Atlanta's signature street could get a significant rewrite where it passes through South Downtown. Officials with the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District, working with the Atlanta Department of Transportation, are planning a pedestrian-oriented redesign of Peachtree Street just south of Five Points and Underground Atlanta.
The project covers Peachtree between Alabama Street and Trinity Avenue, which is also Georgia Highway 154 — roughly three blocks, or about a third of a mile. The core move is a road diet: shrinking the street from four vehicle travel lanes to two, and using the reclaimed width to rebuild and widen the sidewalks. ADA curb ramps and crosswalks would be upgraded, and new space would be created for landscaping and seating.
Officials are careful about what they call it. This is not being framed as a Complete Street, nor as a revival of downtown's earlier shared-street experiment. It is one piece of a broader effort to remake streets across South Downtown, in a corridor where the property owners have changed substantially in the last two years.
That context is what gives the proposal weight. The three blocks in question run directly past buildings in Atlanta Ventures' growing South Downtown portfolio, a few blocks east of the Gulch, where Centennial Yards is under construction. A street rebuilt for people on foot is worth considerably more to a landlord converting historic buildings into apartments and ground-floor retail than four lanes of through traffic are.
The stretch has been one of the harder sections of Peachtree to walk for years: wide, fast, and lined with frontage that has spent decades waiting for tenants. Narrowing it is a modest intervention by the standards of downtown's billion-dollar project list, but it addresses the specific thing that determines whether the new ground-floor space around it ever fills.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published September 2024.
