Our Five Points lesson — Atlanta needs a mobility plan

Credit: MARTA

The controversy over MARTA’s Five Points Station revamp is doing us all at least one favor. It’s exposed the absolute mess that passes for mobility planning in Atlanta.

Like other community groups and downtown business leaders, Better Atlanta Transit has urged the MARTA to pause the Five Points project. There are simply too many questions and concerns to plow ahead unheeded. The mayor’s call to hold off on the project at least until late July – when we expect the city’s audit of MARTA’s alleged misuse of More MARTA sales tax revenue to finally be unveiled – seems a reasonable approach to this high-stakes conundrum.

At the same time, there’s a broader issue: Our spending on transportation initiatives has become an ad hoc jumble. That handicaps efforts to make the best use of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake Atlanta’s transit landscape via More MARTA. We need to do a much better job of thinking about transit improvements as parts of a rich multimodal network, where new assets complement each other. And we must leverage new technologies to enlarge the footprint of transit so that we make the best use of those major investments.

Some of that is happening. But to a great extent Atlanta’s transit reforms are set to autopilot – with the risk that much of More MARTA will be frittered away on huge expenditures that do little to enhance the mobility of real people. The whole, in other words, could turn out to be less than the sum of its parts.

The Atlanta Streetcar System Plan, developed by Atlanta Beltline Inc. in 2015, is the closest thing the city currently has to a coordinated transit plan. From its start, however, the SSP was flawed by the fact that it was designed by an agency with a vested interest in one project – the Beltline streetcar. And events have now rendered the streetcar system entirely irrelevant.

The SSP envisioned 52.4 miles of “interoperable” fixed-rail transit, anchored by the 22-mile Beltline loop. Those 52.4 miles included the 2.7 mile Downtown Streetcar, which actually predated the SSP.

In the nine years since the SSP was published, however, no additional tracks have been laid. The only project to undergo any design work – the 2.3-mile Streetcar Extension East onto the Atlanta Beltline – is mired in questions about its viability. And almost all the remaining 30 miles of streetcar have, if funded at all, been converted to a different transportation mode (mainly bus rapid transit). So much for interoperability.

Yet, the Streetcar Extension continues on like a zombie, with no significant transportation purpose. And the SSP has been laid bare for what it is: A “plan” designed mainly to rationalize a single expensive project that can’t be justified on its own merits.

MARTA, meanwhile, carries a broader charge than just the city’s transit system. Because Atlanta is providing the funding for More MARTA, the agency’s board has followed Atlanta’s lead in prioritizing how that money is spent. But that can get awkward when the city’s priorities are more a function of political pressure from special interest groups rather than part of a coherent transit plan.

Another problem: MARTA’s heavy-rail system was initially designed in the 1960s as more of a commuter rail than a traditional urban subway. The agency has edged over the last couple of decades toward more of the kind of urban placemaking that’s been so successful in places like Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. But the system remains weighted toward a kiss-and-ride/park-and-ride model that places little value on a walkable, urban context. Even intown stations like Lindbergh Center are dominated by parking decks to accommodate suburban commuters who arrive by car and maybe ride to the airport.

It’s not surprising then that MARTA’s plans for its central station are geared toward transfers between the rail lines and onto local buses more than toward serving as a human-scaled gathering place in the urban core of a major city.

Finally, Atlanta’s transit plans – such as they are – do little to take advantage of new “micro” modalities. Micromobility (meaning pedestrians, as well as small vehicles such as e-bikes and rideshare scooters) and microtransit (for the most part, on-demand shuttles) are sweeping the world’s most forward-looking cities. They’ve been shown to increase transit ridership and reduce car-dependency. They also strengthen neighborhoods by making short trips faster and more comfortable. And they can be put in service quickly and inexpensively.

In Atlanta, we need not look any further than the Eastside Trail for proof of micromobility’s efficacy. As best we can tell, more pedestrians, cyclists and others currently complete trips on that part of the Beltline than are projected to ride the entire streetcar from downtown to Ponce City Market once the Streetcar Extension East is completed. At the same time, as the MARTA Reach pilot program with Georgia Tech demonstrated, on-demand microtransit can greatly increase the convenience and utility of existing heavy-rail lines.

The problem is that such innovations are only being implemented in Atlanta in opportunistic spurts, rather than in a coordinated fashion designed to maximize their impact and to complement transit. What we need is a full-fledged integrated mobility plan that incorporates all these ideas. The sum must total more than its parts.

To be clear, we’re not advocating any delay in desperately needed improvements. Most Tier I More MARTA projects are long overdue and justifiable by any reasonable criteria. BRT along Hank Aaron Drive, Campbellton Road and the Clifton Corridor? Check! The same is true for arterial rapid transit on Metropolitan Parkway and Cleveland Avenue, as well as the planned Greenbriar Transfer Station on the far westside.

We’re also big fans of the mayor’s proposal to install four heavy-rail infill stations and to build a 10-mile BRT line from old Bowen Homes site on Hollowell Parkway to Ponce City Market on North Avenue (with a caveat that a bit more study may be needed before we press the “go” button).

But we have serious concerns about the Five Points Station revamp and the Beltline streetcar. As currently configured, they don’t appear to complement other transit assets. And they might even hinder our ability to take full advantage of such innovative approaches as micromobility and microtransit.

They do, however, clarify one thing: This crisis – and the revenue from More MARTA – presents us with a rare opportunity. We can finally get transit and, more broadly speaking, mobility right — but only if we go about it by thoughtfully planning all our investments as a part of an integrated system.

- Ken Edelstein