Savannah itself is an important player in Why I Walk, but the thrust of the text is more universal. The principles and examples could be applied in some way by people who live across America and around the world.

I should note that, before he became SDRA director, Kevin also wrote a wildly popular Savannah Unplugged post that later appeared as an op-ed in the Savannah Morning News: Savannah as a model for the nation: not 1733, but today.

In an SMN column today — Why Savannahians should care about walking — Klinkenberg puts Savannah’s walkability into a broader context. A snippet:

Walking is not a fringe benefit of being in Savannah. It is essential. In this city, you can experience other human beings by greeting them in reality, not just through a car window. Anyone can be here and enjoy a slower pace of life that includes sitting on picturesque streets and shaded public spaces. This place speaks to some very human desires that are timeless, and consistent across every culture.

The fact that Savannah was built around walking for 200 years is also why it is so attractive. When you experience a place by walking, the little details and the appearance of every building matters more. When you speed through a town at 60 mph, you rarely notice much beyond the signs.

I write this because it seems that sometimes we forget just how important walking is to the current and future health of our city.

Kevin doesn’t delve into specific examples, but it’s interesting that this piece has been published as the city of Savannah is about to conduct a misguided “experiment” that will make Bay Street less walkable. For the month of September, we’re going to remove over 100 on-street parking spaces on the south side of Bay Street — spaces that generate millions of dollars for nearby businesses annually — so that travel lanes can be widened in the hope that sideswipe auto collisions can be reduced. In the process, we’ll have speeding traffic just a few feet from the sidewalk on the south side of Bay Street from MLK to East Broad.

Click here for my recent City Talk column detailing all the negative fallout that we’ll see from that experiment.

Ironically, this experiment is in part the end result of Mayor Eddie DeLoach’s expression of concerns about traffic traveling too fast on Bay and the unpleasantness of being on the sidewalk near City Hall. With wider lanes and less on-street parking, we’ll have even faster traffic on Bay and even more unpleasant conditions for pedestrians, in addition to the massive damage done to nearby small businesses and property values.

Yes, we might reduce sideswipe accidents with wider lanes, but we’ll raise the odds of truly catastrophic crashes.

More recently, city officials announced that they might also add a truck ban to Bay Street in the evening until very early morning. That’s worth trying, I think, but I’d invite city officials and members of city council to stand beside Bay Street on a typical weeknight, when traffic really isn’t heavy at all. Some drivers are going far in excess of the speed limit, and a relatively small number of those vehicles are large trucks. With wider lanes, no trucks at all in the evening, and no on-street parking, some of those light vehicle drivers will go even faster.

One important point: a couple days ago, John Bennett of the Savannah Bicycle Campaign told the SMN that the September experiment could result in a “false positive” involving vehicle speeds. In other words, since the temporary medians will be marked with a sea of orange traffic barrels, we will see some drivers automatically slow down. If we had permanent medians there, those drivers would not slow down.

What a mess. Clearly, the city of Savannah needs more people on staff who can advocate clearly and effectively for pedestrians and for small businesses.

Beyond the immediate issue of Bay Street, Kevin’s piece about Savannah’s walking brand is worth keeping in mind for a variety of other reasons. For example, incredibly, there isn’t a signalized crosswalk on either the east or west side of Forsyth Park between Gaston Street and Park Avenue. That’s about 3/8ths of a mile. On MLK south of Gwinnett, we’ve got a median that prevents many pedestrians with limited mobility from crossing the street for blocks at a stretch. I could go on and on with examples.

Yes, Savannah’s older neighborhoods are dramatically more walkable than many places in America, and Savannah’s downtown area remains breathtakingly beautiful in many places, but those qualities exist because of good planning in the relatively distant past. We need to make sure that we make decisions right now that reinforce the visionary planning in Savannah’s history.

