trends in Georgia with Census Explorer

Census Explorer is a tool from the United States Census Bureau which gives quick and easy access to data on a number of popular topics, including "population estimates", "retail", "people, education, and income", and "commuting".  The tool features an interactive map, and access to information from the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and the 2012 American Community Survey.

When you are interested in researching a topic it is best to start with a specific question.  As an example, I'm going to pose the question: "Which areas in Georgia have the largest numbers of adults who commute by bicycle?"  Here are a set of steps for rapidly pulling together an answer to that question.  The graphics in this article are screen shots rather than live maps, but you can build the interactive maps and follow along in another browser window by carrying out the step-by-step instructions.

1) First, go to Census Explorer at http://www.census.gov/censusexplorer/

The opening screen of the current version as I write this article looks like this:

 

2) Since we're interested in data on commuting, we'll select "Go to Census Explorer Commuting Edition"

3) Click on the pull-down menu labeled "Select a Measure".

4) Since my research question involves the trends in bicycle commuting I'll select "bicycle" from the menu.

5) Next, select the pull-down menu labeled "Show by"

6)  I usually start with a larger geographic area to get a quick overview of the patterns, then drill down into the smaller units.  The largest unit relevant to my question is "County", so I'll start there.

7) I'll then double click on the interactive map to zoom in on Georgia, and adjust the size and position by manipulating the plus/minus icon and dragging the map around as needed.

 8) The default data for the map is the 2012 American Community Survey.  You'll notice on the map above that there are four darker areas in the Georgia portion of the map.  These areas represent Appling County, Athens-Clarke County, Baldwin County, and Chattahoochee County.  These are the counties with the highest percentage of people over 16 years of age who commute to work by bicycle. 

The University of Georgia dominates Athens-Clarke, so I would guess that university towns have a larger number of bicycle commuters than average.   Chattahoochee County is very close to Columbus GA, Baldwin County has Milledgeville as its county seat, and Appling is a rural county.  Tentatively I'd guess, based on the counties with relatively high bicycle commuting, that both high concentration of students, and low income, could be contributory factors to increased commuting by bicycle.

Drilling down to the census tract level is where it really gets interesting.  The census tracts with the highest levels of bicycle commuting are concetrated in metro areas, and a few metro Atlanta  census tracts have the highest levels.  In one Clayton County tract. more than ten percent of the commuters over 16 years of age commute by bicycle.  Since any percentage over one percent is unusual, Clayton County is remarkable.

In order to draw valid conclusions about cycle commuting in Georgia,  more analysis would have to be done. The Census Bureau has other tools to help with the process, including American Factfinder. But Census Explorer provides a good starting point.  You can get an overview of a number of characteristics of an area at the state, county, and census tract level.

 

The Census Explorer and Commuting by Bicycle

The Census Bureau has been gathering data on how people get to work, and how long it takes them to get there.  The Census Explorer tool is the fastest and easiest way to get at this data.  Another tool, American Factfinder, provides a much greater level of detail, but one of the advantages of Census Explorer is that it gives you a quick visual representation of the data, overlaid on a map.

Here's how to use it to get information on the percentage of people who commute to work by bicycle in your area.  I'm using metro Atlanta as my target, with the county as my unit of geography.

 

 

 

1. Visit Census Explorer
2. Select "Go to Census Explorer: Commuting Edition"
3. In the dropdown box "Select a Measure" choose "Bicycle"
4. In the dropdown box "Show by" select "County".  You'll get much finer grained detail by selecting "Census Tract", but save that for a more detailed examination later.
5. Use your mouse and the "+" and "-" icons on the upper right of the map to zoom in on the geographic area you're interested in.

I found a number of interesting things by exploring the map, other than the obvious fact that bicycle commuting is a very small percentage of overall commuting.  One is that Chattahoochee, Baldwin, Appling, and Clarke counties have the highest per capita percentage of bike commuters among Georgia counties.  It's obvious to me why that is true in Clarke County (the University of Georgia dominates the county, and college towns tend to have more cycling than other areas).  I'm not certain why the percentage is higher in those other counties, but it would be worth using American Factfinder to explore in more detail   The percentage is still small, but it reached or exceeded the one percentage mark in all these counties.

