By SALLLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Lifestyle Columnist

A recent article about the opening of Arbor Place Mall struck me as ironic. It seems that the big new Douglas County mall may be remembered as a landmark on the road to smarter access planning.

Residents of the adjacent subdivision can't walk to the mall that borders their backyards because there are no connecting streets or paths. Reasons include NIMBY — “Not in my back yard” — opposition from those very residents, but even despite their antagonism, developers tried to get permits to build a golf cart path linking neighborhoods and shopping center.

Getting necessary permission from local governments was too complex and they gave up. Those objecting neighbors will eventually begin using Arbor Place, but they'll have to drive to get there.

They might as well live 30 miles away.

Other older malls and business centers are also looking at ways to give pedestrians easier access to shops and offices. It's interesting to note that when Joel Cowan — now chair of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, charged with cleaning up the air and reducing traffic congestion — was developer of Phipps Plaza, he tried to persuade Lenox Square to agree to a connecting tunnel linking the two malls under Peachtree Street. Lenox wanted none of it.

Today, both complexes are under the same ownership. A shuttle connects them, and a consultant has recommended exactly the type of tunnel Joel pictured three decades ago. Imagine what it will cost in year 2000 dollars and in traffic disruption.

Retrofits are seldom cheap.

With federal funding for road construction frozen until metro Atlanta cleans up its air, planners are finally beginning to look at ways to get people out of their cars. Polls show that most people agree that there's a problem and indicate that they'll help to solve it, but even the best-intentioned environmentalist finds it difficult to allow the extra time required by public transportation — to say nothing of her reluctance to leave the perception of safe, free travel in the security of her automobile.

(I say “perception” because statistically you are less safe traveling by car than by any form of public transit, and it is anything but free. You wouldn't be allowed a 31-cents-per-mile tax deduction on business-related mileage if the federal government didn't consider the cost of driving at least that or higher.)

My sense of irony, mentioned earlier, is tweaked by the fact that GRTA-chair Cowan had more than a little to do with the planning that went into my favorite hometown, Peachtree City. There's no question that his wisdom and that of many of the other early designers produced one of the most comfortable living environments anywhere.

The cart path system here provides an alternative so coveted elsewhere, and so difficult to retrofit. Case in point: paths were not in the initial plans of Peachtree City, and putting one in place recently alongside Hip Pocket Road, the city's second oldest street, spurred anger and ill will between neighbors.

Peachtree City was designed on a 1950s drawing board, with villages clustered around commercial centers to solve the problem of downtown blight. (If you don't have a downtown, you won't have blight, the reasoning ran.)

Trouble is, without a downtown, you also don't have a focal point for major community events. We've centered many of our municipal celebrations on our stunning City Hall Plaza, and that's good. Still, a lot of us cast envious eyes on towns that have a center square, theaters, libraries, restaurants and shops within walking distance of each other, and public transportation to get wherever else people need to go.

Instead, we have a growing number of shopping centers spaced just far enough apart that the only reasonable way to reach them is by car. Not many people have the time or inclination to drive a golf cart all the way from Braelinn to Westpark or Kedron and back.

It's easy to see where long-range planning didn't get it right. The challenge is to take those missteps and apply the lessons learned to today's planning. It won't be easy. For all our vaunted path system, there are serious gaps in facilitating cart or pedestrian traffic within shopping centers themselves. I've long advocated requiring golf cart parking places in the site plan of all public buildings, preferably near main entrances to encourage people to use carts instead of cars.

And while it's easy to run close-to-home errands by cart without risking street traffic, once in a large parking lot, pedestrians and carts become mighty vulnerable competing for space with cars. Pedestrians especially, or kids on bikes, crossing from one side of a parking lot to another, have no option but to thread their way through cars, either parked or on the move. I keep wishing an entrepreneur who can absorb the cost for a long, long time would offer some sort of jitney service around the county — a well-advertised loop linking Peachtree City village centers with each other and City Hall, then out to the hospital and medical centers springing up in mid-county.

From there it would connect with the county offices and up to the Big Box malls on the north side of Fayetteville. It would need at least two, maybe three stops within the Pavilion — the sheer distance from one end of that complex to the other is prohibitive, and, there again, neither he safety nor the convenience of pedestrians was part of the plan.

My dream-shuttle would hit every stop at 15-minute intervals during the business day. My entrepreneur will need at least five busses — four for the road, one for a spare.

But does it really matter? Twenty years from now, exhausted from fighting traffic or changing busses, we may all be shopping by computer, wondering why our county is laced with cart paths and crisscrossed with shuttle routes.

Besides, who's going to call a Fayette Area Regional Transit Authority by its acronym?

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