A few thoughts:

Letter to the editor from Kevin Clark, Mark Krueger, and Bobby Jeffery:

Clark, Krueger, and Jeffery have long histories and great credibility as advocates of LGBTQ rights in Savannah. Their jointly signed letter rightly praises incumbent mayor Edna Jackson for her long advocacy for gay causes and then says this about challenger Eddie DeLoach:

Eddie DeLoach is a deacon of the Independent Presbyterian Church. This church has a long history of discriminating against the LGBT community here in Savannah. Itâ€s gone so far as to advocate for an anti-gay ordinance with the Chatham County Commission. DeLoach also failed to return a Georgia Equality survey.

A cheap shot to bring up DeLoach’s religious affiliation, or to bring up that church’s stance on gay issues? I guess you could consider it a cheap shot if all religious organizations are off the table for debate. Yes, DeLoach ran for Chairman of the Chatham County Commission in the last cycle as a Republican, and he is a member of conservative church. He is not a logical political choice for a broad swath of Savannahians, including my neighbors out here in Thomas Square who increasingly skew very liberal, young, and white.

On the other hand, I’ve known some longtime Democrats with strong civil rights records that attended IPC, just as we all know people who disagree with much of what their pastors say. And the issues in this election don’t clearly fall under liberal or conservative policies.

Also, DeLoach recently sent this letter to Georgia Equality and Savannah’s gay community:

Otis Johnson’s guest op-ed “Mayor Edna Jackson should have a second term”:

I agree strongly with several things that former mayor Johnson has to say here — and disagree just as strongly with other parts of it.

Johnson makes several worthwhile observations about the limited power of the mayor in our system of government, and he adds the following:

The fact is, we have two Savannahs, one doing very well and the other locked into inter-generational poverty. This cannot be objectively disputed. The challenge for anybody who is mayor is, and will continue to be, to provide leadership to end this economic divide.

There is a group calling for change in Savannah. My question for this group is: “What kind of change do you want?” If they understand the limits of the mayor and if they understand that Savannah is respected as a great city across this nation and around the world, how would they change it?[…]

The change that I detect as the goal of this group of people is to change the face of the person who is the representative of this great city of Savannah. There are some among us who are talking about “taking our city back.” Where did it go and who took it away?

This is just code speak for saying that the great city of Savannah needs a white face rather than a black face to represent it. Whether this group accepts the fact of not, Savannah is a majority African America city.

I have a number of thoughts on this:

• Yes, we do have those two Savannahs, but the current administration of Mayor Jackson and City Manager Stephanie Cutter seems to be making zero headway in tackling intergenerational poverty. Building large new affordable housing complexes on land that’s basically invisible to the rest of the city — that’s the plan for the $3 million fairgrounds property — is not the way to get anything done.
• I agree completely with Johnson (hey, can we quit calling all these politicians by their first names?) that much of the opposition to Jackson has revealed itself to be flat out racist. And when not overtly racist, that opposition is just mean spirited, crass, and — far too often — anonymous, like the We Savannah Facebook page.
• Regrettably, both as mayor and now in an editorial like this, Johnson comes a little too close to suggesting that black voters will always put a black candidate in the mayor’s chair, as if local politics should always just boil down to demographic strength. That might be the past, but it’s not the future.
• Also, Johnson and others, including many Jackson detractors, need to realize that many of us think that the Jackson-Cutter administration is simply failing on policy. I’ll list some issues below.

Give Johnson’s op-ed a read. It’s worth a look.

The Savannah Morning News editorial page endorsements:
The SMN editorial team repeats today its previous endorsements of DeLoach, Brian Foster in the at-large race, and Bill Durrence for the 2nd district seat. Let me comment on those races in reverse order.

Bill Durrence vs. Mary Osborne:
As someone who has lived in Thomas Square since 1996 but who was just redistricted into the 2nd, I find this an easy vote. Bill Durrence and Detric Leggett were both exceptional candidates in the general election, and many of us were hoping that the runoff would be between the two of them. But Durrence took 44 percent, Osborne 29 percent, and Leggett 23 percent. Leggett has endorsed Durrence, and Durrence essentially needs a strong turnout of his November supporters to guarantee a victory. Durrence has laid out a coherent vision on his excellent website, while Osborne — as far as I can tell — hasn’t even bothered to create a Facebook page or website stating her beliefs or plans. In the final days of the campaign, it appears the entire Osborne strategy is to blanket the East Side (where her newest constituents don’t live) with flyers denouncing Durrence as a “Downtown Candidate”.

