It considers the corridors identified in Atlanta City Design as growth areas, where large transit infrastructure could be more easily accommodated. Growth considers the patterns of expansion in Atlanta and the ideal scale of a system to balance Atlanta’s core with the suburbs. Individual destinations with over 1,000 parking spaces and no current rail service (including Stone Mountain Park, Zoo Atlanta, and Cellairis Amphitheater) emerged as obvious demand centers. Job centers, residential centers, and major tourist destinations are focus areas. Demand:ĭemand considers both existing and potential riders in areas that are currently underserved by rail transit. Three general concepts guided the proposals: 1) Demand, 2) Growth, and 3) Equity. MARTA 2040? The logic behind these ideas is explained below. This proposed system map would create a rail network that accommodates current and new residents in a comprehensive and logical way, leveraging the strength of the existing lines with new connections both within the city and beyond. By 2040, the city is projected to have 1.2 million, in a metro area of 8.2 million, moving the city’s share up to 14 percent. But not only is it a necessary goal, given Atlanta’s growth trends, with the right planning and proposals, transit expansion in Atlanta can begin to correct decades of inequity that continue to plague the city.Ĭurrently, the city of Atlanta has roughly 500,000 people, with the metro area closing in on 6 million the city is just over 8 percent of the total “Atlanta” population. When MARTA CEO Jeffrey Parker announced his $100 billion “moonshot for transit” this past January, it likely struck many as wishful thinking. And continued redevelopment of growing job and residential centers with loyal transit ridership, such as Lakewood, Greenbriar, and South Dekalb, present opportunities for new transit connections in the near term that will only become more costly, and more necessary, the longer they are not implemented. Similarly, integrating rail transit as a central component of the redeveloped Tilford Yard (Bolton) should be a priority, not an afterthought. Much of this proposed infrastructure is at a time-sensitive juncture: a rail connection to southeast Atlanta has an extremely rare opportunity to be seamlessly incorporated into the ongoing redevelopment of the Georgia State Stadium area. In the context of Atlanta’s inner core and outer suburb structure, MARTA’s heavy rail system is particularly well suited to accommodate trips of five to 25 miles, and this scale forms the focus of these proposals. “This proposed system map would create a rail network that accommodates current and new residents in a comprehensive and logical way.” Atlanta residents inherently understand this, due to our traffic, and the issues with transit that shares vehicle lanes, and overwhelmingly requested the city “expand rail transit” as the primary objective in Atlanta’s Transportation Plan. Others are significant new routes that will provide crucial connections to major growth areas-many long underserved-and will be necessary to accommodate the anticipated doubling of the city’s population over the next 25 years, with significant growth throughout the surrounding suburbs as well.Īlthough rail expansion is contentious for its high cost, there is simply no substitute for the efficiency and capacity that fully separated rail offers. Some are long-proposed expansions, both to the heavy rail network and new light rail lines. This proposal presents the kind of critical, equitable and transformative transit investments that MARTA should make to continue thriving over the next 20 years. Like Beltline Rail Now! advocates, Stephens stresses the importance of rail transit to the growing region’s mobility and success in this detailed Letter to the Editor and transit proposal, which includes a compelling visual. That input will help inform a 30-year transportation plan that ARC leaders must deliver to federal government officials by a February deadline, outlining which local projects might deserve grants from the feds. The metro’s 10-county planning agency, Atlanta Regional Commission, is accepting public comments via email until the close of business today (December 13). When it comes to transit, given metro Atlanta’s anticipated population explosion, Stephens says the time to act is now. Nick Stephens, a Georgia Tech-trained city planner and editorial writer, is an impassioned urbanist to the core.
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