Selecting Census Tract under the "Show by" pulldown gives much more useful results.  A quick look shows that Clayton County in metro Atlanta has the census tracts with the highest levels of bicycle commuting, topping 10%.

The small percentages may seem demoralizing to advocates of cycling as a means of practical transportation.  But in order to increase commuting by bicycle it's necessary to know what factors lead to higher or lower numbers, and those numbers also need to be regularly tracked.  Both Census Explorer and American Factfinder should be important tools for advocates of bicycle commuting.

Cycling to the MARTA Station from south Cobb (and from there to the Dekalb Farmer's Market)

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been exploring bicycle routes to various destinations from our house in south Cobb.  This is a description of today's errands by bicycle.

I had a bit of uncertainty about titling this post, since today was quite an adventure for me.  I not only cycled in Cobb County, but in Fulton and Dekalb Counties as well.  My objective was to familiarize myself with the route from Oakdale Road to the Hamilton Holmes MARTA station, but I needed an errand to justify the trip.  Monday is my day for shopping at the Dekalb Farmer's Market, and the Avondale station on the East line is very close to that market, so I decided it would be an excellent time to check out the route.

Google Maps came up with the following simple route, which was the route I'd have guessed would be most efficient.  I simply took Oakdale Road to Veterans Memorial, which becomes Donald Hollwell Parkway after crossing the Chattahoochee River, turned right on Hamilton Holmes, took a right alongside I-20, and entered the station.  Here's the map:
View Larger Map

All in all it was a pleasant ride.  Traffic moves pretty fast along Veteran's Memorial, but there are two lanes of ample width, so cars and trucks were passing me with plenty of clearance room.  Hollowell Parkway narrows inside I-285, but it isn't far from there to Hamilton Holmes.

The trip from the Avondale Station to the Farmer's Market was even more straightforward.  One of the exits from the station empties onto Ponce De Leon, and the Farmer's Market is about a mile from the station.

After shopping I rode back to the station, and discovered that a medical emergency at the Georgia State station had stopped train service between Candler Park and the Georgia World Congress Center.  MARTA was providing emergency bus service, but rather than hope that a bike rack was available on one of those buses, I decided to cycle to the GWCC station.  This added quite a few overall cycling miles to my day.

After I put away the groceries from the Farmer's Market, I had one more errand.  I rode to the Lewis Ray branch of the Cobb Public Library on Oakdale Road.

My final cycling mileage for the day was 48 miles.  I'm feeling it at the moment, too.

Cycling in south Cobb County

I've been living full time in south Cobb, near the Chattahoochee River, since I sold my East Atlanta house about a year and a half ago.  One thing which has been on my todo list for the entire time I've been here is exploring the area by bicycle.  Despite the reputation of "Outside the Perimeter" (OTP) areas of Atlanta as unfriendly to cyclists, I see cyclists on the roads regularly here, and the Silver Comet trail, which starts near South Cobb Drive, has encouraged cycling in this area considerably.

I've finally gotten my gear in order and began exploring my immediate environment, which includes Oakdale Road, Veteran's Memorial Highway (the old Bankhead Highway), South Cobb Drive, the East-West Connector, and Atlanta Road.

My goal over the next few weeks is to map out good routes to the grocery stores in the area (there are three viable Publix stores and two Krogers), the post office on Floyd Road, the public libraries on Oakdale and Floyd roads, the Hamilton Holmes MARTA station, and the various CCT and MARTA bus stops in the area.  I'll post maps here as I explore them,

Today I made my first utility trip in the area, riding from our house on Brookside Drive to the intersection of South Cobb Drive and River View Road.  It was a pleasant ride, on Brookside, Roberts Drive, Oakdale Road, Dickerson Road, River View Road, and South Cobb.

Here's the Google map of the route I took.

