For decades, American cities have tried to leverage transit infrastructure with transit-oriented development (TOD). It’s the cornerstone of smart growth: Build dense housing and commercial space around rail stations and bus corridors, and you can reduce car dependence, get residents to jobs more easily, and generate economic activity. Most cities have designated special TOD zones, offered density bonuses to developers willing to build near stations, rezoned corridors to encourage mixed-use density, and poured plenty of federal, state, and local money into TOD. It’s the holy grail of urbanism — infrastructure, housing and jobs.

And we should keep doing that!

But when I walked the Beltline in Atlanta (ashamedly, for the first time despite the Beltline being 20 years old now) in January, I found myself thinking maybe we should also be investing just as seriously in pedestrian-oriented development.

It’s abundantly clear that the Beltline has transformed Atlanta. Read that again and fully take it in: Atlanta — the poster child of 1990s and 2000s sprawl — has been transformed by a pedestrian and cycling trail.

A 22-mile loop of multiuse path threading through a necklace of former rail corridors and brownfield land has activated unproductive post-industrial land, transformed neighborhoods, and drawn a cross section of Atlantans to share in public space — even though the Beltline doesn’t have the light rail that was initially promised. People want to live near the Beltline, and Atlanta-born companies like Mailchimp want to locate their offices on it. Much like TOD creates a gravitational pull toward transit infrastructure, pedestrian and cycling-oriented development could turn scarcity of high-quality pedestrian environments into our cities’ economic powerhouses.

In 1999, Georgia Tech student Ryan Gravel delivered a master’s thesis that argued that Atlanta’s historic freight lines should be repurposed for mass transit, creating a new focal point to limit the city’s sprawl. He envisioned dozens of stations connecting to MARTA’s existing rail spokes. The line would be modeled on Portland’s MAX — at-grade crossings, overhead power, simple modular station design — and would serve both existing neighborhoods and new transit-oriented development on adjacent brownfields. Gravel’s Beltline concept found a receptive audience in Shirley Franklin, Atlanta’s mayor from 2002 to 2010. Trails and parks were added to the vision later, and when the project was officially launched in 2005, it carried both ambitions.

The pedestrian infrastructure proved far easier to finance, permit, and construct than the rail component — and it worked. The Eastside Trail opened in 2012 and immediately drew crowds, development and national attention. The trail created the demand that transit planners had been hoping light rail would create.

One of the most powerful, most under-provided ingredients of urban quality of life is exactly what the Beltline delivers: a great place to simply be.

Despite failing to create light rail, the Beltline has served that goal of reinvigorating the core of Atlanta and encouraging the region to densify rather than endlessly sprawl outward. More than 4,000 units of housing have been developed within the Beltline’s Tax Allocation District — a special taxation zone that has raised $750 million for the Beltline. And donors have raised nearly $250 million more for the project. In the project’s first 20 years, it has catalyzed $10 billion in private investment surrounding the Beltline. (These and other highlights from the first two decades of the Beltline can be found here.)

And something else is happening: Rather than offer the prescribed light rail, the Beltline has become a haven for e-bikes. People are taking full advantage of the Beltline and its interconnected trails and spurs to commute, sometimes faster and more safely than driving. As more e-bike sharing options have become available in the less affluent Westside neighborhoods, the Beltline’s biking infrastructure is becoming more accessible to a wider swath of Atlantans. It turns out that trails are transportation, too.

Now there is a renewed push to bring traditional transit back to the Beltline. MARTA has targeted 2028 for operational streetcar service on part of the corridor. But in March 2025, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens withdrew support from the Streetcar East Extension, redirecting focus to a different corridor. The window may be closing. Having spent years letting the pedestrian investment mature, the city now faces a transit retrofit on a corridor that has already been built out around foot traffic and bicycles — a harder and more expensive proposition than building transit and trails together from the start.

The Beltline’s trajectory begs us to wonder: Why aren’t we building pedestrian and cycling realms from scratch to capitalize on the obvious demand for this product in more cities, and in more places than just abandoned rail lines?

Pedestrian-oriented development, an idea we should steal

Part of the answer is that we’re still thinking like twentieth century cities. For most of the last 100 years, the logic of urban attraction was simple: Cities had jobs, and people went where the jobs were. Economic development meant recruiting employers and hoping amenities would follow. But remote and hybrid work have scrambled that calculus. When knowledge workers can live nearly anywhere, cities can no longer rely on job concentration as their primary draw — and GDP growth increasingly decouples from the kind of place-based employment that once filled downtowns.

What cities can offer instead is quality of life. And one of the most powerful, most under-provided ingredients of urban quality of life is exactly what the Beltline delivers: a great place to simply be.

Part of what makes these spaces so magnetic and magical may also be the very neglect that preceded them. Pedestrian zones in American cities have been so thoroughly deprioritized — squeezed by cars, starved of investment, treated as leftover space — that a well-designed trail or park arrives with the force of a revelation. It’s actually wild that city officials aren’t clamoring to invent such spaces when their ROI is so high.

Is the problem gentrification? New York’s High Line turned an abandoned rail line into a force multiplier, transforming a neighborhood of warehouses and gas stations into a luxury condo corridor that favored tourists over local residents — a cautionary tale that the next generation of projects is actively trying to learn from.

In Philadelphia, The Rail Park is currently soliciting community input as it prepares to expand beyond its existing quarter-mile segment into a 3-mile public space. Like the Beltline, the project originally had some transit ambitions but is now being developed with a pedestrian and cycling focus. (Full disclosure: I serve on the project’s community advisory committee.) What’s notable about this next phase is the intentionality around equity: The Rail Park team is working to ensure that the development catalyzed around the project doesn’t simply reprise the High Line’s displacement patterns. Washington, D.C.’s 11th Street Bridge Park, a former bridge that is being transformed into a public space, is pursuing the same ambition — extraordinary design and quality infrastructure paired with an explicit equitable development framework built in from the start, not bolted on afterward.

The fear of displacement is real, but it’s a reason to plan carefully, not a reason to hold back. Rather we should fear inertia.

In Philadelphia, mere blocks from the Rail Park, the Spring Garden Connector is being redesigned with protected bike lanes and curb bump-outs — worthwhile interventions, but hardly the kind of economic development catalyst this undervalued boulevard deserves.

A 2013 proposal for Spring Garden with a central pedestrian and bike zone had a transformative scale more akin to the Beltline — but got scrapped. Not only would it have offered a more enjoyable public realm, it might have lured businesses to the neighborhood. While new residential has been built along Spring Garden in recent years, its street-level presence is sorely lacking.

On the city’s South Broad Street, known as the Avenue of the Arts, lush greenery is being planted into landscaped gardens on the street’s sidewalks and its median. Will this be enough to have the desired impact of creating a neighborhood that arts patrons want to linger or even live in? I’m uncertain.

There is a nearly endless slate of corridors that could be improved, and so rather than pick out spots, we end up trying to compromise on many of them, not quite aiming for something as bold and distinct as the Beltline. But we wouldn’t plop down a new transit system without a more thorough and thoughtful approach to development, rezoning, and investment — so why do that for the pedestrian realm? A more comprehensive approach to pedestrian-oriented development deserves a serious hearing in all our cities.

Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.

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