Alicia Blakely vs. Bill Brian Foster:
Bill Brian Foster’s well-funded — a little too well-funded — campaign has attracted the support of a broad swath of established organizations and area leaders. I like much of what Foster has had to say, but I’m still steamed about the flyer endorsing all incumbents that was paid for jointly by the Foster and Jackson campaigns. I’m impressed by Blakely, but I’ve been disappointed that she hasn’t done more to reach out to diverse voters (like the white liberals in my neighborhood) over the past month — it’s a missed chance on her part. She wasn’t able to attend a debate held downtown (I was planning to go just to hear what she had to say) and hasn’t posted on her campaign Facebook page since mid-October. In a recent flyer, Blakely has also chosen to focus on her position in the non-partisan race as a Democrat facing off against a Republican and has particularly emphasized Foster’s membership in the Oglethorpe Club (which has been brought up by others before her). Foster dismisses those concerns about the Oglethorpe Club and its all-white membership, but his defense of the club will hurt him on election day and will hurt him when he tries to get things done as alderman. I suspect Foster will end up winning this race rather handily — maybe with 55 percent of the vote — but his reputation has definitely been damaged through the campaign process. He will have some things to prove, which might not be a bad thing.

Eddie DeLoach vs. Edna Jackson:
A couple of my close friends are key Jackson supporters. I got to know Eddie DeLoach a little bit back in the 1990s when I taught his son Adam and worked with his wife Cynthia at Savannah Country Day School. Small town.

Here are my policy/decision differences with the Jackson-Cutter administration, in no particular order:

• A pattern of inaction that has left the police merger near death
• Allowing the police department to become so poorly staffed
• Taking so long to institute raises for police officers
• Demolition of Meldrim Row
• One bad decision after another on Waters Avenue
• The mess of the Cultural Arts Center — we are about to spend over $20 million on a new facility that won’t even have a true theater
• Demolition of a historic pharmacy on MLK
• A stunning lack of vision about the future possibilities for the current arena site
• The nonexistent food truck ordinance
• The major missteps in the alcohol ordinance rewrite, which has been going on for almost 3 years
• Failure to move forward with a zoning overhaul
• Failure to address our unworkable sound ordinance
• Lack of vision for poverty reduction
• Inability to address (or even understand, as far as I can tell) problems of gentrification
• The failure to sell or utilize a key block of Hall Street
• Lack of movement on issues related to pedestrianism/biking/traffic calming

The problems just keep piling up.

By the way, in my City Talk column today I discuss the commonsense way to get more Savannahians to vote: hold our elections in even years with national elections. The current calendar guarantees low turnout, which heightens the role of special interests. When a candidate can win a citywide election with barely more than 10 percent support from adults in the city, we have a problem.

Takeaways (these are of course my personal thoughts):

1. The format certainly forced all four candidates — incumbent Edna Jackson and challengers Eddie DeLoach, Murray Silver, and Louis Wilson — to answer questions succinctly.

2. There were no winners, and therefore Jackson was the winner by default. She enters the race with some significant advantages, and the challengers will have to do a better job of tying her and her policies to problems now plaguing the city.

3. What the heck was Jackson thinking in choosing to wear a corsage or whatever it is that’s made out of dollar bills?!?! Actual, unretouched screen capture:

Jackson explained the history and symbolism at the 57-minute mark in the video below, but I still don’t know quite get it. Some young men in West Savannah gave her dollar bills because a suspect was killed in police custody on her birthday? And now she is in the planning stages for some sort of dialogue with those young men? If she wants to talk to them about their lives, why has that taken a year? Is she still in touch with them? Or is she planning some sort of more general dialogue with young people about the problems they face? And that dialogue will somehow help us understand our crime problem?

