Midtown Alliance Receives LCI Grant for Transit Station Designs
The Midtown Alliance has received a Living Centers Initiative (LCI) Grant to study and design potential enhancements around transit stations. According to the LCI website from the Atlanta Regional Commission:
The Livable Centers Initiative (LCI) is a program that awards planning grants on a competitive basis to local governments and nonprofit organizations to prepare plans for the enhancement of existing centers and corridors consistent with regional development policies.
In a seminar a couple years ago, I heard from a major urban planner (his name escapes me at the moment) about how Atlanta’s transit system stations lacked the vitality that many cities have. In other words, they were a train station and nothing else. Quite true when you think about a MARTA station. There is no interaction at the station level, of which all of them are underground. But if you go to other major cities, they have small shops, retail, etc. around the stations.
I suspect this plan will involve street-level enhancements of some kind.
Midtown Atlanta is home to THREE of the MARTA stops leaving Downtown. North Avenue, Midtown (10th Street) and the Arts Center Station (16th Street).
It will be interesting to see what comes out of this study and what changes will be made in Midtown Atlanta.
