ATL Urbanist
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Atlanta Needs Population Density for Efficient Transportation
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A new report from ARC shows that Gwinnett County’s population growth leads the Atlanta region, but that it’s happening in a carpet of sprawl. Read about it here:atlresearch.tumblr.com/post/126447942228/populationestimatesaug2015snapshotHow this county continues to boom in population growth without creating dense urban centers is astounding. In the full ARC report you can see that multifamily housing is growing in the City of Atlanta at a fast clip, while the new housing in Gwinnett is 93% detached single-family. I’m guessing that this carpet-of-sprawl growth pattern is going to hinder their efforts to expand transit service. Here’s a chart of population Atlanta growth from 2010 to 2015. That top row shows the count for the entire region, and the bottom row (I’ve highlighted in orange) has the count for the City of Atlanta, where the population steadily remains at about 10% of the region’s.I’m happy to see pop growth in City of Atlanta, but with the region as a whole booming at this level, we should do better. Why? Because rail transit is centered here and taking full advantage of that transit type will require the city to have a greater population density (along with walkable streets). To illustrate the relationship between development style and transportation…
These were posted by Tumblr urbangeographies, who notes: “The images of density types in developers show the intermediate type – the
suburb – as the site of greatest conflict.” when it comes to serving the environment efficiently with transportation. Conflict is right. How do we expect, as urbanists, to get people out of their cars and into alternate transportation modes if we don’t make major changes to the spaces around us that were built in many places for automobile travel and not much else? As Brent Toderian recently tweeted: “It’s a recipe for failure to design a city for cars, & then ask people to walk, bike & take public transit more. Design a different city.”For the record, I think the word “suburb” is best used to describe a location rather than a built environment. I say that because anyone who’s seen the landscape of intown Atlanta in full will know that even in the city, our level of density and amount of car-centric roads matches that middle image closely in most places.
Sacrificing Walkability for Traffic Flow on Atlanta’s Courtland Street
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There’s a great post this week on the Atlanta Studies website from Joseph Hurley who works as a Data Services and GIS Librarian at Georgia State University Library. Read it here: Atlanta’s Parking Problem Revisited.Here’s a quote from it:…most of downtown has become dominated by substantial parking desk
structures and surface level parking lots, which are placed immediately
alongside one-way streets that are often four to five lanes wide. Cars
regularly treat these exceedingly wide streets as urban highways,
traveling at speeds that are unsafe for an area that should cater to
pedestrians. Courtland Street is a prime example of how providing
“convenient parking” and the removal of on-street parking to allow for
“greater street traffic flows,” exactly what both reports recommended,
has created undesirable urban environments.As Hurley points out, is Courtland Street in Downtown Atlanta (in the middle of the GSU campus) is truly an undesirable place for anyone outside of a car:In these two images he’s contrasting Courtland’s state in 1954, when it had two traffic lanes and street-side parking, with its current state of four traffic lanes. Also notice the narrow sidewalks. This is a supremely unpleasant place to walk, in my experience (and I’m a fairly hardy urban traveler). The wide lanes promote high car speeds, and having those fast cars fly by while you balance on a skinny sidewalk is sometimes terrifying, particularly if you have a child in tow. The street-side parking provided an important buffer for pedestrians in 1954 – one that disappeared when ‘maximum car flow at all costs’ became the priority.I’ve taken a photo of Courtland before myself, when I was walking alongside it and noticed how scary it was to watch pedestrians cross – even with the right-of-way – in front of a line of stopped cars that were all ready to storm through a light as if they were on an interstate entrance ramp.By coincidence, Tim Keane, the new Commissioner of Planning and Community Development for the City of Atlanta, tweeted a photo of Courtland recently. He seems appalled to find a street this dead and uninviting. Just look at how the buildings don’t ‘address’ the street even through they are next to it:Courtland is one of many one-way, multi-lane streets in the city center that should undergo a two-way conversion and streetcaping – maybe with bike lanes as well. If we can’t manage to put anything inviting for pedestrians and cyclists along the street in the form of ground-level retail, at least we could make their experience of maneuvering it outside a car safer and less frightening.A 2008 Atlanta Business Chronicle piece reported that city planners were keen to convert Courtland (and some other one-way, large streets nearby) to two-way traffic as a way of encouraging more pedestrian and cycling traffic, but some owners of large downtown facilities and hotels fear that doing so would prevent the flow of customers in cars that they’ve gotten used to.But if Atlanta is serious about becoming a city that is friendlier to cyclists and pedestrians, and thus to transit riders who are all pedestrians at some point in their trip, these one way monstrosities have to go – if for the sake of safety alone. According to a piece in Planetizen, the stats are clear: two-way streets are safer for everyone:The
risk of collision or injury doubles when driving through a neighborhood
of one-way streets. In total, the 22 Census tracts with a high
concentration of one-ways had 2,992 additional collisions and 792 more
injuries requiring medical treatment—some causing loss of life.
