Facing a $20-million budget shortfall, MARTA is applying all sorts of draconian remedies intended to deal with the problem. First is the elimination of about 100 bus routes, almost all of them originating in low-income areas. MARTA is also planning employee furloughs, early retirement offers and a reduction in corporate discounts for monthly TransCard purchases. In addition, there will be fewer trains running, with longer waits at each station.
So much for "rapid" transit.
Media reports indicate that MARTA board chairman William Moseley Jr. understands that such measures are bound to upset folks. But that's the extent of his concern. There is no talk from MARTA of a long-term solution to the chronic budget shortfalls and low ridership levels that have plagued the organization since its creation. The only people seemingly interested in tackling the problem head-on are the members of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority.
But GRTA has enough problems of its own. It has been slow out of the gate with visible solutions to metro Atlanta's traffic woes, and its efforts are stymied at every turn by suburban conservatives who consider GRTA a threat to their efforts to keep MARTA out of every county except Fulton and DeKalb. To the mostly Republican political operatives who run counties like Cobb and Gwinnett, GRTA is simply doing the bidding of that rascally liberal tree-hugger, King Roy Barnes.
Meanwhile, metro traffic gets worse every day.
For a long time now, commuters have been voting with their collective foot on the gas pedal. Given the choice between spending $3.50 for a round-trip MARTA fare and driving to work, 96 percent of us choose our cars. For MARTA's board and management, the solution to their fiscal woes is to cut service, not to forge bold new solutions that encourage expansion and increased use of the system. GRTA, it would seem, is on its own to solve the problem.
Some suburban conservatives, gleeful over MARTA's troubles, are demanding that state government consider taking over the system, believing that it can somehow wave a magic wand over Atlanta's traffic problems and transform MARTA into an efficient, self-sustaining transit system. This idea comes from the same people who have fought tooth and nail to keep MARTA out of their own counties -- because, in their minds, it brings black people into places they shouldn't be.
But the suburban agenda is hostile toward MARTA for other reasons, too. A great many of these folks are beholden to developers whose lifeblood is the endless construction of strip malls, office complexes and retail circuses conceived and built without the slightest consideration of mass transit. These developers, and the Caucasian politicians in their pockets, graduated long ago from the old school of transportation logic, where the solution to heavy traffic is to widen the roads.
But that's all just so much white noise. The fact is that it's difficult to get anybody excited about MARTA when only 4 percent of the metro population uses it.
It hasn't yet been two years since Roy Barnes created GRTA -- so it's only fair that the new transportation authority be given a few years to prove it can accomplish what the governor promised. Atlanta's transportation problems weren't created in a day, nor will MARTA alone solve them. And you can be sure that the inadequate bus systems created by Cobb and Clayton counties will do little to help. They simply make it more difficult to get around the metro area, even for the tiny percentage of people who actually use mass transit.
MARTA's board of directors recently spent a considerable amount of time on a proposal to rename the West End train station after civil rights hero Ralph David Abernathy Jr. The proposal failed because local residents wanted to keep the familiar "West End" name. But that didn't stop the MARTA board -- on which Abernathy's widow, Juanita, sits -- from spending weeks on the idea.
Such distractions do little to build confidence in our metro transit system. It's the same system that's telling Atlanta's poorest residents -- those who need its services most -- to pound sand.
Jeff Berry rides MARTA to the airport ... sometimes.
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