“I like the choices of those two new board members,” Dickens said. Dickens replaced two City of Atlanta members on MARTA’s board with his own picks – former Atlanta City Councilmember Jennifer Ide and Jacob Tzegaegbe, a senior transportation advisor to former Atlanta Mayor Kiesha Lance Bottoms. We want to see Metropolitan and Cleveland Avenue projects completed, and we want to see these things done on time and on budget,’” Dickens said in an interview on March 3.Īt long last, the City of Atlanta leadership is becoming more engaged in MARTA’s decision-making. We want to see the Summerhill BRT, completed soon. We want to see Campbellton Road BRT completed soon. “It’s important for me, the City Council and the public to say: ‘MARTA, we want to see projects delivered. “I believe there should be a return of some, if not most, of the money that was spent on bus operations and expansions back to the More MARTA capital funding pool,” Shipman said in an interview over the weekend.Ītlanta Mayor Andre Dickens also is taking MARTA to task. Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman with MARTA CEO Collie Greenwood after the March 1 transportation committee meeting. Several councilmembers – Amir Farokhi, Marci Overstreet, Keisha Sean Waites, Antonio Lewis and Matt Westmoreland among others – questioned MARTA on how it has spent its money so far, whether the sequencing of projects was equitable, who was holding the agency accountable, and if the scaling back of plans would cause the public to lose trust.Ĭity Council President Doug Shipman was especially direct in his questioning of Collie Greenwood, MARTA’s general manager, over the amount of money spent so far on bus enhancements. In fact, MARTA had projected that over the life of the More MARTA tax until 2032, $2.4 billion would be raised, and only $238 million, or 10 percent, would have been spent on bus enhancements. Of the $394.8 million collected thus far from the More MARTA sales tax, $180.7 million, or about 46 percent, has been spent on bus operations and enhancements leaving fewer dollars for capital expansion. Several transit lines once promised to be light rail (LRT) – namely Campbellton Road and Clifton Corridor – have now been scaled down to bus rapid transit (BRT) because of costs and expediency. That list has been pared down from 17 projects in 2018 and from as many as 70 in 2016. And only one project is slated to be rail – the extension of the Atlanta Streetcar connecting to the Atlanta BeltLine and continuing on to Ponce City Market. Atlanta City Council’s Transportation Committee hears from MARTA at its March 1 meeting (Photo by Maria Saporta.)Īccording to a schedule MARTA released at the March 1 Atlanta City Council Transportation Committee meeting, there’s now a list of nine projects expected to be completed by 2028. This regional ineptness will be addressed in a future column.īut my latest heartbreak has come from the scaling back of plans to be funded by the More MARTA half-penny sales tax passed in 2016. Plus, the Georgia Department of Transportation has pretty much-ignored transit spending in metro Atlanta. And having our major transit system, MARTA, being out of the capital expansion business for more than two decades.Ī major problem is that in addition to MARTA, we have multiple agencies – Atlanta Regional Commission, The ATL (Atlanta-Region Transit Link Authority), the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and the State Road and Tollway Authority competing for limited federal dollars and minimal state funding. Anemic efforts to secure federal dollars for capital expansion. Lack of state and regional funding for the capital expansion of transit in metro Atlanta. Less is less with More MARTA projects - SaportaReport CloseĪs a lover of transit - especially rail - my heart has been broken repeatedly by the unrealized opportunities metro Atlanta has had over several decades.
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