Moreover, if you are riding a bike or walking, you are also more likely
to be injured on a one-way street.Also, a fascinating article on the origins of Build a Better Block programs. Includes this great passage: ““When
the streetcar went away in 1956 two of the major streets became
one-way, so you lost 50 percent of the [retail] visibility and made it
an unsafe, high-speed corridor. These blocks were built for people, but
the environment around them became inhospitable.”It’s time for these blocks to be for people again, and not so dominated by concerns about car flow.
Atlanta’s Parking Addiction
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“Every dollar spent on parking actively gives people a reason not to ride the streetcar…a recent study on rail systems in the United States over the last 30 years found the availability of low-cost parking to be the second strongest indicator of the lack of success of a line.” - Atlanta’s parking addiction: It’s time for an intervention if we want Atlanta to become a walkable and transit-connected city | Matt Garbett, Creative LoafingThe image above shows a section of the streetcar line on Luckie Street in Downtown Atlanta. Everything that isn’t shaded in red is either a parking lot or a parking deck.This is important. We have a $100 million starter line for modern streetcars in Atlanta and much of the track runs beside properties that contain facilities devoted to car parking instead of destinations for pedestrians. If this seed is going to grow into a larger, successful system of street rail – and there are proposals for that – city leadership needs to get off its collective ass and give the line a chance to work as it should.I am in general very excited to have a streetcar here and hopeful that it will end up, some day in the future, serving a thriving neighborhood of new residential and commercial structures that replace our downtown parking blight. But there are also days when I walk these streets, where I live, and cynically think: “In Atlanta, we love parking so much that we built a $100 million streetcar line to show off our parking facilities to tourists.”That’s not where we need to be when we’re looking toward charging people money to ride the streetcar later this year (fare is currently free) and expanding the line.
City leaders need to boldly guide us in a direction that changes the way we use land for parking and that also changes the expectations we have for driving and parking in the city. As Matt writes in the piece linked above: “If we want to continue to grow, we need to have the capacity to accommodate up to 500,000 new citizens. We cannot accommodate all their cars. These changes take political will and leadership. It takes recognizing that parking is an impactful land-use decision that affects multiple aspects of our lives.”
Streetcar Tour of Bad Land Use in Atlanta
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Streetcar tour of bad land use in Atlanta
“If you look to the left, you’ll see yet another surface parking lot; next up, an abandoned building; and here, we see a parking deck.”
Think of how much more useful the Atlanta Streetcar would be if these parking lots, empty lots and abandoned buildings were apartments, condos, offices, retail…
This morning when I walked along Auburn Avenue, the streetcar was almost completely empty, just like it is every weekday morning when I see it pass – and every weekday night.
It fills up midday with tourists, which is great (it’ll be packed full at 2pm w/ riders going to and from the King Historic area, the Curb Market and Centennial Park, which is encouraging to see). But consider the potential we have for it to also be a commuter tool and nighttime entertainment tool for locals, if only we could get these dead spaces filled.
This is the promise of the streetcar for the historic Sweet Auburn area – to help build transit-appropriate development where there is blight and underused property. As of now, it serves mostly as a means of shuttling tourists past the blight so that they don’t have to walk through it.
