Transit

By KAITLYN LEWIS, WABE

A concrete MARTA station in Midtown will be getting a slight face-lift soon.

Midtown Alliance and MARTA are partnering together to revamp the Midtown MARTA Station on Peachtree Place. Earlier this year, the organizations sent out a request for submissions to enhance the public space.

Atlanta-based painter Andrew Catanese was chosen out of 40 artists.

Catanese is a young artist who moved to Atlanta in 2015. He has only done one other public mural — on the Atlanta BeltLine. He applied thinking he may not make it past the first round, but he ended up making through the second.

“I think it’s really just such an incredible opportunity as an artist and careerwise,” he said. “I didn’t know why I wouldn’t apply to it.”

Catanese’s colorful paintings are filled with the flora that commonly grows in Georgia. Scattered among the trees, grasses, flowers and shrubs are characters from Greek mythologies, fables and biblical stories.

Catanese grew up in the South hearing and reading these stories. His father would read him Greek mythologies and Aesop’s fables. Then he read the Bible on his own.

“Growing up in the South in a family that wasn’t religious, I was interested in biblical stories largely because of how many of my friends were Protestant,” Catanese said, “and so I ended up reading the Bible on my own just because I wanted to know what it was that they were learning.”

Lately, he has been focusing on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

“So, struggling with those stricter — not stricter but more rigid — systems that don’t really leave room for different interpretations,” Catanese said, “that is particularly interesting to me. It’s kinda the same reason that I often identify my work as sort of in line with Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston or Eudora Welty (or) Truman Capote. They’re often, as Southerners, dealing with something similar in terms of confronting this rigid ideology in the South.”

What’s Ahead For New Murals

Catanese said that this MARTA station mural is going to be less engaged with religious texts, and it will focus on celebrating Midtown’s diversity.

“It’s a little different than the work I do in galleries, and I think that’s the nature of public work,” he said. “Sometimes, the kinds of topics you can address are kind of different, and it’s nice, too. It kind of forces me into a maybe a more positive voice.”

He is planning to paint on two large walls at the station and two vents in the plaza area.

“I think, in total, it’s about 1,000 square feet,” he said.

Work will begin soon, Midtown Alliance said in a blog post. Catanese said he may be finished by late May or early June.

This story was provided by WABE. 

By STEPHANNIE STOKES, WABE

Atlanta’s bike lanes have a problem: vehicles are blocking them.

At least, that’s what cycling advocates say. And now one group has a report showing how big the problem is.

The Atlanta Bicycle Coalition’s Bennett Foster stood along Peachtree Center Avenue just behind the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta.

There’s a two-way bike lane running up and down the left side of the street. But Foster said cars often use it as a parking lane.

“Peachtree Center Avenue got a lot of reports of violations,” Foster said.

For a year, the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition asked its members to document vehicles in bike lanes. The crowd-sourcing campaign found nearly 700 instances around the city.

More than a hundred of those were concentrated around Peachtree Center Avenue as it intersects with John Portman Boulevard, according to the group’s report on the data called “Unblock the Lane.”

“This is by no means comprehensive,” Foster said. “But what it did show was the frequency and the brazenness or obliviousness of some people who are stopping in the bike lane.”

In just an hour on Peachtree Center Avenue, cars dropped off passengers, delivery trucks served the hotel and a police officer pulled up to the curb — all after pausing in the bike lane.

When approached, one woman said stopping temporarily isn’t an issue before rolling up her window. Another driver, Roosevelt Bryant, said he moved to Atlanta recently and was struggling to find the Hyatt parking garage.

When asked why he drove in the bike lane, Bryant said, “I wasn’t paying attention.”

The concern for the bicycle coalition is that when cars block the lane, cyclists have to go elsewhere. Rodney Pierce, who happened to be biking by, said he has to deal with the situation all the time.

“They telling us to stay off the sidewalk. Where we gonna go? Go in the street? The cars are too fast,” he said.

Pierce said that puts cyclists like him in danger. It’s stressful.

And ultimately, Foster of the coalition said the point of these lanes is to lessen the stress.

“Atlanta is trying to become a bike-friendly city, and this conflict that we have undoes a lot of the work that we’re doing,” he said.

Foster said he believes there’s a way for cars and cyclists to coexist at the curb.

He said there’s already been improvement on this street. Once, delivery vehicles used to park regularly in the bike lane, but Central Atlanta Progress and the hotels worked to bring those trucks into a loading area.

More cyclists also have been using the Peachtree Center bike lanes. The city reported a nearly 75 percent increase from 2015 to 2017.

Atlanta Chief Bicycle Officer Becky Katz said the city is looking at other ways to reduce conflicts within bike lanes. They include making it more difficult for cars to enter the lanes and also adding parking alongside the lanes.

In the meantime, she said she’s grateful that interactions between parked cars and cyclists, while frustrating, tend to be “low-speed.”

“I hope that when people see parking in bike lanes — both the driver and the person biking — that everyone takes a deep breath and really has understanding from both sides,” Katz said.

This story was provided by WABE.