Do you live near Emory University, drive through Emory, visit Emory from time to time? I do and my life has just improved thanks to the traffic engineers and to the planners and the politicians that put them to work.
Emory Village has a traffic circle and I feel fine. (I hope you don't mind if this Georgian pays a oblique tribute to R.E.M.)
The Haywood Hopkins Gate by Philip Trammell Shutze is on the circle. It's Emory University's front door per the master plan by Henry Hornbostel. It's a modest entrance to a campus that seems set in a wooded park.
Until this summer the gate faced a bleak, busy, bottle-necking 5-points wasteland, the intersection of North Decatur, Oxford, and Dowman, home of Everybody's Pizza. It's been horrible since my first visit in 1968.
If you've driven there, you know what I mean. If you've crossed the streets on foot, you know.
So they moved gate a little, made it an entrance, closed it as an exit...
...and put in the circle. It's not quite done yet. It's going to have trees and bushes and less paving.
Bless those engineers. They've removed 2 traffic lanes lanes, cut paving in half, made space to landscape, improved auto and pedestrian safety. In the process they gave Emory Village a more friendly center.
They improved traffic flow by slowing things down.
It's all so I can spend less time driving and more time at home.
Remarkable. Here is new left turn to the west from Oxford to North Decatur. This simple turn could take forever. Here I breeze though without a full stop.
Bess those engineers.
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