I wrote a post almost identical to this a while ago. I hope next year I don’t have to write another.
The Adaptive-Reuse Trinity on Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta
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On
Ponce de Leon Avenue in Midtown Atlanta you can stand in one spot and see three of the coolest adaptive reuse projects the city has to offer. In former lives, they were: a Ford automobile
assembly plant, a Sears outlet/distribution
center, and a railroad that ran between them. In their current incarnations they serve as examples of how to create a thriving, walkable neighborhood in a place that was, for a period, pretty bleak. In the photo above you can see the Ford Factory Lofts. It has residences on top, and a retail strip retrofitted into the bottom on its east side. By the time it was undergoing residential conversion in the mid 1980s, it had served as a car assembly plant, a War Department induction center, and a storage facility for the military. Here’s the scene in 1985. The Ford factory building (obviously gutted and undergoing construction) sits behind a sign promoting a new Kroger supermarket – a store that still sits beside the lofts today:
Below is a 1940s photo of the giant Sears, Roebuck & Company
distribution center, completed in 1925 with additions made in following years. After Sears left in the late 1980s, the building loomed for many years as an empty
or mostly-empty behemoth on this street, reminding all passersby of the
loss of economic activity in the area (particularly when combined with
other empty buildings nearby in the 1980s-90s). Over the last couple of years, the
structure has undergone a mixed-use conversion as Ponce City Market. The finished product includes 517,000 square feet of offices,
300,000 square feet of retail, and 259 residential units. We took a walk through here a few weeks ago and it’s a marvel. Several retail shops are already open, with more to come soon:Trains used to unload merchandise into the Sears building via a railroad that ran in between it and the Ford factory. Now
that railroad – which itself sat unused for many years – is the Atlanta Beltline’s northeast trail. This multiuse path delivers cyclists
and pedestrians to the Historic Fourth Ward Park just south of these buildings, and in time there will be a direct pedestrian connection with Ponce City Market (there’s already a connection to the Ford lofts side). Pardon the old photo, but I couldn’t get a good new one due to the combination of constant traffic on the Beltline and the lush greenery of trees (not complaining). So here’s what the trail looked like a few years ago when construction was just beginning:I need to visit this spot at night some time. That Sears building used to creep me out in the 1990s when it was dark outside. I’m eager to have a happier visit and see it with lights on in the windows because of the residents inside.
When People Habitats and Car Habitats Are Equally Dense
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H/t to @urbandata for tweeting this graphic that shows how different transportation modes use road space. On a typical lane of road in a city, cars in mixed traffic can carry 2,000 people per hour, where bicycles can carry 14,000 and street rail can carry 22,000. That’s quite a scale.(see a larger image of that graphic here)The low carrying capacity of a personal car may be fine in a low-density environment, but dense urban centers cannot be effectively served by cars. The chart above shows carrying capacity, but also consider the amount of road and parking infrastructure needed by a high volume of cars – when you couple that need with capacity, it’s clear that cars are a spatially inefficient form of transportation for city centers.And yet we bend over backwards to receive and store tons of them to the middle of Atlanta. Here’s a photo of Downtown that I’ve edited to show where the streets and parking facilities are. The buildings that humans actually use are separated by all of these car facilities – and when the pattern gets repeated, those separations create a terrain that’s more challenging to pedestrians than a downtown should be. Here’s a photo of Midtown Atlanta near interstate 75/85. Look at the “dead” space (meaning that its unusable by people outside of cars) that’s created by these lanes and parking spaces. To get from the area in the top, right of this photo to the bottom – I couldn’t blame anyone for hopping in a car instead of walking. This situation that’s challenging for pedestrians just serves to enforce the use of these spatially-inefficient cars in the city center. Midtown in general has seen great strides in the reduction of surface parking lots. It is definitely one of the more walkable parts of the city. But with fewer cars on the road (and the conversion of multi-lane, one-way streets in Midtown that cary them), it could realize its full potential for healthy density.Even when we add street rail to the city center by way of the Atlanta Streetcar, we’re not completely out of the woods. This photo shows a section of the streetcar line that’s hindered by an interstate overpass and entrance/exit ramps. How many streetcar riders will exit the train and want to walk past these