Thousands of vehicles speed daily along Juniper Street past dozens of businesses and apartment buildings in the heart of Midtown, one of Atlanta’s most densely populated neighborhoods.
The north-south thoroughfare is a vital stretch of Atlanta’s transportation network. It intersects with 10th Street, 14th Street and North Avenue, connecting motorists to destinations like Georgia Tech, Piedmont Park and the Atlanta BeltLine.
Juniper Street is also one of the city’s more dangerous roads. Between 2018 and 2022, there were 620 crashes on the roughly one-mile corridor. That’s about one crash every three days, said Midtown Alliance President & CEO Kevin Green.
“That’s not acceptable for a walkable, urban district. That’s not acceptable for our city,” he told reporters April 17 at the corner of 10th and Juniper streets.
Green was with members of the Atlanta Department of Transportation (ATLDOT) in Midtown to launch its Vision Zero Action Plan that aims to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2040.
The plan stresses reducing risks along Juniper Street and other roads ranked in the High Injury Network, a map that shows where the highest concentration of fatal and serious injury crashes occur.
ATLDOT Commissioner Solomon Caviness said at the Vision Zero Action Plan launch there were 100 traffic fatalities in the city in 2021, the highest number in a decade. Last year, 47 people were killed on city surface streets.
“Atlanta is now poised to end all traffic deaths through a safe system approach that focuses on minimizing impacts of human error by slowing vehicles to safe speeds to protect vulnerable road users,” he said.
“This is a project worth investing in,” he said.
Behind the city officials, construction crews were tearing up cement as part of the Juniper Street Complete Street Project.
The long-awaited overhaul of the road between 14th Street and Ponce De Leon Avenue includes widening sidewalks and creating a protected bike lane to make room for people not in cars.
High-visibility crosswalks and narrowing vehicular travel lanes from four to two are included in the Complete Street design to make the road safer for people on foot, bike, scooter and wheelchairs.
“Here on Juniper Street, we have a project that focuses directly on improvements to the infrastructure, reducing speeds and making Midtown and the city of Atlanta a more livable place,” Caviness said.
The estimated $8 million project, expected to be completed by the end of the year, is funded with city, state and federal dollars. The Midtown Alliance is also picking up some of the bill.
The safety measures being installed on Juniper Street are examples of what needs to take place across the city to achieve zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries, according to the Vision Zero Action Plan.
“Atlanta is a people city, and we really want to state that as our mantra moving forward,” said ATLDOT Deputy Commissioner of Strategy & Planning Betty Smoot-Madison.
“There’s already 500,000 people here today and we know hundreds of thousands more are coming in the next 10 to 20 years,” she said. “We’ve got to make room for people. We will not be able to make room for cars.”
‘Shaping behavior’ through Vision Zero to make safer streets
Lee Street in Southwest Atlanta, like Juniper Street, is on the High Injury Network. The five-lane road is entirely dedicated to cars with no infrastructure for people who are walking, biking or riding scooters.
The High Injury Network shows the highest concentration of fatal and serious crashes occur on less than 10% of the city’s streets, but accounted for 73% of fatalities and severe injuries.
During the pandemic, ATLDOT staff noticed aggressive driving on the road and asked MARTA if they could put up orange temporary barriers along the West End station. The barrier created a lane in the road for cyclists and scooter riders.
MARTA later approached the city about putting up cement barriers. MARTA Artbound partnered with Atlanta artist Ashley Bella to work with residents living in West End to paint the 150 cement barricades to form a protected bike lane on Lee Street.
The cement barricades also narrow the road and forces drivers to slow down.
“A lot of what we try to do in Vision Zero and the tactics that we employ are about shaping behavior, whether that’s shaping behavior for people walking or biking or in cars,” said ATLDOT Mobility Planning Director John Saxton.
“Narrowing the road encourages drivers to go at safer speeds and instead of treating [Lee Street] like a highway, they treat it more like a neighborhood street.”
The cement barriers are a short-term safety measure. The long-term plan for Lee Street is to build a trail from the West End MARTA station to the Lakewood/Fort McPherson station, creating connections to the Atlanta BeltLine and Oakland City MARTA station.
The approximate 2.6 mile Lee Street Trail, still in the concept phase, would also reconfigure Lee Street from five to four travel lanes with turn lanes at signalized intersections.
The trail is estimated to cost about $13 million and is to be paid for with city, state and federal funding. The city has set aside $5 million for the Lee Street Trail to come from the $350 million transportation special local option sales tax (TSPLOST) approved by voters in 2022.
Concerns about city’s ability to implement Vision Zero
Rebecca Serna is executive director of Propel ATL, the city’s leading advocacy organization to make Atlanta’s streets “safe, inclusive, and thriving spaces for people to ride, walk, and roll.”
She said she was excited to see the release of the Vision Zero Action Plan after nearly a decade of working with city leaders and community members to make Atlanta’s streets safer.
“We’ve been advocating for Vision Zero since 2017 … so we’re very excited that it’s rolling out,” she said.
But she acknowledged she has concerns about ATLDOT being able to execute the recommendations for safer streets by 2040 because ATLDOT is “painfully underfunded.”
Last year, the city council approved the mayor’s $790 million budget, the largest in city history. But ATLDOT funding was slashed by 12% — from roughly $57 million to just over $50 million.
According to estimates from the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), the median budget for member cities with 300,000-600,000 residents is just over $164,000, or about 3.5 times larger than Atlanta’s.
“I think the key is do we have the capacity within the city to actually implement the recommendations in the Vision Zero Action Plan,” Serna said.
While individual street projects have funding, the department as a whole doesn’t have enough people to manage the funded projects. That’s why hiring more staff is immediate priority listed in the action plan’s executive summary.
“We really need to beef up the department to be able to implement this,” Serna said.