Miscellaneous

Transportation

Since I was a child, I have been fascinated by road maps and transportation improvement projects. Over the years, I’ve invented various highway proposals of my own. I have also taken digitized highway proposals from the past and made them more accessible.

Atlanta Urban Area Tollway Plan

One example is seen below. In this project, I mapped the Atlanta Urban Area Tollway Plan from the early 1970s–the details of which can be found in the Georgia State University archives–into modern day mapping. The original proposal was quelched by opposition from the upper-middle-class neighborhoods that would have been impacted. By the time the project was officially cancelled in 1975, much land had already been acquired through emminent domain. It became Freedom Parkway (itself delayed more than a decade of additional protests), the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and a handful of parks and greenways. However, the idea briefly resurfaced in the late aughts and early 2010s with a report sponsored by the Reason Foundation and Georgia Public Policy Foundation identifying that this roadway capacity was desperately needed, though they proposed putting the roadway in a tunnel under the neighborhoods who had opposed a surface roadway. Take a look for yourself at what could have been in the map below. (Note that many of the developments that the roadways go through on the maps today did not exist when the project was first proposed.)

Other Proposals

I have taken some of my own ideas for road projects and mapped them here and here. While this visualization of these ideas that I had as a younger person interested in the work that goes into highway planning and design is an incomplete work-in-progress, today, many of these are fiscally or politically unfeasible. Still, it’s one way I show my imaginative side.

Piano

I began learning to play the piano when I was 5 years old, and I have been playing ever since. While I initially learned classical piano, much of the past decade has been spent regularly accompanying worship at various churches–both as part of a larger praise band and as the only instrumentalist–along with instrumental preludes, offeratories, and other liturgical music. I also write my own hymn arrangements. One such arrangement, my version of O Sacred Head Now Wounded, can be found here.