entrance and exit ramps for the interstate? Could you blame someone for deciding to drive to a destination near this overpass instead? The bulk of the streetcar line is very nice to walk around, by the way. And this overpass is being put to good use by housing the maintenance facility underneath. But the entrance and exit ramps – serving the large number of cars in the area – are a problem here. The natural progression of urban density is being stunted in Atlanta’s core by the presence of this level of car traffic and infrastructure. We’re left with a half-assed kind of density, thanks to detached parking decks and surface lots and land-hogging interstate infrastructure that are all taking up spaces that could be used by human habitats.I had a daydream recently that involved closing off all the interstate exit ramps in the center of the city to cars and only allowing emergency vehicles, delivery trucks, buses and carpool riders to use them. It’s an extreme idea, but I can’t help but dream about it – and basically anything that would reduce the number of cars we bring into the city center. And I want to make sure that “reduce” is clear; I am not a proponent of car free cities. I just want a better balance that prevents cars from being so dominant. In that balance, we can create a more healthy kind of density.(h/t Tyler Blazer for constructive criticism on the post; edits were made)
Looking Forward to What Will Happen Above Underground
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This is a photo I took recently of Peachtree Street, facing south from Woodruff Park. At the end of the vista you can see a thin tower above Underground Atlanta. That’s the tower that has, for many years now, held the giant peach for the annual peach drop on New Year’s Eve – probably the only thing that connects most Atlantans to this odd, outdated mall. But with the sale and redevelopment of Underground looming large on the future of South Downtown, I’m now looking at this vista and imagining it topped with new apartment towers filled with residents. The Saporta Report has a good article on the status of plans for the site, pointing out the significant amount of money that will flow into the project:The developer of the re-envisioned Underground Atlanta says the total investment in the project likely will be between $350 million and $400 million. That’s about double previous estimates.That info comes from an Interview with Scott Smith, president of WRS, Inc. – the company that hopes to turn this property into something new; something that could play a big part in transforming the South Downtown neighborhood (important to note: they do not yet own Underground, but expect to purchase it from the city later this year). How long will we have to wait before the magic happens? “We expect to start construction by early 2017,” Smith said. “I think we will be developed out completely in four to five years.”So that’s potentially 2022 before the surface of Underground Atlanta looks like the rendering below, complete with a grocery store, apartment towers, a new hotel and more.I’ve lived in Downtown Atlanta for five years now and put up with the current iteration of Underground – which has become a pretty sad place. I can patiently wait a few more years for something wonderful to happen here. And I’m certainly thankful that it isn’t becoming a casino.
MARTA Studies Rail Route Into Clayton County
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MARTA studies rail route into Clayton County.MARTA
is undertaking a $300k, year-long study of freight rail right-of-way in
Clayton County. The agency wants to put a new passenger rail line here, but is in need of a route – one that would go south of the existing East Point station. Saporta Report has the story. What is the timeline for getting Clayton residents on a train? Jeff Turner, chairman of
the Clayton County Commission, says the process will not be a fast one:
“We are still a long ways out from getting the rail component.
Realistically it will take up to 10 years to get a rail line to Clayton
County.”The image above comes from a 2014 MARTA report on Clayton County transit routes. It shows a proposed rail line going through the center of the county and connecting to spots like Clayton State University. A quote from that report shows a timeline that was, as of last year, a little more optimistic than the one suggested by Turner, above:It is proposed that revenue rail passenger service in Clayton County would begin in FY 2022. The service would provide rail transit access to the major activity centers within Clayton County…The rail service plan options include a 15-minute headway option during peak hours and/or a 30-minute headway option during peak hours.Clayton County voted to join the transit system in a referendum late last year. It passed by a wide margin. MARTA bus lines are already rolling in the county.Keep in mind that this is only a study of the Clayton route that’s being undertaken here. Actually funding the expansion – and the new rail stations – is another matter. Also, this Clayton rail proposal is a separate project from the $8 billion rail expansion that was in the news recently. That expansion only involves north Fulton and east Dekalb Counties.
