Two extremes of Atlanta transportation: trains and cars. Unfortunately, cars heavily dominate our city to the detriment of both walkability and transit ridership; and the number of people who live in walkable distance to train lines is severely limited. But we can change that.
I'd like to see the city build a denser kind of urbanism -- one that prioritizes the vehicles in the top photo (MARTA rail) and lessens the dominance of the vehicles in the second (cars on I-75/85).
And if we do it right, many trips could be taken by sidewalk or by bike lane. That's what density can bring. Meanwhile, car-scaled sprawl hurts us all.
Why not just extend MARTA rail for many miles in all directions to reach people where they are now? It's not simple.
While we should always keep trying to find funding for greatly expanding rail lines in Atlanta, the sad political and economic reality is that rail expansion will happen in small pieces over very long periods of time, if it happens at all. For the foreseeable future, heavy-rail transit is so expensive to build into the suburbs that Metro Atlanta and state leaders aren't even seriously considering it. I'm not suggesting we abandon the dream of expansion, but it's important that we don't put all of our eggs in that one basket when it comes to undoing car dependency.
We need to focus heavily on building walkable (and affordable) density near the existing MARTA lines, while better serving suburbs with less expensive options like buses or on-demand shuttles. And of course it's possible to build walkable spaces in suburbs as well and to serve them with buses.
My point is that land-use has to shift in order to make better transit access possible, both in the suburbs and in the city.
The bulk of the current urbanism of Metro Atlanta was built very intentionally for cars by way of massive freeway investment, car-scaled zoning, and more. Retrofitting efficient transit into that sprawling footprint isn't a one-note task; we shouldn't simply ask for train lines to be expanded as if that's the only change needed. The full solution requires bold reinvention of our entire urban design.
