Ted Van Dyk, AIA is principal of New City Design Group, a Raleigh Architecture firm.

Mr. Van Dyk founded New City in 1996, and continues to work on a wide variety of retail multifamily, and mixed use projects throughout the region.

Mr. Van Dyk submitted the following to Livable Raleigh as a guest blog:

So, now we are ‘improving’ Atlantic Avenue. $15 million, did I hear, for this handiwork?

First task – cut down a large swath of mature trees. The goal – replace this carbon capturing green space with a grass median – useless of course – so traffic can move more rapidly with fewer conflicts when turning.

Lots of talk about safety, of course, but really the way to make this road safer would be to take a lane out in each direction, slow things down, and create a center turn lane, not widen the right of way.

The traffic count here is around 20,000 cars a day, about the same as Hillsborough Street before the road diet.

Not sure why we are so schizophrenic in this town – eliminating all parking requirements in the name of reducing car dependency, supposedly due to our concern with the environment and the climate.

Meanwhile, here we are spending millions to make it easier for more cars to travel faster, not slower, along this once pleasant stretch of road, and logging off dozens of mature trees to get it done.

The best way to green up roads and highways is to not ungreen them in the first place.