The Connection Between Sprawl and Road Deaths
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A new report analyzes statistics on road deaths and uses them to create recommendations for improvements that could produce safer roads: “7 Proven Principles for Designing a Safer City.” It comes from World Resources Institute,a DC-based organization that does policy research and analysis on environmental issues.The institute’s number one principal for safety is “Avoid urban sprawl,” which, as you could probably guess, casts a dim light on the Atlanta region:“Cities that are connected and compact are generally safer than cities that are spread out over a large area. Compact Stockholm and Tokyo have the lowest traffic fatality rates in the world—fewer than 1.5 deaths per 100,000 residents. Sprawling Atlanta, on the other hand, has a death rate six times that, at nine fatalities per 100,000 residents.”In the chart above, you can see that even the Los Angeles region, notorious for its car-centric sprawl, has a considerably lower road-death rate than Atlanta. Can Atlanta ever achieve road safety on the level of Tokyo? Likely not, but we can do better. Data like this casts a clear light on the importance of efforts to retrofit our car-dependent built environments. In both the suburbs and intown, we need bold improvements that allow for safer roads and a more widespread accessibility to alternative transportation options.
Is Atlanta Destined for Low Density?
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While doing a recent search for Atlanta land use maps, I found an
interesting 2013 dissertation from a GA Tech student – “A Typology of Block Faces” by Alice Vialard – that contained this incredible graphic below (see a larger version):This is basically showing us that the average block size in the City of
Atlanta, which is fairly large, has produced a low density of buildings. This is an average for the whole city; I’d like to see a study of specific pockets of
density. But it’s still a fascinating measurement that,to my mind, shows the amazing potential for
growth in buildings and population here.
According to the dissertation (and I’m paraphrasing to the best of my
ability here, as a non-academic, armchair urbanist): In the City of
Atlanta, city blocks cover 86 percent of the available land, and the
leftover area for the streets is 14 percent. Building footprints cover
only 2,879 hectares which is only 10 percent of the overall land or 12
percent of the land covered by the urban blocks. This means that,
in the City of Atlanta, roads are occupying more land than actual
buildings. Relative to cities and neighborhoods with small blocks (such
as in historic Savannah, GA) buildings here are very sparse.This
actually fits in well with the findings of another study that I recently blogged about on
street-connectivity patterns. It shows that the entire Atlanta region is
"density proof” compared to other US regions due to its relatively sparse level of street
intersections.Suburban-level populations in the cityUsing a mapping tool that allows you to type
in ZIP Codes to see demographic and lifestyle information, I was able to produce this map of Atlanta’s population density (see a larger version). Not a single zip code in Atlanta qualifies as Urban
or Metropolis by this measure. Most of the city is Suburban.Is the City of Atlanta destined to have a low density? I don’t believe so. The overall average population for the city and the region may remain low in comparison to other regions, but there’s a great chance for boosting population density in key parts of the city and region, hopefully near transit stations and other types of alternative transportation such as bike lanes and multiuse paths.The population of the city has been slow in comparison to the overall region, but growth has been steady (though still well below peak population level in 1970). This trend will likely continue. Why hope for greater density at all? Because the world is urbanising, and that global trend is happening in the US as well. As population in general grows, and as those populations migrate more and more to urban job centers, it’s important to allow a growth pattern that shuns the car-centric sprawl of our past and instead embraces a walkable compact pattern. Important: not all density is good! There are bad ways to densify that are likely no better, in regard to urban sustainability, than sprawl due to the way they promote car use and fail to encourage walking and public interaction in attractive outdoor spaces. We need livable (and lovable) compact urban places. Doing so will require good design, thoughtful leadership, and patience.
Will Fear of Road Congestion Scuttle BRT in Cobb County?