 

View Larger Map

What does simple living actually mean?

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.  -- Albert Einstein

The quote above is often paraphrased as "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler".  It's a warning again both over-complicating, and over-simplifying.

Yesterday I spent a bit of time reading through a series of articles by a friend of mine who's been on a campaign to pare down his number of possessions to the minimum necessary.  During the course of the articles, he mentions several excellent resources of which I'm very fond, including David Allen's Getting Things Done system, explained in the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Leo Babauta's website Zen Habits,  and the 100 Things Challenge (a challenge to reduce one's physical belongings to 100 objects) which began on the website  A Guy Named Dave and is described in the book The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul.

I've had a longstanding interest in simplifying my life, and I've made increasingly good progress over the past few years.  One of the more difficult things is trying to balance the tradeoffs.

As an example of this, consider one of the most fundamental human activities: eating.  The tradeoff in that respect is complexity of preparation versus complexity of consumption.  I prepare food a lot.  Preparing food for my wife and I allows me to simplify the ingredients, using basic whole foods, avoiding the alphabet soup of chemical additives, preservatives, and the over-processed, over-packaged, nutrient-poor dreck which constitutes most of the standard American diet.

On the face of it, whole, unprocessed, organic foods may seem simpler.  Actually, in choosing that route, I've added a great deal of time management complexity to my life.  I have to research foods and preparation techniques, plan menus, shop, prepare the food, and clean up.  Aside from the cleanup this is a very satisfying activity to me, is much cheaper than eating out, and is certainly healthier than the alternative.  But from a time budgeting standpoint, eating out wins hands down.  Eating out offloads a lot of the complexity to the mammoth food service industry.  We would just show up, order our food, eat, pay, and let someone else deal with the generated mess.

For those of you who cycle, a similar dilemma presents itself in bicycle touring.  The most basic means of touring is to carry camping gear, an assortment of bicycle repair tools, food, and other gear aimed at self sufficiency.  The other option is "credit card touring" whereby one just takes the bike, a basic patch kit, a cell phone, a few minimal supplies, and stays in motels and eats out using the credit card.  Again, much of the personal complexity of being on the road is offloaded by the credit card method.

So what exactly is simple living?

Is it living with the least amount of clutter?

Is it living with only some bare minimum of technology?

Is it trying to do only the necessary activities to meet some goal, and making those activities as time efficient as possible?

I'm going to spend a few weeks writing about simple living and its related topics (clutter, time management, appropriate technology).  I don't think I really have any definitive answers to the questions I've raised, but hope to focus them, and discuss the tradeoffs.  I'll also write a bit about how I'm currently managing those tradeoffs in my own life.

Cycling in Metro Atlanta Part 1: The Bike Cobb blog

While my focus has usually been intown Atlanta, or Inside the Perimeter (ITP) as it's popularly known here, I find myself cycling more in the counties adjoining Atlanta. 

Probably most of my miles Outside the Perimeter are in the south Metro area (south Fulton, Fayette, and Coweta counties) because of several well designed "centuries" (hundred mile sport/recreational rides) in that area.  Three or four hundred miles can put a pretty good dent in my yearly cycling averages.

But for practical purposes cycling conditions in Cobb County is of particular interest to me, since my fiance lives just over the bridge in south Cobb.  I've recently stumbled on a blog which, although it hasn't been updated in awhile, has insights into the overall cycling environment in Cobb.  It's the Bike Cobb blog  If you're interested in cycling in Cobb you may want to browse through the articles.

Based on my first trip on the CCT, I've decided to try out the bus-mounted bike rack, probably on a trip on the number 30 (the most efficient public transit method of getting to my fiance's house is probably bike-train-bus-bike).  I'll continue posting updates on my cycling and public transit experiences in Cobb as I have things to report.

My first trip on the CCT

I've wanted to try out some of the county transit systems for the past few years.  It's ironic that my first trip on the Cobb Community Transit system (CCT) was to pick up my automobile from a garage in Mableton.

