MARTA is hosting the final virtual and in-person meetings this week in a series of public engagement sessions about the draft plan for the agency’s NextGen Bus Network.
The new network will triple the number of residents with access to bus service at least every 15 minutes, improve transit options for communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, and expand access to jobs, fresh groceries, education, healthcare, and other essential destinations, Andrea Foard, a project manager on MARTA’s redesign team, explained during a public meeting.
“If you look at Atlanta’s growth pattern over the last 15 years…there have been spots that have grown much faster than the rest of the city. I do think that this network redesign is smartly trying to take that into account. To say, where are people actually living? What is the potential for them to be riders? It’s not just about frequency per se, but it’s also about population coverage and job coverage and where those things actually are now,” Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman said.
Riders who want to make their voices heard can fill out MARTA’s survey about the bus service changes, leave a comment through the website, or attend one of the upcoming meetings.
- Wednesday, Feb. 19 at 12 p.m.: DeKalb virtual meeting
- Thursday, Feb. 20 at 12 p.m.: City of Atlanta virtual meeting
- Thursday, Feb. 20 at 12 p.m.: City of Atlanta in-person meeting at MLK Recreation Center (110 Hillard Street Northeast, Atlanta, Georgia 30312)
- Thursday, Feb. 20 at 6 p.m.: DeKalb in-person meeting at East Central DeKalb Community and Senior Center (4885 Elam Road, Stone Mountain, Georgia 30083)
- Friday, Feb. 21 at 12 p.m.: South Fulton virtual meeting
- Saturday, Feb. 22 at 10 a.m.: Open House in-person at MARTA headquarters (2424 Piedmont Road Northeast, Atlanta, 30324)
These events will round out more than 30 public meetings held both online and in person throughout MARTA’s service area since December to inform riders and collect their questions and concerns.
“It’s a huge volume of feedback,” Ryan Van Sickle, Director of Technical Services and Service Planning at MARTA, said. “We’re trying to synthesize comments looking into a number of different aspects of the network. It’s comments about where the network currently goes and places where people have concerns about changes to coverage — maybe a route is moving away from an area.”
Riders from Kirkwood and Old Fourth Ward, for example, have expressed concerns during public meetings about losing routes that served more stops within their neighborhoods.
MARTA has oriented the bus network redesign around prioritizing frequency of service rather than expanding coverage areas. The draft network plan cuts the existing 113 fixed bus routes down to 79 fixed bus routes, which allows 18 corridors to provide service every 15 minutes — up from just five in the existing network. The number of routes with service every 20 minutes would increase from nine to 13.
The bus network redesign doesn’t come with increased funding for public transit, so in order to achieve higher frequency with the same budget, the tradeoff is streamlining routes.
During calls with the public, members of the MARTA team and consultants working on the redesign often reiterated this emphasis on frequency over coverage and pointed out that while the draft network may require a transfer to reach some destinations that used to be served by a single bus route, the higher frequency may actually get riders from point A to point B faster than the existing service.
The move to fewer routes with higher frequency does mean riders will often face a longer trip to reach the bus stop. MARTA is partnering and having conversations with the city and the Georgia Department of Transportation about improvements to pedestrian infrastructure and to park-and-ride lots to help with connectivity, Foard said.
Frequency hopes and fears
“A lot of constituents have been calling for greater frequencies, and that is something that I think is largely embraced, especially by frequent riders and commuters,” Shipman said.
In addition to focusing on the frequency of buses, MARTA also began increasing the frequency of rail service during peak hours in December by adding an additional train to each line during the busiest parts of the day.
“I think we’re all hopeful that greater frequency will lead to a return of ridership because we know that ridership has not fully recovered from Covid,” Shipman said.
But riders do have some concerns about how often the current bus service is experiencing cancellations due to a shortage of drivers. As many as 20 to 25 percent of bus operators aren’t showing up to work on a daily basis, MARTA CEO Collie Greenwood said in September.
“The question really is, can you increase frequencies on certain routes and actually deliver that frequency? What is the improvement to labor and to actual execution that’s going to allow you to do that?” Shipman said. “A really bad outcome here would be setting expectations for higher frequencies and then not being able to deliver.”
The NextGen Bus Network team said they’re considering this during the redesign process.
“That’s one of the big factors in the actual shape and the amount of service in the network. We’re really trying to make sure that what we have proposed in this draft and the final version are well-tuned to our staffing and our ability to actually operate it,” Van Sickle said. “We’ve seen other redesigns where they were very ambitious and then did not have the staffing to support it and had to scale back. So we’re really working to make sure that we have those things in sync as we move the project forward at every step.”
On-demand zones
One new feature in the draft plan is on-demand zones, which are designed to help fill the gap for riders who are no longer served by a bus route. The service will work similarly to Uber or Lyft, allowing riders to hail a vehicle within 30 minutes.
This type of service has been piloted in certain parts of MARTA’s service area, and on-demand zones were selected in the draft network based on factors like household income and the number of residents without a car.
MARTA put out a request for proposals for contracts to provide the technology and the staffing for this service, which will use vehicles that are wheelchair accessible.
What’s next
After this phase of public engagement wraps up, the team will take the feedback collected and refine the bus network draft into a final version.
“There’s a lot of work left to be done in the refinement phase,” Foard said, including making adjustments that can be made based on rider concerns and showing the public how their feedback was incorporated into the final service plan.
“We’re going to be looking at the routing itself. We’ll be looking at the timing. Do we have the frequencies on all of these things right? Do we have the right hours of operation?” Van Sickle said. “It’s not just the map; it’s also the frequencies and the time aspects behind the map that we’re really focusing on.”
After that, preparation for MARTA’s public hearing process will come, which will include conversations with stakeholders and the board before the final vote to adopt the NextGen Bus Network plan, Foard said.
“And then there’s the launch piece that comes after that,” she said, which includes a lot of work around rider education and is expected to take place in late 2025.
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