A recent

article about the opening of Arbor Place Mall struck me

as ironic. It seems that the big new Douglas County mall

may be remembered as a landmark on the road to smarter

access planning.

Residents of the adjacent

subdivision can't walk to the mall that borders their

backyards because there are no connecting streets or

paths. Reasons include NIMBY - "Not in my back

yard" - opposition from those very residents,

but even despite their antagonism, developers tried to

get permits to build a golf cart path linking

neighborhoods and shopping center.

Getting necessary

permission from local governments was too complex and

they gave up. Those objecting neighbors will eventually

begin using Arbor Place, but they'll have to drive to get

there.

They might as well live 30

miles away.

Other older malls and

business centers are also looking at ways to give

pedestrians easier access to shops and offices. It's

interesting to note that when Joel Cowan - now chair

of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, charged

with cleaning up the air and reducing traffic congestion

- was developer of Phipps Plaza, he tried to

persuade Lenox Square to agree to a connecting tunnel

linking the two malls under Peachtree Street. Lenox

wanted none of it.

Today, both complexes are

under the same ownership. A shuttle connects them, and a

consultant has recommended exactly the type of tunnel

Joel pictured three decades ago. Imagine what it will

cost in year 2000 dollars and in traffic disruption.

Retrofits are seldom cheap.

With federal funding for

road construction frozen until metro Atlanta cleans up

its air, planners are finally beginning to look at ways

to get people out of their cars. Polls show that most

people agree that there's a problem and indicate that

they'll help to solve it, but even the best-intentioned

environmentalist finds it difficult to allow the extra

time required by public transportation - to say

nothing of her reluctance to leave the perception of

safe, free travel in the security of her automobile.

(I say

"perception" because statistically you are less

safe traveling by car than by any form of public transit,

and it is anything but free. You wouldn't be allowed a

31-cents-per-mile tax deduction on business-related

mileage if the federal government didn't consider the

cost of driving at least that or higher.)

My sense of irony,

mentioned earlier, is tweaked by the fact that GRTA-chair

Cowan had more than a little to do with the planning that

went into my favorite hometown, Peachtree City. There's

no question that his wisdom and that of many of the other

early designers produced one of the most comfortable

living environments anywhere.

The cart path system here

provides an alternative so coveted elsewhere, and so

difficult to retrofit. Case in point: paths were not in

the initial plans of Peachtree City, and putting one in

place recently alongside Hip Pocket Road, the city's

second oldest street, spurred anger and ill will between

neighbors.

Peachtree City was designed

on a 1950s drawing board, with villages clustered around

commercial centers to solve the problem of downtown

blight. (If you don't have a downtown, you won't have

blight, the reasoning ran.)

Trouble is, without a

downtown, you also don't have a focal point for major

community events. We've centered many of our municipal

celebrations on our stunning City Hall Plaza, and that's

good. Still, a lot of us cast envious eyes on towns that

have a center square, theaters, libraries, restaurants

and shops within walking distance of each other, and

public transportation to get wherever else people need to

go.

Instead, we have a growing

number of shopping centers spaced just far enough apart

that the only reasonable way to reach them is by car. Not

many people have the time or inclination to drive a golf

cart all the way from Braelinn to Westpark or Kedron and

back.

It's easy to see where

long-range planning didn't get it right. The challenge is

to take those missteps and apply the lessons learned to

today's planning. It won't be easy. For all our vaunted

path system, there are serious gaps in facilitating cart

or pedestrian traffic within shopping centers themselves.

I've long advocated requiring golf cart parking places in

the site plan of all public buildings, preferably near

main entrances to encourage people to use carts instead

of cars.

And while it's easy to run

close-to-home errands by cart without risking street

traffic, once in a large parking lot, pedestrians and

carts become mighty vulnerable competing for space with

cars. Pedestrians especially, or kids on bikes, crossing

from one side of a parking lot to another, have no option

but to thread their way through cars, either parked or on

the move. I keep wishing an entrepreneur who can absorb

the cost for a long, long time would offer some sort of

jitney service around the county - a well-advertised

loop linking Peachtree City village centers with each

other and City Hall, then out to the hospital and medical

centers springing up in mid-county.

From there it would connect

with the county offices and up to the Big Box malls on

the north side of Fayetteville. It would need at least

two, maybe three stops within the Pavilion - the

sheer distance from one end of that complex to the other

is prohibitive, and, there again, neither he safety nor

the convenience of pedestrians was part of the plan.

My dream-shuttle would hit

every stop at 15-minute intervals during the business

day. My entrepreneur will need at least five busses

- four for the road, one for a spare.

But does it really matter?

Twenty years from now, exhausted from fighting traffic or

changing busses, we may all be shopping by computer,

wondering why our county is laced with cart paths and

crisscrossed with shuttle routes.

Besides, who's going to

call a Fayette Area Regional Transit Authority by its

acronym?

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