Downtown's one-way street grid was engineered in the 1950s and 60s to move cars out of the city center as fast as possible. In 2024, three separate public meetings took aim at three of the worst offenders.
Courtland Street came first. On June 5, 2024, ATLDOT and the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District held a virtual public meeting on the Courtland Street and Piedmont Avenue Safe Streets project, a redesign of Courtland between Ralph McGill Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The project traces back to a 2020 Atlanta Regional Commission Livable Centers Initiative grant that funded a concept for a bus-only lane on Courtland; by spring 2024 it had advanced to final design, with the meeting focused on bus-lane operating hours and markings, a southbound protected bike facility on Courtland, and a northbound protected bike lane and pedestrian improvements on the parallel Piedmont Avenue. Together the pair would convert downtown's main north-south one-way couplet east of Peachtree into a transit-and-bike spine.
Ted Turner Drive was next. On September 25, 2024, CAP and the improvement district hosted a virtual public meeting on converting Ted Turner Drive from one-way to two-way between Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Williams Street, presenting a conceptual design and the results of traffic modeling for the corridor. The street - Spring Street until it was renamed for the CNN founder in 2015 - runs the length of downtown's west side past the Gulch, and its one-way northbound configuration has long made it a de facto expressway ramp rather than a street with storefronts.
The third was Peachtree Street SW in South Downtown. The improvement district held an informal public information open house on September 11, 2024, at 99 Broad Street SW for a proposed streetscape project whose stated goal was 'a pedestrian-oriented street with generous sidewalk dimensions designed for flexible use' - ADA-accessible conditions, room for sidewalk dining, and designated curbside space for commercial deliveries and passenger drop-off. The project anticipates the restaurants and shops that South Downtown's owners have been opening in the blocks between Five Points and the Gulch.
All three follow the template ATLDOT used on Forsyth Street, where a Vision Zero resurfacing project delivered protected bike lanes, intersection daylighting, and a 25 mph limit by March 2025. The difference is scale: Forsyth was a repaving with safety extras. Courtland, Ted Turner, and Peachtree SW are reconfigurations of how the streets work, and each was still in design as the improvement district's 2025 Impact Report counted 'seven major pedestrian enhancement projects underway' and $750,000 spent on engineering for the next round.
Source: Downtown Navigator, September 11, 2024 (Central Atlanta Progress / ADID), published September 11, 2024.