Volunteers Needed: Feet on Atlanta Month
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Help PEDS Count Broken Sidewalks
 Help us convince the City of Atlanta that safe and accessible sidewalks should be a top priority. Volunteers are needed to help determine how many of the city's sidewalks need to be repaired or replaced.
Becoming a Feet on Atlanta volunteer is easy. Just print one survey form for each street you intend to survey, go for a walk, and use tally marks to note what you see. Volunteers who submit completed forms to PEDS
by April 30 will be entered in a random drawing for a $75 gift certificate at Phidippides.
We encourage neighborhood
organizations to ask traffic committees, block
captains, or others to recruit volunteers and assign streets
to them. Make sure your neighborhood's broken sidewalks get counted! If you plan to volunteer, please let us know by e-mailing Jo Ann Zyla.
If broken sidewalks aren't counted, they don't count!
Mayor Franklin has said for years that she wants Atlanta to be a "walking city." Actions speak louder than words. The City budget includes no funding for sidewalk maintenance. And scorecards used by the City to gauge the effectiveness of its services include no performance measures for sidewalk maintenance. Busted sidewalks deserve parity with potholes!
Join us Tues, March 31 at 10:00 am at the intersection of Monroe Drive and Park Drive to kick off Feet on Atlanta month. We are inviting the media to join PEDS for a walk on Monroe Drive, a recently repaved road whose sidewalks have been neglected for decades. |
| As Effective as Speed Humps? |
Radar Sign Demonstration Project Speed humps, one of the cheapest traffic calming devices, are also the crudest and most controversial. Most jurisdictions prohibit them on
collector streets, where speeding cut-through traffic is often rampant. In cities throughout the United States, radar signs are gaining increased traction. By providing feedback to drivers, bystanders, and police, the signs result in dramatic speed reductions. To encourage local governments to expand their traffic calming toolbox, PEDS is collaborating with the Radarsign company and the City of Dunwoody on a two-week study aimed at reducing speeding in school zones. Results of the project will be released on April 30. |
Why did the victim try to cross the road?
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Pedestrian Behavior Puzzles Cobb County Police
Fifty-five
year old Ethel Smith was killed by a driver recently while attempting to cross the street in Cobb County. The driver "was traveling eastbound on Six Flags Drive," the official police
record states, "when
for reason
unknown, a female
attempted to cross Six Flags Drive to the Hunters Grove Apartment complex in
front of it." For reason unknown?
The police overlooked numerous contributing factors. Smith lived at Hunters Grove
Apartments. She routinely crossed Six Flags Drive to
catch the Cobb County Transit bus at the stop across the street. The nearest crosswalk is 1/3 mile away, and no sidewalk exists on Ethel's side of the street. The report makes no mention of driver behavior. Was the driver
speeding on this 40 mph road? Was he talking on a cell phone or texting?
By failing to note that the victim was crossing from a bus stop to
her home, police are hiding an ugly truth: suburban transit users who walk to transit are
at high risk of getting killed.
What's Become of the Six Flags Corridor Study?
In 2006 the
Cobb County Community Development Agency's Planning Division conducted a
corridor study for Six Flag Drive. The final report recommends
installing sidewalks along the south side of the corridor and six
pedestrian refuge islands with crosswalks along Six Flags Drive. Three years have passed, yet the corridor remains the same. It's time for Cobb to move the recommendations off the shelf and into the street. |