4. The format included a large panel of media questioners, and the sheer number of panelists precluded any clear logical progression to the questions. The panelists and later the moderator asked all the candidates the exact same questions, which might seem a fair process at first, but the challengers need to be asked different questions than one would ask the incumbent.

5. No one asked about certain policy specifics. What about the rewrite of the alcohol ordinance and issues like the expansion of the to-go cup zone? What about the NewZO — the new zoning ordinance that has been in the works for a decade? What about the food truck ordinance, the first draft of which is far too restrictive? What about the work of the City Manager and her office? What about the future of the current arena site? What about traffic calming, bicycling, pedestrianism? What about Waters Avenue and the many years of failed policy decisions there? What about the I-16 flyover? I’m pretty sure I’ve watched the entire debate embedded here, and I didn’t hear anything about any of those.

6. Also, it was disappointing to hear questions about how to increase filmmaking and tourism. Both of those sectors are booming.

7. Murray Silver brought up the possibility of making Savannah a high-tech hub, but none of the other candidates talked about Savannah’s potential as a creative enclave of the 21st century. Disappointing.

8. Asked about city-county consolidation (which I oppose for reasons I’ll likely write about sometime soon), the mayor cited the difficulty in finalizing the decade-old police merger. Huh? If we had a consolidated government, the police merger would have been over and done with, years ago. We wouldn’t have two separate governments wrangling over details — costly details — if there were only one government involved. This surely wasn’t the first time Jackson had heard a question about merging the city and county governments, and that makes her response even more mystifying.

9. Jackson also expressed her support for commercial recycling (right now of course we only have residential recycling). Well, Jackson is the mayor, and has been mayor for almost 4 years. If she thinks that commercial recycling is a good idea, shouldn’t plans for that be in the works? And shouldn’t she have told us the status of those plans?

Those are just a few quick thoughts. Feel free to share yours in the comments here, but I won’t approve comments that have no other point than to make personal attacks. I’m sure some people will also comment on the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page, and I hope I don’t have to police personal attacks there either. If you want to rant, there are plenty of sites where you can do that.

Many drivers on those streets greatly exceed the posted speed limit (35 mph for much of the time), and they aren’t going to slow down if the street design remains as it is now.

After all, drivers will typically go faster when roads are straight and flat, when roads are one-way, when there is no on-street parking, when lanes are wide (typical freeway lanes are 12′, Drayton and Whitaker are 15′), and when there is little “visual friction” from streetscape elements like trees.

We know from the nasty routine wrecks that drivers aren’t safe cruising faster than 35 mph on Drayton and Whitaker, but the street design deceives those drivers into thinking that they can safely go much faster.

Even though there is plenty of room for bicyclists on Drayton and Whitaker, most of us avoid those streets like the plague. Pedestrians, too, avoid Drayton and Whitaker; the very elements that make drivers feel safer make pedestrians feel more imperiled.

If we were starting from scratch, we would never design Drayton and Whitaker like they exist today. It’s long past time to get serious about changing them.

With fairly straightforward changes, we can dramatically improve safety on those streets, and at the same time we can dramatically enhance quality of life for nearby residents and enhance the experiences of hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

At the end of the day, however, the most compelling argument for redesigning the streets might be a financial one.

Public land has value. Used appropriately and efficiently, public spaces — including our streets — can enhance the value of neighboring properties, encourage development, contribute to the tax coffers, and promote neighborhood vibrancy. We simply don’t need two 15′ lanes on those streets, and the wasted space could be repurposed in ways that would generate many millions in economic activity each year.

Let’s look at some images that I created using Streetmix. I’m sharing these under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You are welcome to use them under the same terms.

I should say right off the bat that pretty much all streets have some variation in width. I’m working with a basic width of 40′ in most of these images and ideas — that’s the approximate width of the two lanes and the sidewalks along much of the street.

Just keep in mind that the calculations might vary slightly from block to block, and, as I suggest near the end of the post, we don’t necessarily need to treat all blocks of Whitaker and Drayton the same.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m focusing on Whitaker rather than Drayton, primarily because the northernmost blocks of Whitaker really do need a radical redesign.