The garage was located on Veteran's Memorial (the old Bankhead Highway) about midway between Oakdale Road/Discovery Boulevard, and Floyd Road/Mableton Parkway (Veteran's Memorial seems to be the dividing point for a number of name changes of roads).

My original plan was to cycle to the train station, ride the westbound train to the Holmes station, and cycle to the garage.  But the car was ready a day early, and I'd taken the train to work with no bike.  So I got the brainstorm of trying to make connection with the CCT.  I knew absolutely nothing about the routes, fares, or schedules of the CCT, so I hit the CCT website.
So far so good.  The website indicates that the CCT actually wants people to ride the system.  I don't know what made me think they wouldn't.  I then hit the link to the system map.  Hmmm...
Weird.  One would think that a route straight out Veteran's Memorial would be a natural, since it would run through the center of Mableton and Austell.  But the closest route was the 30, which departs from the Holmes MARTA station and intersects  Veteran's Memorial  where Mableton Parkway  becomes Floyd Road, very near the Mable House.   I checked the map legend, and determined that if I got off there the walk would be two miles at the most.  Good enough.  I then
phoned the CCT to find out how to transfer from MARTA to the CCT.  I found that transferring from
MARTA to the CCT at the train station was no extra cost with my monthly Breeze ticket.

So  I walked the half mile from my workplace to the Georgia State MARTA station at about 3 PM on a Friday.   I took the westbound train to the Holmes Station, and asked one of the MARTA staff the location of the CCT stop.  He pointed it out to me.  When the bus arrived (about fifteen minutes later) I boarded and asked if the Veteran's Memorial stop would be announced.  The driver said yes.  The bus was crowded at around 4:30 PM, the stops were frequent along it's meandering route with people both boarding and exiting along the entire route through South Cobb.

The woman seated next to me, who'd overheard me ask the driver about the stop,  let me know about two stops in advance that my stop was nearing.

I disembarked, crossed Veteran's Memorial, and walked to the garage.  The sidewalks along my path to the garage were smooth and walkable, although needless to say the overall streetscaping along Veteran's Memorial is dismal.

The entire trip, from boarding at the Georgia State station to arriving at the garage took about an hour and twenty minutes.  I could probably have cut the time by calculating the connection schedule better.  But all in all that wasn't too shabby.

I intend to explore the CCT more thoroughly over the next few months.  But overall my first experience was very positive.  I generally  evaluate public transit routes based on  how good they are in getting me from East Atlanta to some useful  or interesting destination.   Looking at the CCT's  system  map there are routes to the Mable House/Barnes Amphitheater,  the Silver Comet  Trail, the Marietta town square,  Kennesaw  Mountain,  and a route within walking distance of Smyrna's well designed town center.  The question is how efficiently the CCT can get me there.
I'll keep you posted.

I do intend to contact the CCT and request that they consider a route running straight out Highway 78 (Veterans Memorial).  One of my longstanding notions is that the towns formed by the railroad to Birmingham would be a logical extension of the westbound MARTA rail line (Mableton, Austell, Powder Springs, Douglasville, Villa Rica).  Since Cobb doesn't have a rapid transit system yet, at least they could fill in that gap with a bus line within their own boundaries.

Utility Cycling forum

An interesting new forum has been added to Bike Forums, a resource I mentioned in one of my previous posts.  It's the Utility Cycling forum, and covers an aspect of cycling which I think has been neglected in recent years, particularly in the U.S.  A lot of the focus on cycling has centered on commuting and recreational cycling.  The third major type of cycling, which in my opinion is a special category, is utility cycling.  Utility cycling consists of using the bicycle for the errands and utility trips most people in the U.S. perform in a car.  It covers a wide range of activities, equipment, and personal ingenuity.  The activities would include grocery shopping, visiting friends, or even using the bike for the purpose of moving.

There are many overlaps between commuting, recreational cycling, and utility cycling but on a worldwide basis utility cycling is the main use to which the bicycle is put, and I think this is going to be a very useful and lively forum.