The City of Atlanta has always been rather proud of itself. Tall buildings, a big airport on the south side of town, arts, entertainment and cuisine. In so many ways, Atlanta offers a dose of sin for those deprived individuals who are not fortunate enough to call the City of Atlanta as home. The City even promotes itself that way, “The ATL” and all that. It’s like we’re a giant Stuckeys on the Interstate of Life. “See the Two-Headed Calf! The ATL Only 20 Miles”. “Chenille Bedspreads. The ATL Only 15 Miles”. You get the picture.
Needless to say, this high opinion is not always shared by everybody, and there’s more than a little resentment from those outside of The ATL. And, in some cases, the City of Atlanta serves as a cautionary tale who view us as a second-rate Gomorrah. They’ve got due cause; consider that in the 1960′s the suburbanites would drive into town with their kids to stare at the hippies collected at 10th & Peachtree.
[Photo courtesy: Boyd Lewis]
So, in a few words, the City of Atlanta is both a source of entertainment and a source of irritation, all at once. But, our view of the world is a bit shaded, like the “Map of New York”:
And Atlanta’s not even on their map.
So, the City of Atlanta’s view of the world can be pretty self-centered. For example, consider today’s editorial page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, in which the current mayor, Mr. Kasim Reed, avers that the Atlanta Beltline project is a regional transportation project and worthy of receiving funding from the proposed regional transportation tax. To wit:
The Atlanta Beltline, with its direct routes into the heart of the city, provides critical last-mile connectivity to major activity and employment destinations in the downtown and Midtown business districts such as Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, CNN, the Georgia World Congress Center and Piedmont Park. There are more than 100,000 jobs within a quarter mile of these transit routes. In combination with other critical investments on the list, Atlanta’s transit project will strengthen the region’s core.
Key to this statement is the unspoken assumption that the MARTA heavy-rail system is a regional transportation system. Which it currently is not. Because of a variety of issues, MARTA remains a city system that might one day become a regional system. It is not there yet. Consider this statement from “Sales Tax Boosters Press for Transit Overhaul” (Atlanta Business Chronicle, September 16-22, 2011, page 2A):
Supporters of a 1-cent regional transportation sales tax are betting that downplaying the role a polarizing MARTA plays in Atlanta transit will convince voters to pass the tax referendum.
I’m a fan of the Beltline, if for no other reason than it was the project that actually got average people to seriously think about transit solutions to Atlanta’s traffic problems. But the Beltline’s fortunes are inevitably connected to the fortunes of the MARTA heavy rail system. And to call the Beltline a “regional solution” flies in the face of the realities. A “regional” belt line railway solution would go from Marietta to Douglasville to Fairburn, to Jonesboro, to Conyers, to Snellville, to Lawrenceville, to Roswell and back. Now, that’s a belt line.
Needless to say, not everybody in the 11-County regional transportation voting district are as breathless as Mayor Reed. Consider the words of Eva Galambos, mayor of the just-slightly suburban City of Sandy Springs, who points out an inconvenient truth:
A close examination of the Beltline website maps reveals an astounding fact: Not a single segment of the proposed Beltline intersects the MARTA system at MARTA stations.
In other words, folks who will be riding whatever transit system the Beltline might eventually adopt (possibly streetcars) will not be able to get off those conveyances to transfer to MARTA trains at the MARTA stations.
Actually, the Beltline will interface with MARTA at the Lindbergh Station complex, but, overall, it’s not like we haven’t been here before. The City of Atlanta is already enamored with another streetcar project that will do nothing to solve the Atlanta region’s traffic problems; please see here. However good and potentially useful the Beltline project might be, it is beginning to look like just another ego-centric City of Atlanta project to the other voters for the transportation tax.
And it points to the larger fact that we as a region are being asked to vote for a lot of projects that are not in our immediate area of life. There’s nothing right now but a lot of seemingly unrelated projects that just sort dab small solutions here and there that serve the special interests of one area or another. As of this writing, there is no common thread that everybody in the region can fix their hopes on. What we seek is a plan for a comprehensive solution for our region’s traffic problems.
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[...] Atlanta. In part, this was based upon the notion that Atlanta is the center of the world, an idea not necessarily shared by all living in the region. Of course, it did not turn out that way because of the cultural [...]