The initial project list was built after a long community engagement process following the 2016 More MARTA vote. When the list of projects was approved, former MARTA CEO Jeffrey Parker wrote that it was “a signal moment that promises to fundamentally redefine how people move around Atlanta.” But support for public transit is much stronger within city limits, and More MARTA was designed to move ahead on local projects with local support.Īs of 2019, the project list included 29 new miles of light rail and 36 new miles of bus rapid transit and “ arterial rapid transit,” which runs buses in traffic with signal priority. Voters in the 10-county region around Atlanta emphatically rejected a proposed transportation tax in 2012. Only 7 percent of residents commuted to work by public transit before the pandemic, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. A history of racialized opposition to transit has prevented MARTA from establishing strong connections between suburbs and the city.
“ reflected a hunger for significant transit expansion within the city limits, and I think that’s why you see disappointment in the project list - because we’re taxing ourselves for more and we’re not getting more yet.”Ītlanta has had a tough time making progress on regional public transit. The voters feel the same way,” says City Councilmember Amir Farokhi, who chairs the council’s transportation committee. “I would have expected much more project completion or active implementation at this point, and I’m not alone. But local officials and residents also worry about MARTA’s ability to execute projects quickly enough to take advantage of the infusion of support for public transit in a historically car-centric city. The paring down of the More MARTA program is partly a reflection of the painful choices that transit agencies all over the country are making as they deal with pandemic-related construction delays, higher material and labor costs, lower ridership and smaller budgets. And the agency recently told the City Council that it will only actively pursue nine of the 17 projects that had been on its priority list. Two light rail routes that were included in the initial list of projects approved by MARTA’s board in 2018 have been switched to bus rapid transit. MARTA is only now breaking ground on its first bus rapid transit expansion since the More MARTA program was approved. Seven years later, little work has been completed and the scope of the program continues to narrow. With other voter-approved funds already going to support MARTA’s operations, the More MARTA Atlanta program was dedicated specifically to capital expansion: new train lines, new bus lines, new streetcar extensions and new stations. The measure was meant to bring in around $2.7 billion for the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) over 40 years through a new half-penny sales tax.
In 2016, Atlanta voters approved a plan to dramatically expand public transit service and provide more alternatives to the city’s infamously congested car commute - what a writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution once described as “the mundane kind of misery that passes for normal.” Advocates and political leaders worry about the slow pace of progress and its impacts on mobility, housing affordability and public confidence in the More MARTA Atlanta program.It is also pursuing bus rapid transit on two corridors that were originally planned for light rail.MARTA is indefinitely delaying about half the projects that it planned to build with the proceeds of a sales tax approved by voters in 2016.
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