MARTA’s 25th Year
Last night I was among a group of a group of MARTA citizen advocates known as Citizens for Progressive Transit to celebrate MARTA’s 25th year of rail service. We met at the Georgia State station and rode the train to Decatur where we learned why the organization was formed and why the issue of saving MARTA is so urgent.
Here are a few items I managed to copy down:
- MARTA is among the ten largest transit agencies in the United States. Among these ten agencies, MARTA is the only one that does not receive any sort of operating funds from the state.
- A recent study (anyone have a link?) showed that among comparable rail systems, the cost per passenger on MARTA is the lowest. That means that MARTA is among the most cost efficient of the transit agencies.
- Asphalt advocates claim that asphalt is cheaper than rail, but they’re only referring to the fixed cost. When you take the total cost into account — fixed plus variable — rail is the cheapest alternative because it services the largest number of passengers per operator.
- When MARTA was able to do so, they set up a rainy day fund, but that fund is currently running out. If nothing is done at the state level, there will be (not could be — will be) more service cutbacks at every level of operation within the next twelve months. These cutbacks may include eliminating weekend service, or even shutting down entirely.
Given the benefits to the local economy and mobility, this place ITP, the place we call our home, would suffer terrible consequences for allowing MARTA to shut down. We can all make sure we do our part to let the governor and our public servants on the state level know that such a scenario would be irresponsible and inexcusable.
July 4th, 2004 at 2:35 am
One of the great tragedies is that pols from both parties who live outside the region run against MARTA, rather than explaining to the citizens from all regions of the state how MARTA benefits them. No MARTA to the airport, To Lenox, To Perimeter, and to the Dome, then far less convention traffic.
If you take a third of the convention related revenue away from the state, lots of programs in rural Georgia suffer. It’s not just Atlantans who benefit from MARTA, it’s everyone.
July 7th, 2004 at 12:24 pm
Has anyone at MARTA looked into additional funding from the Federal government, say the EPA or Department of Transportation?
If Atlanta and GA as a state want to avoid being a enviromental disaster like L.A. We, the citizens and our elected politcal officials, need to get busy before it is to late. To prevent an unhealthy enviroment is less expensive than to try and clean up the mess. It is in the best interest of the entire population of the state to work togather to prevent loss of jobs and tourism that will result when the Georgia State Capital is a enviromental disaster. Who wants to visit or invest in business in a state that doesn’t even care about being unhealthy? Air and water pollution affect the entire state not just a city, maybe our legistative representives need to keep this fact in mind.
July 13th, 2004 at 12:53 pm
My guess is that the study you heard about comes from the Texas Transportation Institute, since that’s where I went for some comparative data on MARTA when I was researching a story in 2002. They’ve got some Atlanta data for their 2003 Urban Mobility Study.
My other guess is that being the most efficient transit agency is something like being the least annoying Spice Girl. (Which is Sporty.)
The “MARTA isn’t funded by the state” argument never cut all that much ice with me, even if economic growth in Atlanta benefits the state as a whole (which it does). New York would join Georgia in a heartbeat in that category, if Pataki et al. could figure out a way to do it.
One historical note — at this point in the NYC subway’s history (1929; the first subway ran in 1904) the system looked a great deal more like Atlanta’s current situation than it does like NYC’s, in that there were three competing transit agencies (IMD, IRT and BMT) competing with each other, not coordinating very well, and suffering from various degrees of egregious financial mismanagement. I believe the city didn’t control all three lines until sometime around World War II. And if Brooklyn and Queens had had the degree of independence from NYC government that Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton Counties have had from the city of Atlanta, I doubt the connections between the boroughs would have been nearly as extensive as they are now. In other words, I suspect that a great deal of the reason why the NYC subway is so much bigger (in every sense) than MARTA is that the NYC government had a greater ability to bully than Atlanta’s has had. Whatever improvements happen to MARTA have to happen in the context of a much smaller amount of city power.
(I know more about the history of the NYC subway than I know about those of the Chicago El, the DC Metro, the Boston T, and BART/MUNI, which is why I’m not making those comparisons here; but certainly someone should.)