Read about sustainable roundtable at SaportaReport
BY Jeanne Bonner • December 4, 2009
Well, darn if you can never tell where I might show up on the Web!
I covered Southface’s Sustainable Roundtable this morning for SaportaReport.
The topic, one near and dear to my heart and yours, was the future of transit in Atlanta, and the featured speakers were Erik Steavens, director of the Georgia Department of Transportation’s Intermodal Programs, and Lee Biola, president of Citizens For Progressive Transit.
The event gave us, as I put it in the piece, reasons for optimism and reasons for skepticism. Read the piece here.
So what’s with the photo above?
Well, my plan was to take MARTA to the event, which was held at All Saints Episcopal Church in Midtown across from the North Avenue station.
They encourage you to take something other than your car to the event, and in fact there’s even a gift drawing for the folks who come by bus, train, foot, bike or camel.
But as I drove toward the King MARTA station this morning, and I gazed up at the mammoth infrastructure separating the rail platform from the ground, and I realized I only had one Breezecard with me, and I feared it had a low balance, and I remembered the trouble I had the last time loading more money onto the card, and I fretted I would be late for the 7:30 a.m. event and Maria would kill me, I decided spur of the moment to just drive there.
And it took five minutes, literally, and then I parked in the garage next to the church, and I either didn’t have time to feel guilty or maybe I just remembered the photo that I had taken over the summer.
The photo above. Is it modern art? Is it a torture device? Who built it and where the hell is that guy now?
I mean, I just thought: I don’t have the time to get to the train and make my event on time.
And actually it wasn’t the frequency of the trains that worried me; at that time of the morning, the trains pass regularly.
It was the whole preamble required to reach the train. Part of the issue was that I had started the journey in my car, rather than taking the bus to the station.
But part of it was just the sense that as close as I was to the station, getting to the train would probably have taken an additional five minutes — five minutes that instead I used to drive to the event.
Believe me: I am sorry. I really want to take MARTA when I’m going somewhere that’s literally right next to a MARTA station.
But I also wish it could be more convenient to take MARTA. For example, I wish the 99 bus which links the King MARTA station with the North Avenue MARTA station actually stopped near my house so I could have just taken it directly to the event, rather than use the station is a necessary conduit.
You see that a lot with the MARTA system; the part of MARTA that’s most convenient to me is a bus whose sole goal is taking me to a station, where essentially I start my journey over again.
MARTA released a list of schedule changes this week that may sound minor but on closer inspection reveal a widening gap between people who must take MARTA and people who could take MARTA.
A number of bus routes will now reduce their off-peak frequency to every 40 minutes or 45 minutes, or in one case 50 minutes. It’s only 5 additional minutes, but unfortunately people don’t treat a city’s mass transit system like Amtrak; people want to take something that passes more often.
Maybe that’s wrong but that’s how it works. So if you don’t have a car, and you have to get to work, you will just suck it up and deal with those additional five minutes.
But if you were thinking about being a rider by choice, a class of rider MARTA wants to attract, those additional five minutes probably make it just a little less likely that you are ever going to bother to take that bus that passes right near your house.
Of course as I’ve said before, this isn’t something you can put on the front stoop of MARTA’s house in terms of blame. The transit system is a day away from holding a bake sale to raise funds, and that’s not for lack of trying on their part to change their funding situation.
And as I’ve said before, no one who is powerful truly cares about MARTA or indeed uses it ever. So that’s why the No. 16 bus will now pass every 45 minutes on weekends, instead of every 40 minutes. You can see all of the schedule changes here.
It probably won’t affect your life. But it will affect someone’s life, and it certainly won’t bring us any closer to a city where transit is truly valued, and truly used.
Just my thoughts here. In fact, I probably have to say these are my comments alone, and not Maria’s!
Thanks for listening.
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It shouldn’t be surprising that it’s faster and easier to make most trips within the city by car, even with the presence of MARTA — and it isn’t the fault of the transit system or the Breeze card machines. The fault lies squarely with the politicians and developers who, for several decades, allowed residences and commercial structures intown to be built entirely with auto transport in mind.
Sprawling, single-use residential neighborhoods filled with nothing but detached, single-story bungalows with driveways; suburban-style shopping centers separated from the road by massive surface lots that are dangerous to walk through; monolithic office buildings with no ground-floor retail space ; these are the things that have kept Atlanta from being easy to traverse by any means other than a personal car.
I’ll bet the built environment where you live is very much like the one where I live in that it caters primarily or exclusively to cars: driveways, surface parking, roads with no bike lanes and few if any utilitarian amenities in walking distance of most residents. Even though I live in a condo one block off of Peachtree in Midtown and not far from a MARTA station, it’s still easier to drive most places rather than walk or take public transportation.
My wife and I have an arrangement where I get to take one night per week away from daddy duty with our boy and have a ‘MARTA adventure’. I walk to the train and go downtown to take photos of the great architecture (yes, there is really some down there) and eat at a cool restaurant like Social or Peasant Bistro. It gives me a chance to pretend I’m in a more compact, walkable city than Atlanta really is and to imagine what living in here might be like some day if things head in the right direction with development and transit.
I’d have to get a book and study just to figure out how to pay for a bus or train ride. I had a handle on it when you could use actual money, maybe you still can. In my MARTA days I walked 3 houses away, got a bus, and read until the end of the route 2 blocks from work, all in daylight. I prefer not to use up my adventures on MARTA but I do like Darin’s idea.