144141 external_news 1343983768 1475893551 The man who dreamed up the Atlanta Beltline is able to see a silver lining in voters’ July 31 defeat of a tax that would have pumped $600 million into the project. “We started a regionwide discussion about how important transportation is,” says Ryan Gravel. “Before, we didn’t have that.” As a Georgia Tech graduate student in 1999, Gravel became the first to imagine the Beltline, a proposed 22-mile ring of parks, paths and transit around downtown Atlanta, making it his master’s thesis. Now almost 40, Gravel is an architect with the firm Perkins+Will.

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