Urban designer and planner Ryan Gravel sits on a low wall overlooking the Historic Fourth Ward Park, just yards from the Atlanta BeltLine. It's a warm spring day and a steady stream of bikers, strollers and joggers flow through the park and the Eastside trail, or the two-mile stretch between the Krog Street Market and Piedmont Park.
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The people enjoying the green space may not know it, but they are cruising past the man who came up with the idea for the BeltLine in the first place: Gravel wrote the original plan as his master’s thesis at Georgia Tech.
Since then, the BeltLine has evolved into Atlanta’s largest infrastructure project. By the time the entire loop is completed in 2033, the goal is that the trails will snake 33 miles through the city, connect 45 neighborhoods, incorporate light rail line and cost nearly $5 billion.
Gravel says that he never thought such an ambitious project would ever become a reality, or that his original idea would grow into the huge-scale endeavor it is today.
“I never imagined we were actually going to do it. I was just going to graduate,” Gravel laughs. “The kernel of the idea is still there but it's so much better than we ever imagined it would be. “
Hear more from Ryan Gravel, 4/10 at 12:30 p.
Cox Media Group
