There are some interesting transportation options in Atlanta these days. 

There’s always the Marta train which is helpful for getting to certain locations around the city. The train system was built in 1979 with a north-south axis and an east-west axis. If you want to go somewhere on an axis, it’s helpful. If you want to go somewhere between the axis legs, it’s rubbish. Luckily for me, we live within walking distance of a Marta train station (we did that on purpose) and I work within walking distance of a train station. This makes it easy for me to take the train to work if it’s raining or if I’m just feeling lazy and don’t want to walk to work.

Uber and Lyft are convenient options if you want a more direct trip. Uber arrived in Atlanta in 2014 and was, by and far, a much better option than the local taxi service. Uber was great in the beginning, but I found that the service degraded over time as I started getting dirty, run-down cars when the gig economy took off. Lyft is generally better and cheaper (but does anyone else remember the giant pink moustaches from the early Lyft days?).

Atlanta used to have Zipcar and City Carshare. I used this service a lot. For example, I would take Marta to work and then use Zipcar to go to a doctor appointment in the middle of the day. I think Uber killed this.

For a while there was a bike-share program. Bikes were located around the city and you could use an app to check one out. And then scooters came along.

The scooter craze hit Atlanta in 2018 when thousands of these things were dropped around the city. This was a big mess with scooters all over the place, blocking sidewalks. It was as if cicada carcasses had fallen out of the sky all over the city. Scooters reigned supreme, and people were riding them EVERYWHERE, until Covid.

Flash forward to today.

Scooters are still around. I don’t see people using them as much, but they are still used. The scooter companies now have bikes.

But here’s the best part. Atlanta now has delivery robots and driverless cars.

The delivery robots are from Serve Robotics and are used for food delivery through Uber Eats and Doordash. I see them all over the place in downtown Atlanta because Georgia State University has its main campus buildings here, and there are tons of restaurants that do take-out for students. I also see these cute bots closer to my house in Old Fourth Ward along the beltline.

Every robot travels on sidewalks, waits patiently at red lights, uses the crosswalks, and pauses to let humans pass by. Each robot also has a unique name, which makes these little guys seem like adorable pets.

Driverless cars also arrived in Atlanta last year. These cars are by Waymo, and every one is a white Jaguar sedan with loads of navigation cameras. They are available through Uber, which might be the smartest thing Uber has done in a long time. The cars are much safer than human-driven cars, because they obey all traffic rules, they don’t drink and drive, they don’t text, they pay attention to pedestrians crossing the street, etc. After some of my experiences with Uber drivers, I would totally take a Waymo instead of a human driver.

Despite a cold snap earlier this week, it’s finally springtime in Atlanta. This is my favorite time of year. The days grow longer, and the weather warms up. Trees are pushing out new leaves and spring flowers are blooming, adding splashes of color everywhere after the dullness of the winter. For my walking commute to work, I no longer need to wear my winter layers of clothes in the morning, but it’s not yet the height of summer weather that leaves me overheated and dripping with sweat as I walk home in the afternoon. 

The birds are waking up earlier, sometimes a little too early, tweeting at 4:30 am. We’re seeing lots of fat robins flitting from tree to tree and hopping around the yard. Each spring, we typically get a nest somewhere in the yard with three or four eggs. Our little pond provides a resource for all kinds of birds throughout the year, and we’re continuing to see activity as birds take advantage of this water feature to have a drink of water or take a bath.

There are tons of flowers blooming around our neighborhood with a variety of colors and sizes.

There are also lots of flowering trees right now. Common trees are dogwoods, redbuds, and cherry trees.

Spring marks the beginning of festival season in Atlanta. Beginning in spring and running through the fall, there are a variety of festivals in neighborhoods and parks all over the city. One of my plans this year is to go to all of the major festivals. Some of them will be old favorites like the Inman Park Festival in our own neighborhood, and some of them will be new experiences.