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Thanks much to CCT Girl for sharing this graphic on Twitter. It comes from a news article about Cobb County’s proposed bus rapid transit line (behind a paywall: http://www.myajc.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/controversial-brt-wont-reduce-traffic-jams-study-s/nm2dc/). It would connect Kennesaw State University with Midtown Atlanta and all points in between on that line – including the new Braves stadium.According to the news article, a study has found that the BRT line likely won’t reduce car congestion on Hwy 41 in Cobb, and may even make it worse. But does this mean the doom of the route? Not necessarily. As the quote below shows, there are people in Cobb who understand the focus of a transit line like this is more than mobility. It’s also about efforts to point future growth in a particular direction.David Welden, a campaign manager for former commissioner Helen
Goreham who has served on several citizen committees studying
transportation projects, said BRT has never been about thinning traffic.“It’s about commercial development,” said Welden, who thinks the
reversible toll lanes currently under construction on I-75 will do more
to mitigate traffic on U.S. 41 than BRT. “Where there’s a little
Army-Navy store right now will be a 17-story office tower, or a
live-work-play development.Something important to note here: when it comes to dealing with car congestion, even building new lanes and new roads doesn’t help – they only induce demand for driving over time, particularly in a growing region. Congestion comes with the territory in an expanding population. The key is in allowing for mobility options that diminish the damage done by inevitable traffic, and a big part of that is reshaping the way we build places to allow for those options. Feeder lanes & receiver roads; but what about places? Words matterLook at that last phrase in the text at the top of the graphic; it says something about the way land use and transportation are treated in areas like Cobb that are beset with sprawl. It refers to “roadway improvements” such as “extended feeder lanes on receiver roads.” This is the kind language I encountered when I attended a GA Department of Transportation meeting about the 400/I-285 interchange project. It’s a type of transportation-engineering speak that has a logical place inside the offices of those engineers. But when it makes it’s way into the public, it sounds dehumanizing. Feeders? Receivers? The roadways listed on the BRT route are not interstate highways will walls beside them. These are places for people. But to me, it sounds like these places are being designed for vehicles – much more so than for pedestrians and the places that they inhabit outside of those vehicles. If we’re going to talk about using transportation to help shape the future forms of our urban places, then we need better language for that effort. We need words that encompass the full range of uses of roadways like these, with references to improvements that affect pedestrians and the places that they inhabit.Caveat: having said all of this, I’m not fully advocating this particular BRT plan. Unless it is accompanied by other growth in the Cobb County CCT transit system, plus bike lanes, plus rezoning of properties, plus master planning – there’s no guarantee that a single transit line like this, along a very car-centric corridor such as Hwy 41, will result in good urbanism. It’s possible that it could be a step in the right direction at least, but I can’t help but pessimistically wonder, given Cobb’s history, if those other important steps would truly follow.
After 35 Years, Still Waiting for Transit-Spurred Development in South Downtown
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A planning document from 1970, found on the Planning Atlanta website adds an interesting piece to the story of the city’s South Downtown neighborhood – one that has not experienced the investment seen in other parts of the city’s center over the past couple of decades. Above, you can see the assessment of South Downtown from planners from that era. “Relative isolation” hurts the place, but it is full of “potential;” so what’s the prescription for helping it develop? See the image below, also from that document:The area needs “residents, probably high rise” that could be spurred by a strong catalyst like a “rapid transit station.” Good plan. And about 10 years after, that transit station arrived: MARTA’s Garnett Station. But the development did not. Almost 35 years since the station opened, we’re still waiting for that catalyst to have an effect. Garnett cost $12 million to build. Adjusted for inflation that’s $30 million in 2015 dollars. You may have read my previous post about this problem: http://atlurbanist.tumblr.com/post/120708595324/martas-garnett-station-top-photo-aAnd you can also see a post I made years ago about the loss of urban fabric around Garnett with demolished buildings being converted to parking lots: http://atlurbanist.tumblr.com/post/82700627928/paving-decisions-in-atlanta-the-top-image-is
A catalyst like a transit station is similar to a garden – it can produce great things, but only if you take care of it and give it the nurturing environment it needs. City government did not do that with Garnett. In regard to its potential for spurring growth, it’s turned into a waste of money because of the lack of care taken to give it a proper environment for growth.Here’s what it looks like now, from above. A city that sits back and waits for the market to work is not doing everything it can to help the station fulfill its potential. Imagine what could be here.