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Residents urge council to address traffic, road conditions and concentrated development in Buckhead-area neighborhoods
Summary
Three residents raised traffic delays, potholes and excessive local development during public comment at an Atlanta City Council meeting, asking council members to consider neighborhood balance when approving zoning decisions.
Three Atlanta residents used the public-comment period to urge the City Council to address heavy traffic, poor road conditions and what they described as concentrated residential development in portions of Buckhead and adjacent neighborhoods.
Dalil Anthony, a Garden Hills resident, said traffic congestion on the principal north-south routes is severe and that commutes downtown can take “at least an hour and 15 minutes.” He described repeat bottlenecks on Piedmont Road, Peachtree Road and the downtown connector and said delivery trips between Buckhead and Virginia-Highland routinely took more than an hour in evening peak periods.
The traffic complaints were accompanied by concerns about road maintenance. Anthony cited multiple potholes on Morningside Drive that he said force drivers into unsafe maneuvers.
“I hit pothole after pothole. There’s one on Morningside Drive … if you hit it, you will blow out a tire,” Anthony said.
Stephanie Coffin, who identified herself as a frequent tree advocate at council meetings, said she was speaking about traffic on Monroe Drive and about new development proposals she expects to increase traffic pressure in that corridor. Coffin said her neighborhood planning unit (NPU) believes the area already is “out of balance” with too much development concentrated near existing services and parks.
Larry Pett, who said he has lived in Morningside and Virginia-Highland for decades, asked council members to prioritize quality-of-life impacts when considering zoning and development requests. “When you consider zoning and development decisions, please consider whether your decisions will improve the quality of life in our community or make it worse,” Pett said.
The council did not take action on these comments during the public-comment period. Several zoning items later on the agenda — including rezonings, special-use permits and amendments to the 1982 Atlanta zoning ordinance — proceeded through committee reports and votes. The residents’ remarks were not tied to a single agenda item during the meeting but touched on corridors and neighborhoods that appear in multiple zoning captions read aloud by staff.
The public commenters named specific local streets and places — Garden Hills, Virginia-Highland, Morningside Drive, Monroe Drive, Piedmont Road and the BeltLine — and urged the council to consider spreading development more evenly across the city to reduce concentrated traffic and preserve neighborhood character.
Council members did not respond directly during the comment period; the meeting proceeded to zoning captions and multiple votes that the transcript shows were taken later in the session.