Also, really important: I am assuming that Drayton and Whitaker will continue to be one-way streets, but the best options might involve making them both two-way.

And also really important: you might assume that wider lanes are safer lanes, but the evidence does not support that conclusion. Drivers travel more slowly and carefully in narrower lanes, and even if certain types of wrecks increase on narrower roads, those accidents are much less likely to be catastrophic because the speeds are lower.

So here’s what Whitaker looks like now — two overly wide travel lanes and absurdly narrow sidewalks.

Next is a pretty minor redesign, although this would definitely cost some money since it involves devoting a significant amount of the road surface to the sidewalks. Nothing ambitious here, however — we make the sidewalks safer, beautify the street with trees, slow traffic because of the narrower but still perfectly wide lanes, and, maybe most critically, improve the visibility of drivers at the stop signs on the cross streets.

There’s plenty of room on Whitaker for the following design too — two travel lanes and a lane of parking, which would add considerable value to the properties next to the on-street parking:

But maybe we don’t need the parking as much as a bike lane? Two travel lanes plus bike lane, and a little extra sidewalk width that could be used for beautification:

I would suggest that some stretches of Drayton and Whitaker don’t really need two vehicular travel lanes. These are more radical options — 1 travel lane, 1 bike lane, on-street parking, and wider, safer sidewalks. In one, I’ve put the bike lane next to the parked cars like on Price; in the other, I’ve used the parking as a buffer to protect the bike lane.

As I said above, there is no reason to think that Whitaker and Drayton need the same design for the entire stretch from Victory Drive to Bay Street. The northernmost blocks of Whitaker — from Bay to Broughton — have a large number of pedestrians; many of them are patronizing popular restaurants and bars, while many others are just trying to get safely across the two travel lanes. But if you stand at the corner of, say, Whitaker and Bryan, you realize that the cars turning off Bay and turning out of the parking garage are only really using a single lane. We could and should dramatically reimagine those busy blocks — and we could turn a truly repellant street into a pleasant and comfortable one, including space for outdoor cafe seating and a protected bike lane.

But maybe we need two travel lanes on other parts of Whitaker, especially around Forsyth Park. Here I’ve still made the lanes narrower — again, that’s a no-brainer — but the left lane here is a dedicated turn lane onto Park Avenue, while the buffered bicycle lane will also make it much safer and more pleasant for pedestrians on the west side of Whitaker. After narrowing the lanes, I was able to widen the western sidewalk by 2′ and create a 2′ buffer for the bike lane. The presence of that bike lane would also make it much easier to reduce bicycle traffic in Forsyth Park.

These are all just possibilities, but any and all of them are better than what we have now.

Other neighborhoods on the list are in Oakland; Denver; Washington, D.C.; Dorchester, Mass.; Jackson, Miss.; St. Louis; Albany, N.Y.; Richmond, Va.; and Seattle.

I know some people who live in the Victorian District who would scoff at this designation in the wake of a recent surge in crime on the east side of Forsyth Park, but the APA’s description of the neighborhood and its amenities is hard to ignore.

From the APA:

Savannah’s Victorian District lies immediately to the south of the well-known National Landmark Historic District. The Victorian District encompasses the West Victorian, East Victorian, and Dixon Park neighborhoods. This downtown neighborhood was developed in the second half of the 19th century as a streetcar suburb of the original city. It was designed in a compact, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use development pattern with a modified ward structure and street grid from the original James Oglethorpe 1733 plan.

