Streetsblog New York City

This photo shows the bus stop on Austell Road and the path taken by Raquel Nelson to get to her apartment complex across the street. No marked crossings are visible in the photo. Source: T4America

Last week, we reported on the horrific story of Raquel Nelson, whose four-year-old son was killed as she attempted to cross the street with him to reach their home. Nelson was convicted of reckless conduct, improperly crossing a roadway and second-degree homicide by vehicle, all for the crime of being a pedestrian in the car-centric Atlanta suburbs. The conviction carried a sentence of up to 36 months, while the driver who killed Nelson’s son — who’d been drinking and using painkillers before getting behind the wheel — got off with six months on a hit-and-run charge.

Many of you responded with outrage. The more information that came out, the more outrageous the charges against Nelson became. From an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story that came out the month after the incident:

On April 10, she and her three children — Tyler, 9, A.J., 4, and Lauryn, 3 — went shopping because the next day was Nelson’s birthday. They had pizza, went to Wal-Mart and missed a bus, putting them an hour late getting home. Nelson, a student at Kennesaw State University, said she never expected to be out after dark, especially with the children.

When the Cobb County Transit bus finally stopped directly across from Somerpoint Apartments, night had fallen. She and the children crossed two lanes and waited with other passengers on the raised median for a break in traffic. The nearest crosswalks were three-tenths of a mile in either direction, and Nelson wanted to get her children inside as soon as possible. A.J. carried a plastic bag holding a goldfish they’d purchased.

“One girl ran across the street,” Nelson said. “For some odd reason, I guess he saw the girl and decided to run out behind her. I said, ‘Stop, A.J.,’ and he was in the middle of the street so I said keep going. That’s when we all got hit.”

Look at all the ways the design of the city’s transportation system failed Nelson and her family. Bus service runs once an hour. There is no crosswalk to connect a bus stop with an apartment building it serves – nor any crosswalk for three blocks. A convicted hit-and-run driver who is half-blind and under the influence of alcohol and drugs is considered less of a threat to the public than a woman who rides the bus and walks with her kids.

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A Google Street View image of the intersection where Raquel Nelson’s four-year-old son was killed. There are no crosswalks in sight.

We don’t normally report on vehicle crashes on the Capitol Hill blog, but this was so outrageous we couldn’t help ourselves.

A 30-year-old woman in Marietta, Georgia was convicted of vehicular homicide this week – and she wasn’t even driving a car. The woman was crossing the street with her three children when a driver, who had been drinking, hit and killed her four-year-old. The driver, Jerry Guy, was initially charged with “hit and run, first degree homicide by vehicle and cruelty to children,” Elise Hitchcock of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. “Charges were later dropped to just the hit and run charge.”

The man has previously been convicted of two hit-and-runs – on the same day, in 1997, one of them on the same road where he killed Raquel Nelson’s son.

Guy will serve six months for killing the boy, but Nelson will serve up to 36 months – just for crossing the street with her child.

Hitchcock at the AJC says:

The conviction does not sit well with Sally Flocks, president and CEO of PEDS, a pedestrian advocacy organization.

“Invest the money in safe crossings,” Flocks said. “For the costs of the trial yesterday, they could have made a safe crossing. But they don’t want to do that.”

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This is the final installment of our series on high-stakes governor’s races. We hope you’ll be watching along with us tonight as the results come in for the races we’ve followed in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, California, Texas, Maryland, Colorado, and Tennessee. Now, we turn to Georgia.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told Georgians two weeks ago, “If Georgia wants a rail line and wants to be connected to high-speed intercity rail, you can make it happen.” But he warned that they’ll need leadership from the governor’s office.

Separated at birth? The candidates for GA governor may look like identical twins, but they have different priorities for transportation. Image: TPM

“Whoever gets elected governor will be getting a phone call from me,’” LaHood said. He wants to know if Georgia’s going to be “in the mix” on high speed rail. “They should be. They’re an important region of the country.”

Today, Georgia decides who will be in the governor’s mansion to answer LaHood’s phone call. It’s a time of transportation innovation in the state. Atlanta was recently awarded a TIGER II grant to build a streetcar line, and the federal government topped that off with $4.1 million for a multistate plan for high speed rail between Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina. But the state of Georgia has many unmet transportation needs, and the two men facing off in today’s election each have their own ideas about how to proceed.

