On July 1, 2020, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced a $5 million, two-year initiative to improve safety on 20 streets and corridors across Atlanta. The plan came after a year in which the city's relationship with its own streets had become visibly dangerous — and, in downtown, personal.
Since February 2020, more than three million e-scooter trips had been taken in Atlanta. Four riders had been killed in crashes. One fatality occurred at a downtown intersection, prompting residents to stand in the street and form a human-protected bike lane — a physical protest against infrastructure that had failed to keep a person alive.
The Approach
"People want safer streets and they want to see real changes before another tragedy occurs," Bottoms said. The plan did not prescribe specific solutions for each corridor. Instead, it allocated resources for community-driven design — letting the people who use each street determine what kind of improvements would make the most difference.
Jacob Tzegaegbe, the city's senior transportation policy advisor, underscored the flexibility: "It may not be bike lanes. It may be changing how those roads are striped." The point was to avoid imposing a one-size-fits-all template on streets that serve different communities in different ways.
What It Meant for Downtown
Downtown Atlanta's street grid was designed in an era when the primary goal was moving cars through the city center as efficiently as possible. Wider lanes, faster speeds, fewer crosswalks. By 2020, that design philosophy was killing people — on scooters, on bikes, and on foot.
The $5 million plan was not large enough to redesign every dangerous street in the city, but it established a principle: the city would spend money to slow cars down and make room for people who are not in them. The Forsyth Street protected bike lane, completed in 2025, and the broader Vision Zero Action Plan that followed both built on the foundation that this announcement laid.
The human bike lane at the downtown intersection was a small, angry, hopeful act. The $5 million plan was the city's first attempt to make sure it would not have to happen again.
Original reporting by GPB News, Georgia Public Broadcasting, July 1, 2020.