The APA description focuses heavily on the importance of Forsyth Park — the active south half of Forsyth is bounded by the Victorian District. This list of “Community Engagement and Amenities” is also interesting:

• Savannah Landmark Rehabilitation Project was founded to provide safe, affordable housing to low-income residents in the Victorian District (1974) and subsequently built 300 apartments for low-income renters in the neighborhood (1982)
• Park Place Outreach Youth Emergency Shelter, a 24-hour facility on the district’s east side, was renovated in 2008 through the collaboration of the Cowart Group, J.T. Turner, and SCAD students; one of the first LEED-certified nonprofit buildings in Savannah
• The neighborhood is home to the new headquarters of the Savannah Bicycle Campaign (SBC), a local bicycle advocacy group, which shares its space with its statewide counterpart, Georgia Bikes, along with Healthy Savannah — a local initiative dedicated to making Savannah a healthier place to live
• SBC and Healthy Savannah are working with the City of Savannah to encourage the adoption of a Complete Streets ordinance — in addition, SBC’s new facility will rehabilitate donated bikes for distribution to underserved populations to use as a dependable transportation option
• The American Legion complex serves as an excellent example of adaptive reuse; as a local neighborhood hangout it draws a diverse crowd with local shops, bars, and a variety of restaurant options

When I moved to Savannah in 1995, I rented a sprawling parlor floor apartment on the first block of East Gwinnett Street for, I think, $625/month. I think pretty much everyone in town would have laughed at the idea of such a glowing designation for the Victorian District, but less than 20 years later, here we are. Times change and neighborhoods change, sometimes quickly.

The designation does not mention Kroger, but the new store opened in 1995 on East Gwinnett. Nor does the APA mention businesses like Brighter Day Natural Foods and The Sentient Bean by name, but those have been critical to the sense of place. SCAD’s Eckburg and Anderson halls are also mentioned — they both lie at the southern edge of the Victorian District.

By the way, the historic cottages of Meldrim Row that the city plans to demolish are just three very short blocks south of the Victorian District. Along its eastern and western boundaries, the neighborhood has some real  blight, in part because of poor street design and inappropriate zoning.

In my City Talk column today, by the way, I consider the growing number of public uses along Bull Street from Victory Drive northward. I like to think of the Victorian neighborhood as more or less continuous with the Thomas Square Historic Streetcar District where I live.

For all the positive changes in the Victorian District in recent years, I think the prevailing sense around the neighborhood is that things can still improve dramatically from here. Imagine a productive use of the old Sears/DFACS building, which is simply priced too high for investors who are interested. Imagine the boon for the neighborhood if/when there is appropriate development at the southwest corner of Bull Street and Park Avenue. Imagine the advantages in terms of business investment when Montgomery Street through the Historic District is converted back to two-way traffic. There are also underutilized lots and buildings that are scattered throughout the neighborhood.

So, this is really nice news from the APA, but there is plenty of work ahead.

I won’t recap that entire column here, but Dover’s ideas — both generally and specifically about Savannah — are well worth consideration.

Dover emphasizes, with overwhelming evidence, that great streets in cities around the world are bustling with a variety of types of transportation. Cars are generally present in that mix, but their speeds are kept within reasonable limits and the design of the street actively encourages pedestrianism, bicycling, and other forms of transportation.

Effective streets often include ample parking, although that was not the emphasis of Dover’s presentation. Parked cars help shield pedestrians from active traffic and also slow drivers down. A critical mass of on-street parking also boosts businesses and allows drivers to access neighborhood commercial districts from a variety of directions at various times of day.

Dover showed a slide of St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans and asked his Savannah audience about the ruts along the streetcar line in the neutral ground. I had the answer of course — the neutral ground is also perfect for joggers. Also, it’s worth noting that the St. Charles Avenue median is wide enough to allow cross traffic to cross the street one lane at a time, eliminating any demand for stoplights along long stretches of the road.

Also worth noting: St. Charles Avenue, which now also features a bike lane, has just one lane for cars in each direction. Those lanes handle a lot of cars each day, but they don’t crowd out other uses — and they don’t interfere with the street’s beauty. Here’s a shot I took in 2009 of St. Charles Avenue:

Click here for another post about St. Charles from summer 2013, which included this image:

Dover’s recent talk at the SCAD Museum of Art was also referenced last week in John Bennett’s Connect Savannah column If we win the parking war, we lose the city. I always enjoy and appreciate Bennett’s columns, but I think he hit the ball out of the proverbial park with this one.

