Priorities & Distractions
By
Kevin H. Posey
Have you ridden MARTA lately? I have, unfortunately. East Lake MARTA station is a short walk from my house, or at least it would be if the sidewalk wasn’t narrow, overgrown, and directly adjacent to the sole remaining stretch of 4–lane Dekalb Avenue that functions as a race track. To say the walk is unsafe is like saying that smoking might not be a good choice on the Hindenburg. But, I’m sure that Dekalb County officials could likely produce a set of statistics showing how few people had been killed along that sidewalk.
Once I got on the train, I saw cigarette butts on the seats, a man angrily murmuring to himself and his imaginary friends, and a level of grubbiness that made it clear that the car hadn’t been cleaned since the Obama Administration. What I didn’t see were any MARTA police officers. I rode all the way to Peachtree Center, changing at Five Points, but not one officer was present. This is an anecdote that I’m sure MARTA would refute with some statistics that showed how hardly anyone has been murdered or picked up a deadly infection on a MARTA train in the last few months.
However, statistics don’t matter in either case. Perceptions do. Unlike Metro in DC, which gets heavy ridership from people of ALL walks of life— including me when I lived there— MARTA seems to have been relegated to being the mode of last resort for those who can’t afford anything else. It is as if those in charge are unable to make it feel safe and clean enough to entice riders who can easily afford using something else, like the bus-sized SUV parked in front of their house.
It would be easy to stop here and say that this is all the fault of local officials, but much of the blame falls on a group of individuals who hold no office, are few in number, but are very loud. They call themselves Beltline Rail Now (BRN).
Their antics have successfully distracted local politicians from important yet mundane matters, like station access, transit security, and general maintenance, in favor of an unwanted, destructive streetcar project costing hundreds of millions of dollars for just a short stub of track. They are very, very, VERY unhappy that this project is now little more than a zombie: dead, but still twitching a bit.
You may have read about their latest antics recently in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which was once a respected newspaper but now is, um, a blog? The AJC breathlessly reported that BRN supporters recently turned up at a MARTA Board meeting to denounce the board’s decision to cancel the Eastside Beltline streetcar.
How vast was this protest? A whopping 20 speakers, or 0.0037% of the city’s population, who proceeded to yell at MARTA Board members and accuse them of selling out to Big Oil, a group that I’m sure was just in a panic about a two-mile-long streetcar extension. Even as I type this, BRN supporters are mounting an email campaign to harass a vast Google Doc list of people, including school board members, civic association leaders, and probably dog-walkers. If you’re reading this, you probably got one, too! It’s all an effort to intimidate everyone into spending $200 million-per-mile in taxpayer dollars for their little trolley instead of any other transit project in the region.
If BRN were as committed to transit and equity as they claim to be, they would have embraced the Mayor’s initial plan to reprioritize transit on the Beltline to the Southside and add infill MARTA stations that would create heavy rail connections to the Beltline that the streetcar wouldn’t offer. The Southside is an area where a lot of people have poor transit access and can’t afford a car.
Instead, they denounced Mayor Dickens for putting others ahead of their own extremely gentrified neighborhoods. If getting more people out of their cars and onto transit was BRN’s priority, they would call for more maintenance and security on MARTA’s trains and buses, plus better access to stations. Instead, they ignore such mundane matters and distract everyone with their screams of betrayal because the city won’t destroy the Beltline everyone enjoys today just to stick a streetcar on it.
So, I can’t complain too much about MARTA officials, city councilmembers, and county commission members for failing to fix some of our glaringly obvious transportation problems. It’s hard to focus when a small, but loud, group is bent on being disruptive rather than constructive.
Note: This column previously appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of the Lake Claire Clarion and is used with their permission.