Democrat Roy Barnes declares on his campaign website, “The days of only big road projects are gone.” In a section called “Unclog Atlanta,” he says:

Instead of simply pouring more concrete, we must implement a mass transit plan that addresses Metro Atlanta’s tremendous population growth and unique problems. MARTA is convenient for Atlantans who want to travel short distances within the city, but it is completely unusable for suburban and exurban commuters. An elevated light-rail system running over metro Atlanta’s interstates, rail lines, and existing rights-of-way would move commuters to outlying suburbs more efficiently, unclog our interstates, and reduce our reliance on foreign oil, all while putting Georgians back to work.

Republican Nathan Deal is giving up his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for a chance to replace Sonny Perdue as governor. In Congress, he voted against federal funding subsidies for Amtrak and an increase in emissions standards.

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I lived in Athens, Georgia, for seven years, and though Atlanta is only about an hour away (by car, of course), with a little effort I could probably count the number of times I made the trip. This video, the first in the American Makeover web series, goes a long way toward explaining why "Sprawlanta" -- all 8,378 square miles of it -- is no place for anyone interested in a walkable environment.

Not that Atlanta doesn't have traditional pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. But these pockets of relative sanity are normally bound by interstates or the hostile, high-speed traffic sewers that crisscross the metro area. As the film explains, the average Atlanta commute is an astounding 66-mile round trip, while the pedestrian fatality rate exceeds one death per week.

Into the breach come builders like Charles Brewer, the Internet entrepreneur behind Glenwood Park, a new urbanist development of walkable streets, green spaces and sidewalk cafes constructed on a former brownfield site close to downtown and the state capitol. While it's still hemmed in by freeways and wouldn't live up to an "old urbanism" standard for walkability, enviros like Kaid Benfield of the NRDC are hailing Glenwood Park as a shining example of smart growth in an otherwise dismal sprawlopolis.

I can't get behind Prevention Magazine's ranking of New York as 39th among the nation's most walkable cities. But after spending three days in Atlanta for a conference recently, I have no problem understanding why it rates 86th.

Stuck, like most of the city's legions of conventioneers, in the area around the Peachtree Center, I was astonished by the bleakness of downtown Atlanta's streetscape. The looming sandstone-colored skyscrapers contained almost no street-level storefronts. OK, there was a Hooters and a Hard Rock Café and a McDonald's and a few other things, but most of the businesses were either underground or in the massive, often windowless towers.

No matter which way you turned, there was a parking lot or parking garage, and more likely three or four, within sight.

Almost all the streets were one-way and built for speed. The day I got there, the air was so smoggy that my eyes started stinging and I had trouble breathing within minutes of getting off the MARTA train (it turned out that it was the city's most smoggy day of the year so far).

But most surreal were the pedestrian walkways, tubes that connected tower to tower to parking structure, everywhere you looked. A friend who has lived in Atlanta for six years told me the city encouraged these walkways to protect tourists and convention-goers like myself from panhandlers and street thugs.

Now, there are a lot of lovely things about Atlanta, and I don't want to imply that I think the Peachtree Center area is all there is to this city. The Little Five Points and Virginia Highland neighborhoods, which I visited briefly, seemed like eminently walkable and lively places (though there's no way you would walk to them from downtown). I spotted what looked like a really nice cycling trail in a Little Five Points park. While I only used MARTA to get to and from the airport, it worked perfectly for that, and it was clean and timely and inexpensive. There's a vocal pedestrian activism group, PEDS, fighting for improvements. And the city, which is full of unusually friendly people to begin with, also has what it calls an "ambassador" program downtown -- roving uniformed folks who will give tourists directions or just a kindly hello. They'll escort you to your destination if you feel menaced by those who rove the streets after dark.

It wasn't anything human that felt menacing to me, however. It was the ponderous architecture, the windswept, empty plazas, the planned environment in which nothing is on a human scale and in which no organic human interaction can easily take root. How sad that this is the face Atlanta's civic leaders have chosen to show to out-of-towners.

Photos: Sarah Goodyear, March 2006