From that column:

In Savannah, however, there seems to be something else at work. Millions of people come from all over the world every year to enjoy strolling our streets. Yet some of us just can’t tolerate walking a couple of blocks from our cars to our destinations, even in one of the most beautiful cities in North America.

Should we fine tune the pricing of on-street parking to reflect market rates as Shoup suggests, extend hours of operation at municipal garages and find other ways to maximize the usefulness of our existing parking inventory? Certainly.

However, entertaining unreasonable expectations of suburban-style parking in a historic city is potentially disastrous, as explained by Savannah-based urban designer Kevin Klinkenberg.

“Savannah can, like so many other cities, solve its parking problem by building a lot of convenient, cheap parking,” he said. “And when we are done with that, we will have destroyed the reasons people love Savannah in the first place.”

As I’ve noted over and over and over in my various writings, there are many things we can do to expand the inventory of on-street parking, including lengthening the time on some meters in areas that are often nowhere near capacity.

And let me pick up on one other element of Dover’s talk. He mentioned the possibility of recreating the walkway under the trees down the middle of the Oglethorpe Avenue median. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Just a few weeks ago, I was down that way and pulled out my iPhone and took this photo looking east from Montgomery Street.

Who wouldn’t want to walk on a path between these trees, even with vehicular travel lanes on either side?

So I don’t have a dog in this hunt. At the end of the day, I don’t have any emotional stake in where the Braves play baseball.

As a columnist and as a journalism teacher, however, I’m fascinated by the story of the Braves’ planned 2017 move to a new stadium in Cobb County.

I love baseball on some levels. When I was a kid growing up in Kentucky, my dad and I routinely traveled up to Cincinnati for Reds games. For a few years there, I could recite Big Red Machine stats off the top of my head — and there are still a few in my brain to this day. Like George Foster’s 52 home runs in 1977 — in the pre-steroid days, that was a shit ton of homers. I actually saw Game 5 of the 1975 World Series against the Boston Red Sox — that’s the game when Tony Perez hit two homers.

Riverfront Stadium was a pretty soulless place compared to stadiums built both before and after it, but those trips to Cincinnati branded baseball games as  urban experiences for me.

For most Americans, professional baseball is something of an urban experience. (I have really fond memories of seeing games at Fenway Park and Camden Yards too.)

Yes, baseball fans might largely be suburbanites these days — communities with enough room for Little League ball fields — but that doesn’t mean that those attending professional games want to watch them in the suburbs. There’s a grittiness, a toughness, a smudged quality to baseball that tells many of us that it belongs in the city.

But the Braves’ move makes business sense, right? They’re moving into the heart of their biggest fan base, aren’t they? There are many factors that contribute to fan support, and there’s a paradoxical but fairly obvious counter-argument that I haven’t heard yet from any Braves’ detractors. If the team already has strong support from Atlanta’s northern suburbs, how much larger of a fan base can be cultivated in those neighborhoods? And if the supporters in Fulton County, Atlanta, and points south are less committed, how much of that marginal support will be lost when the team moves?

And how many more comments will we hear that echo this one from Cobb GOP Chairman Joe Dendy?:

It is absolutely necessary the solution is all about moving cars in and around Cobb and surrounding counties from our north and east where most Braves fans travel from, and not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta. 

The emphasis is Dendy’s, by the way.

Um, wow. Is this a bias against transit? Against urban centers? Or is it just a bias against the bulk of the residents of Atlanta — the people who actually live there? Ironically, the Braves cite “lack of consistent mass transit options” as a key reason for abandoning Turner Field.

A few more public statements like that, and it’s possible that Atlanta residents, especially those who have generally taken MARTA to games, will give up on the Braves en masse.

And there’s also the bizarre (to me, at least) fact that Braves management and Cobb County officials have been largely mum about how the county will come up with the $400-450 million in public financing apparently needed for the $672 million new stadium, which will be surrounded with a huge new mixed-use development.