Spring also signals the end of the school year, and even though we don’t have kids, I still feel the change in the rhythm of the calendar. At the end of May, we’ll stop hearing the school bus picking up kids in front of our house at 6:57 am and dropping them off at 2:35 pm during the week. My church handbell choir will pause rehearsals for three months which will free up my Wednesday evenings. The neighborhood pool behind our house will open up for the summer, giving Chad and me a place to cool off and relax together after a long day of work. And just in general, there’s a mental shift as we look forward to a change of pace – that sense of free time and long days of summer.

Ponce City Market is a mixed-use development next to the Beltline in the center of Atlanta. The Beltline is a 22-mile hike and bike path that circles Atlanta, and its construction over the last several years has led to an explosion in real estate development along its perimeter, including the development of Ponce City Market.

The original brick building of Ponce City Market was built in 1926 to be the southeast headquarters for Sears Roebuck and Company, and it was occupied by the company until 1987. At the time, it was the largest brick building east of the Mississippi River. It housed company offices, a retail store, and the catalog warehouse.

From 1990-2010, the City of Atlanta housed part of its city hall function here. When we moved to Atlanta in 2009, people talked about City Hall East, referring to this building. The City sold the building to Jamestown, a developer, in 2011. In about 2012, Jamestown began construction to turn the building into a mixed-use development with restaurants, retail, office space, and apartments, and the redevelopment opened in 2014.

Chad and I were able to take a tour during construction, and we learned some interesting facts. One of the most interesting things is that, for the offices and apartments, you are able to drive your car up to your floor and park next to your office/apartment. During the Jamestown renovation of the property, the structural engineer didn’t have to fortify the upper floors to support the weight of the cars that would park there, because the floors were already designed to warehouse Sears catalogues. Can you imagine? As an architect, that little fact has stuck with me for 14 years, even though I haven’t seen it published anywhere.

The adaptive reuse of the building from a warehouse-type of place to a modern mixed-use is pretty interesting. The ground floor and second floor contain a wonderful food hall and retail tenants. The upper eight or so floors are offices and apartments.

The fun murals and graphic design elements are carried throughout the development and used for signage as well as general decoration.

One of the old freight elevators is still functioning, and it carries people up to the roof deck. The roof deck is open to the public, and it has an amusement park, a bar, and a great restaurant.

In addition to having this development as an amenity in central Atlanta (I can walk to it, by the way), I have also contributed to the design of Ponce City Market. Gensler designed the Jamestown office in the building, and I was the sustainability lead for that project ensuring that the best materials, energy efficiency, and human health aspects were included in the design through LEED.

During my time at Integral Engineering, I was the project manager and sustainability lead for the next three buildings on the property – an apartment building, a hotel, and a retail/office building, all of which are LEED certified. 

The high-rise apartment building called Signal House is right on the Beltline. The apartments are pretty pricey – $2,400 for a one-bedroom, $3,100-$3700 for a 2-bedroom, and $4,300 for a 3-bedroom. However, the building is in a prime location, and amenities include a pool on an upper deck, a rooftop community garden, fitness room, clubhouse lounge, and concierge services.

The Scout hotel is interesting. It has regular hotel rooms, but it also has extended stay mini-apartments. It was quite the challenge to design these little apartments to feel luxurious while using minimal square footage. Like Signal House, the building has a rooftop pool and concierge service in addition to the regular hotel housekeeping services. The ground floor has retail spaces that can be leased and built out to be shops and/or restaurants.

The third building that I worked on, and probably the most interesting one, is the retail/office building. Pottery Barn has moved into the ground floor retail space, and there is office space for lease on the floors above. 

The building is all wood structure (columns, beams, floors) which is common in Europe but is highly unusual in the United States. Wood construction has a much lower carbon footprint than steel and concrete, and one of the primary goals of the overall development is to reduce its carbon footprint.

Other design decisions to reduce carbon footprint across the development includes not having gas service on the site. This means that all of the apartment kitchens plus the future restaurant kitchens will be all-electric; there will not be gas stoves or gas water heaters. This is a fairly novel idea, especially for Georgia, and it was great to be part of the team that designed these cutting edge projects.