***Renew Atlanta/TSPLOST will not be presenting to the Transportation Committee this Wednesday, October 24th. We will post an update as soon as we hear about the next meeting.***

88% of Atlanta voters approved the $250-million Renew Atlanta bond back in 2015. After three years of public meetings and bold promises, only one out of 16 Complete Street projects have been built -- and that project didn't have a single public meeting nor was it on the project list shared with voters. Failure to build these projects would defy the will of the voters who overwhelmingly said yes to both the Renew Atlanta bond and TSPLOST.

Three years after voters overwhelmingly approved the Renew Atlanta bond, in March 2015, just one out of the fifteen Complete Street projects has been completed and only two projects have progressed beyond a quarter of a percent complete.

Now, we're seeing one project after another get kicked down the road to 2020, according to the Renew Atlanta Complete Street Project pages. Construction on phase 1 of DeKalb Avenue was scheduled to start this year but now it won't start until 2020; Cascade Road was also going to start this year but now it's been delayed until 2020. The same goes for Howell Mill Road.

After the most recent open house for Monroe Drive/Boulevard Complete Street, which failed to include a road diet north of 10th Street, it's become clear that the city needs to commit to these Complete Street projects.

85% of respondents to the live poll conducted at the Renew Atlanta Monroe Drive/Boulevard public meeting said that bicycle and pedestrian safety should be prioritized in this project. And for good reason, the Complete Streets designs presented at the meeting would result in a substantial reduction in bicycle and pedestrian crashes at dozens of intersections on this corridor, including Monroe and 10th Street, Boulevard and Woodward, and Monroe and Ponce de Leon. 

DeKalb Avenue is fast, dangerous, and out of control. In 2015, Atlanta voters overwhelming approved the Renew Atlanta Infrastructure Bond to update and improve our streets, including a Complete Street for DeKalb Avenue.

Yet in 2019, after three years of public meetings, funding for the Complete Street on DeKalb Avenue was cut, leaving only resurfacing and replacing the reversible lane with a center turn lane and design for a future Complete Street in the budget. It's not clear where funding would come from to actually build it. 

The Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, along with community members and neighborhoods along DeKalb, is continuing the fight for a DeKalb that serves more than high-speed traffic speeding through our communities. DeKalb Ave connects 11 neighborhoods -- all but 1 wrote letters of support for a Complete Street. 

We are calling for any project, including repaving, that affects this key, flat corridor to make the road safer -- for everyone. The resurfacing project should include a buffer between people walking on the sidewalk and cars, and a place for people to bike. 

The City of Atlanta retained Arcadis as the design firm for the striping design for the first phase of resurfacing on this project. They are pursuing short-term safety improvements that can be accomplished within the resurfacing project, with an eye toward long-term improvements that can be built in a future second phase.

The design team intends to begin meeting again with various local stakeholders in January and February 2020 to be followed by a public meeting. It's not yet clear when the design will be finalized and when the resurfacing project will go to construction.

Atlanta Bicycle Coalition remains an advocate for both long and short term solution to the dangerous conditions on DeKalb Avenue. The improvements should address the glaring gap in bike facilities stretching from the Stone Mountain PATH trail to the Inman Park-Reynoldstown MARTA station.

If the public comments from the city of Atlanta’s proposed infrastructure bond were a twitter feed, “bike projects” would be trending.

Even we were surprised to see the word "bike" show up 376 times and "complete streets" 126 times in the public comments!

An astounding one-third of all comments were requests for bike projects and Complete Streets. And a whopping 79 comments out of 767 total asked for DeKalb Avenue to be remade as a Complete Street!

That's a lot of support for the $23.4 million worth of projects that would include bikeways when resurfacing streets, which comes out to 9% of the $250 million worth of transportation proposals in the total proposed package. Here’s a small sample of the many wonderful comments: