Inman Park Stations Itself Full-up
An amazing thing happened on Thursday. The Inman Park MARTA station’s northern parking lot was full. Absolutely full. Before this year, this was a rarity at best. This shows some progress and some problems. First, it shows that MARTA ridership is on the rise and that demand for frequent service will cause people to drive a little further.
That demonstrates that MARTA should seriously consider extending trains on the Proctor Creek Line to the Decatur Station. That would both help move people to one of Atlanta’s top restaurant destinations and let more people use the Eastlake Station while still capturing the benefits of two trains.
It also shows that demand is still high for parking. Some of that comes from the closure of the Parking Lot for the King Memorial Station. There used to be parking there, but it has now been leased to Grady Hospital for their employees and the public can no longer use it, but mostly it comes from the general publics discomfort with buses. That discomfort is three fold. First, because MARTA does not get enough financing, it has had to consistently pull back on its schedule. The frequent changes in schedule have also made people leery of the buses. Lastly there are social economic issues that still remain.
Still, it’s good to see the system prosper and to witness people using it in smart ways.
January 15th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Isn’t the logical place for train station expansion north Fulton?
Co-workers communting from there swear they’d take MARTA rather than face the traffic on 400 if they could. I was a frequent East Lake station user, plenty of parking, but why not drive a little further to Edgewood Candler if on the way home I can take the sparsely populated clean new train that stops there instead of waiting in filthy Five Points for the packed train that goes the all the way to Indian Creek? I’ll never understand why they think having a train run half the length of the East-West line does anyone any good.
January 17th, 2007 at 12:01 am
The problem with expanding MARTA with the current funding structure is that it’s so damn expensive. MARTA is a heavy rail system that costs much more than most people realize. If the system was expanded into Cobb and Gwinnett it could then look like a real regional system like D.C’s Metro. It may not go everywhere but at least it wouldn’t look like some 70’s era train system.
There has been talk to expanding MARTA to Alpharetta and to the Perimeter on the E/W line but without better funding, I don’t see this happening.
Gwinnett is actually studying a MARTA expansion into their county. If this happened it’d be a watershed event, rivaling only the creation of the system itself.
January 17th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
If you want MARTA expansion, and better funding for transit in general, tell your state Senator and state Representative. This is important! State legislators can be surprisingly accessible to people who live and vote in their district.
Make it clear, politely, that your support of their continuation in office depends on their support of funding for transit.
January 19th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Now if only the Senators and Reps with MARTA in their districts had any influence and those that didn’t have it didn’t see MARTA as a one way trip to their own political demise. . .