Daniel Urshansky on Atlanta’s Public Transport Problem
Daniel Urshansky
Atlanta’s Public Transport Problem
Claims and stances
Transcript
- 0:00 So I just wanted to hop on here and talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently since I got back from traveling in Europe this summer, and that is public transportation.
- 0:09 Right now I'm taking a city planning and urban transportation course, and it's really crazy for me to see how far behind Atlanta, especially is behind cities in Europe like Paris, Brussels, London, and even smaller towns in Switzerland and Germany.
- 0:26 In Europe, you can literally just hop on a train or a tram and it can get you anywhere.
- 0:30 It's fast, it's clean, and it's cheap.
- 0:32 In Atlanta, though, if you don't have a car, you're basically just stuck.
- 0:35 Marta can get you downtown or maybe to the airport, but that's about it.
- 0:40 In my class, we've been learning a lot about concepts like transit-oriented development and first and last mile connectivity.
- 0:46 And it's wild to think about how much of a difference that can make in our city.
- 0:50 Imagine if we had better bike lanes to connect neighborhoods to transit stops or mixed use developments built around stations so people actually wanted to live near and use safe and clean public transport.
- 1:01 Atlanta's really growing fast, and we have this chance to kind of rethink about how everybody moves around the city.
- 1:07 It's not just about convenience though, it's also about sustainability, reducing car traffic, and making the city more accessible to everyone, to both tourists and people that live here.
- 1:16 Honestly, seeing what works in Europe makes me realize that we don't need to reinvent the wheel.
- 1:21 We just need to actually invest in ideas that have been working everywhere else for decades, even in other cities in America, like New York, Boston, and Chicago.