Ongoing road projects are already costing Georgia taxpayers over a billion dollars in Cobb and nearby counties and now officials are floating even more plans, like  a new bridge for pedestrians and a fan shuttle that will cross over I-285.

At the same time that they’re preparing for some big spending, Cobb County officials might be banking on revenue projections that are far, far, far too optimistic. For example, Commissioner Bob Ott predicts “about 400,000 new hotel stays per year.”

Say what?

So there are going to be 5,000 hotel stays in Cobb for every Braves home game? Consider this contradictory data from a recent economic impact study, as cited by the Saporta Report:

Visiting Braves fans stay 110,000 nights each year in local hotels and motels (averaging about 2.5 nights per out-of-town fan).

That means that some of those fans see one game while they are in town for longer stays. Will a large number of fans really stay in Cobb County hotels for an average of 2.5 nights while just seeing one game? Really? Or will they just, you know, get a hotel in downtown Atlanta for a couple nights and drive out to Cobb to catch a game?

And how many hotel stays in Cobb will be lost when would-be visitors realize their plans conflict with Braves’ home games and all that additional traffic?

I could go on and on. Maybe all of this will work out fine for the Braves and for Cobb too.

But I think it has trouble written all over it, and I’m shocked that the famously tax-averse citizens of the Cobb County aren’t up in arms about the move.

There are obviously roads connecting those points, but they’re unsatisfactory. Several key stretches have no sidewalks, and most feel too narrow for safety on a bicycle. So even a tourist at a nearby hotel (there are several west of MLK in the immediate area) or a nearby resident would probably end up driving even for the simplest of trips. Those without cars or licenses or simply not old enough to drive would be SOL.

There are lots of people who live in the immediate area, including residents of westside neighborhoods like Carver Heights and West Savannah, residents of SCAD dorms, and residents along MLK, like those in the Frogtown Lofts.

In other words, the connectivity on that side of town is terrible. And it’s terrible for cars in addition to cyclists and pedestrians, in large part because of the unfriendly traffic flow created by the I-16 flyover and the lack of parking in the MLK corridor.

I’ve discussed the flyover many times before. While that’s not a direct part of the problems addressed by the new “West Boundary Civic Vision Plan” — the so-called “canal district” — envisioned in the conceptual drawings of Sottile & Sottile, those eventual changes to the terminus of I-16 would complement this broader effort.

Christian and Amy Sottile are well known to many of you, I’m sure, either personally or through the fine work they’ve done in considering the urban fabric of Savannah. They get it.

The Sottiles see the great potential for culture and commerce on the western fringe of downtown. Their conceptual approach takes advantage of existing streets and historical assets.

It’s worth noting that thousands of trips are made daily and safely along the West Boundary Street corridor, even though our current infrastructure actively impedes many of those trips. With more connectivity, more beauty, and more civic pride, that area can become a real gem in relatively short order.

Of course, the Sottiles aren’t the only ones who see all that potential. Individual entrepreneurs, corporations, nonprofits, and SCAD have all been actively investing and expanding their presence west of MLK over the last decade, despite a crippling recession.

These images have already been published elsewhere, but I present them here since they give some good illustrations of the possibilities and development trends that I talk about in my City Talk column today: “Canal District” gives Savannah room to grow.

First, the full image of a large area envisioned by Sottile & Sottile (click for a pretty huge version), followed by three details from the map.

In the rendering of the intersection of Gwinnett and Stiles, you can see an image of the magnificent late 19th century waterworks. The building beyond that would be an imagined image of the front facade of either the new arena or adjacent building for parking, offices, etc.

Right now, the old trestle at Boundary Street and Louisville Road is not open to the public at all — but look at how beautifully it would serve connectivity throughout the area.

The arena is obviously a really expensive proposal, but much of the rest of this vision would be fairly straightforward to implement — and quite cheap compared to the cost of other major infrastructure improvements, like road building and repaving.

None of this would happen overnight, and I’d love to see a series of open house/workshop sessions for all the stakeholders in the area.

So much potential. So many possibilities.