On Sunday, September 27, Peachtree Street goes car-free from 15th Street all the way down to Alabama Street — roughly three miles of Atlanta's spine handed over to people on foot, on bikes, on skates and on scooters, from 2 to 6 p.m.
Atlanta Streets Alive is an open-streets event, a format that started in Bogotá as ciclovía and has since been copied by cities worldwide. The premise is simple and the effect is not: remove the cars from a major arterial for a few hours and the street stops being infrastructure you cross and starts being a place you linger in. Run by the Atlanta Department of Transportation, the event draws tens of thousands and fills the roadbed with pop-up programming, local vendors and side activities at intersections along the route.
The September route matters for downtown specifically. Peachtree below North Avenue is a corridor most Atlantans experience through a windshield; walking the middle of it past the Fox, through SoNo and down into Fairlie-Poplar and Five Points is a genuinely different read on the same blocks.
It is free, there is no ticket, and you can join anywhere along the route. MARTA is the sane way in — the route runs directly over the North Avenue, Midtown, Civic Center, Peachtree Center and Five Points stations.