MARTA has prioritized installing light rail on radial lines that have existing bus routes and postponed the desperately needed BeltLine circle past 2045. A transfer penalty is the real and measured cost of the uncertainty in making connections when we are forced to change buses. This is particularly evident for residents in the southern quadrants that lack the quantity of jobs, education, healthcare, parks, recreation, groceries, arts, restaurants, and stores that the northern quadrants offer. Southern residents have to pay a transfer penalty to visit the northern quadrants. None of these bus routes pass between quadrants which makes a radial grid without any circle lines! Without circle lines, Atlantans cannot make reasonably direct trips between non-downtown points. Second, MARTA’s bus routes move along radial lines within four quadrants. As a result, very few City of Atlanta residents ever go downtown and even less actually live there. It is a city of neighborhoods with activity centers all over the city with relatively little to do downtown. Atlanta is the opposite of having a dominant downtown. Unfortunately for Atlanta residents, MARTA is not a typical radial grid.įirst, the radial grid is only efficient if the downtown is so dominant that it can justify the huge amount of service converging there. A passenger should be able to make a reasonably direct trip between non-downtown points by using one of the circle lines in combination with one of the radial lines. Normally, this radial grid can work just as well as a rectangular grid. ![]() The BasicsĪtlanta’s MARTA is not set up as a rectangular grid, but as a radial grid with its center in downtown. The following comes from The Basics by Jarrett Walker, one of the country’s most influential thinkers on transit. So Atlanta only needs a refresher on how an ideal public transportation system should operate. Luckily the City of Atlanta Planning department has laid out our path forward for a dense community. ![]() Unfortunately, the Atlanta residents that lived in our city when we had a dense community and a public transportation that made Europeans envious are long gone. Resulting in commute times far longer than other cities and Atlanta being the example of what not to do.Ītlanta hasn’t always been the butt of transportation jokes. He explained how the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia have been consistently selected to “Increase Mobility” over “Increasing Proximity”. Nick Donohue, Deputy Secretary of Transportation, Commonwealth of Virginia presented the balancing act needed to achieve regional accessibility. This idea was laid out succinctly to multiple Atlanta transportation officials and politicians at Transportation for America’s Capital Ideas Conference in December.
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