Fifth Street Bridge

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Cartopia (n) - an imaginary place in which traffic always flows smoothly, parking is easy and close to one's destination, and automobiles have no negative impacts on the world in which they exist.

Unfortunately, Cartopia is as much of a fantasy as is Utopia.  Here in metro Atlanta, many still believe that someday we will pave over enough of the state to create Cartopia.  Luckily that belief is declining as the negative effects of our sprawling automobile centric development pattern become too large to ignore.

One small step in the return of our city to being a pedestrian friendly environment is the Fifth Street Bridge.  While this is still primarily a roadway for automobiles, it is a great improvement over the old Fifth Street bridge that it replaces.

The new bridge has bike lanes, wide sidewalks and greenery.  All of those are features that had previously been abandoned in transportation projects during our quest for Cartopia but what really sets the new Fifth Street Bridge apart is the amount of space set aside for greenery.  On both edges of the bridge are large lawns.  The sidewalk has a large trellis that when the greenery grows up on it, will provide shade for pedestrians.  The lawns also have multiple levels, the highest of which has trees, that end up creating a visual and noise barrier between the users of the bridge and the automobile sewer below.  The levels aren't so tall as to block out the skyline so you still get a nice view while the nasty parts are blocked out.

It isn't unusual to see Georgia Tech students using the green space to throw the football around or just stop and relax between destinations.  It is even used as a tailgating location on game days.  Tech's expansion across the Downtown Connector into Midtown wouldn't have worked well without the pedestrian friendly new bridge.  It creates a mostly seamless connection between the main campus and Tech Square.

Ironically, the new bridge appears to carry more automobile traffic than the old one.  The old bridge was so poor that its existence wasn't even known to many Tech students.  Now it is one of the primary gateways into campus.  As such, many people headed for Georgia Tech, be it on foot, bicycle, Tech Trolley or private automobile make use of the new bridge.

Only four stars because, well, it is still primarily an automobile roadway and could have been much better with the use of quality natural materials (we're sitting on millions of tons of granite, use some of it!) and interesting architecture.  However, relative to any other bridge that the Georgia Department of Transportation has built, it deserves ten stars.