The state of Georgia has a really good track record of creating regional transit agencies, but none of them have a good track record in actually building regional transit.
That reality resurfaced last week when the House Transportation Committee passed HB 1358, which would have abolished the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) and the Atlanta-region Transit LINK Authority (The ATL) by folding them into a reconfigured State Road and Tollway Authority (SRTA). GRTA was established in 1999, and shortly thereafter, SRTA was given expanded powers. The ATL was created in 2018.
While HB 1358 did not pass the Georgia House on Feb. 29, few believe it has gone away.
“We are operating under the assumption that the idea is not dead,” said Seth Millican, executive director of the Georgia Transportation Alliance.
Millican added that if it resurfaces, the bill could have a “seismic” impact on the future of transit in the Atlanta region.
State Rep. Phil Olaleye (D-Atlanta) agreed.
“It’s never dead,” Olaleye said. “It has been hurried and so fast. There are more questions than answers as it relates to this proposed legislation.”
The 34-page bill came as a surprise to most people in regional transportation and planning circles. It is believed the governor’s office supports the concept, but not necessarily every aspect of the bill.
The merits would be streamlining the alphabet soup of transit agencies and bringing a more consolidated vision to transit implementation. On the other hand, the bill as proposed would basically dissolve the GRTA Xpress bus service. A major area of concern is who would be at the table making decisions. A big fear is that the state would be calling the shots without ample participation from regional leaders.
“There are so many consequences and downstream implications, we can’t wrap our hands around it,” Olaleye said. “We just haven’t given ourselves enough time to bring everybody together to look at the potential costs and benefits. Given how consequential this piece of legislation could be, why rush into this? Let’s take the time to bring all the relevant stakeholders to crunch the numbers and analyze it.”
Transit in Atlanta has been a sad story of starts and stops.
When MARTA was passed in 1971 by the City of Atlanta and the counties of Fulton and DeKalb, the future looked bright. A transit system was built to serve those three jurisdictions, and the hope was that other counties would join in — creating a regional network of rail and buses.
Unfortunately, that never came to pass. Atlanta fell behind other cities — namely San Francisco and Washington D.C. — that started building rail transit system at the same time. But those cities kept expanding their transit systems while Atlanta did not.
Why? Because the state of Georgia has never fully embraced transit, either as a financial or operating partner.
Gov. Roy Barnes tried. Barnes created GRTA in 1999, the first year he was in office, as a way to build a regional transit system.
“Yes, I had a big plan I was working on,” Barnes said in a telephone interview on March 3. “I was in the process of buying the rail line between Atlanta and Macon.”
Barnes also wanted to build a regional transit network of both heavy rail and light rail, including a possible service to Chattanooga. Eventually, he envisioned combining MARTA and GRTA. At the same time, SRTA was expected to be the financing agency that could provide state funds for transit through tolls and other funding.
But then Barnes lost his reelection in 2002, and those plans evaporated.
“Getting rid of GRTA is shortsighted,” Barnes said. “You need one coordinating authority to make sure everything fits together. GRTA needs to be utilized rather than dismantled. GRTA can provide the framework for what we have been talking about for a number of years.”
Barnes believes the need for a regional transit system is as great as ever.
“The Atlanta region has been the economic engine for the state,” said Barnes, who understands the state would not have been able to attract the 1996 Summer Olympics, three Super Bowls and the 2026 World Cup if it did not have the backbone of MARTA rail. “Our inability to build out a regional rail and bus network will impact our economic competitiveness as a region.”
If the Atlanta region doesn’t build transit, Barnes said the alternative will be more gridlock. And because it will take 10, 15, 20, 25 years to build out a regional transit network, Georgia cannot keep putting it off.
“We have never invested in a regional transit system,” Barnes said. “The only thing we have invested in is roads and bridges.”
Barnes also is not convinced that bus rapid transit – the favored mode for most of Atlanta’s regional plans – is the solution.
“There’s a place for bus, but I do not think BRT is the solution because when you have major congestion, the bus still has to be on the road,” Barnes said. “The reason people don’t ride buses is because mass transit has to be competitive on time.”
Of course, the Atlanta region has had multiple regional transit plans, including the comprehensive Concept 3 – a vision adopted by the 13 counties through the Transit Planning Board through the Atlanta Regional Commission in 2010.
But state leaders at the time did not embrace the concept.
Doug Hooker, former executive director of both the Atlanta Regional Commission and SRTA, said it all boils down to political will.
“Although there are many residents in the region who would like to have robust transit options, we have not yet developed the political and public will to do so,” Hooker said. “So much of our ability to have a robust regional transit system must be within a framework acceptable to the state.”
Tom Weyandt, a member of The ATL board and a long-time public servant in regional transportation and planning, highlighted the new ATL Rides app as an example of how transit agencies can be more integrated.
“The Atlanta region has wonderful opportunities to expand transit in many directions,” Weyandt said. “I hope we as a community will figure out how to do that and how we can do that together.”
In many ways, Barnes was the last Georgia governor who also served as the de facto “Metro Mayor.” He understood that Georgia’s economic vitality depends on the state investing in the Atlanta region’s infrastructure, including transit.
“It’s frightening,” Barnes said of the state’s reluctance to invest in transit. “By not having a regional transportation plan that includes rail transit, we were not going to be able to sustain growth in the way we would like.”
Roy Barnes is right. Frequency is everything. We live next to a MARTA station and my adult children won’t use it because it lacks frequency.
Consider this. In the first months of the Ukraine war, Kyiv slowed its train system to 8 minutes between stops in off hours. MARTA runs at 15-20 minutes between trains at off hours. This means a trip from Decatur to the Fox Theater can take an hour on a Friday night. Longer coming back.
There is only one cure for this: vote for Democrats, and against Republicans, every time there is an election. Especially state legislative elections, and governor. Repeat, for DECADES.
This is a great article, and I especially love this quote:
“The state of Georgia has a really good track record of creating regional transit agencies, but none of them have a good track record in actually building regional transit.”
That said, this article contains a big mistake (made by former Governor Barnes). Gov. Barnes confuses “bus” transit with “bus rapid transit”.
Gov. Barnes is quoted as saying:
“There’s a place for bus, but I do not think BRT is the solution because when you have major congestion, the bus still has to be on the road,” Barnes said.
But BRT has dedicated lanes, so the bus is not on the (shared) road, it is on its own separate bus lane. BRT is protected from road congestion.
Of course, if BRT is implemented as not BRT (i.e. as simple bus service on regular roads,) then Gov. Barnes is correct. But the same holds for light rail: if it mixes with traffic, it will also get stuck in traffic (as we see with today’s streetcar.)
In transportation talk, getting stuck in congestion is not technology specific, it is alignment specific.
The key factor in the success of BRT is that it is implemented as BRT, with a dedicated alignment. Done right, BRT is less expensive to build and faster to deploy and provides the same transit service as, say, light rail. And Atlanta’s very wide surface streets have ample space for BRT lanes.