HAYNIE, S. Dawn. “THE ATLANTA STREETCAR: an analysis of its development and growth as it relates to the Core Cognitive Structure of the City.”
Dawn Haynie writes “The Atlanta Streetcar: An analysis of its development and growth as it relates to the Core Cognitive Structure Of the City” to describe and analyze the Streetcar system in Atlanta. The work is a paper she wrote while attending Georgia Tech College of Architecture, however, Haynie is now currently an Assistant Professor of Interior Design at Georgia State. She has earned her Bachelor’s degree in Architecture at Auburn; Master’s in Science, History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Urban Design at Georgia Tech; and PhD in Urban Morphology at Tech as well.
Haynie begins with a brief history of the railroads in Atlanta and how/why streetcars were eventually created as well. She mentions how Atlanta was previously known as Georgia’s terminus for railway, connecting several major railroads. She writes about how Richard Peters and George Adair founded the first streetcar system in Atlanta, the Atlanta Streetcar Railway Company, which used cars driven by horses and mules. As problems began to affect the streetcar system such as labor disputes and fixed fares, the city felt the need to adopt some sort of plan to better organize the system: the “Constructive Plan for Present and Future Transportation in Atlanta”. This allowed the streetcar system to be changed and altered with time, which eventually led to the use of the motorbus, which then led to the creation of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA).

The rest of Haynie’s essay consists of an in-depth, complex analysis of the streetcar system, including two ideas that might not be easily comprehensible to people unknown to the subject: metric reach and directional reach. Haynie refers to these ideas many times to explain the placement of certain rails. She explains that the streetcar system was built mostly focusing on the “shifting directional reach core structure of the city”. Haynie then explains what has essentially caused the system to fail, including cost and the advancement of the car.

Her essay ends with several detailed maps of the advancement of the streetcar system through time. The maps help illustrate the relationship between the growth of the streetcar and directional reach.

I chose this source because I believe it is informative on the topic of public transportation, and the fact that the streetcar was built in relation to old railroads is similar to the construction of the Beltline. Gravel wrote in his book on the Beltline, Where We Want to Live, that the eventual plan to the beltline is to build some sort of railway system. This essay contributes to that conversation with the previous history of Atlanta’s streetcar system, and how directional reach affected the density of our street structure in the city.