Atlanta Transportation – Unintended Consequences

Artist's Conception

Popular tastes change.  Sometimes they change because people want to do something differently.  In other cases, change is helped along by unseen hands.  Consider downtown Atlanta.

There was a time when downtown Atlanta was a vibrant place.  Then there was a time when it was decidedly not a vibrant place.  In my recent visits to downtown, all one of them, it seems to be alive again, but with an entirely different cast of characters.  Where once it was the local populace of Atlanta, now it appears to be those who are visiting from other places.  Things change.  A local saying was: “Then grits ain’t groceries and Peachtree don’t go to town.”  For most residents of Atlanta, Peachtree no longer goes to town.  Why should it when every neighborhood in Atlanta has any number of fine restaurants, grocery stores, theaters and just about everything else that a soul needs?  Yes, traffic patterns change, but the change in downtown Atlanta’s personality was helped along by an unintended consequence.

There was a time when the paper bus transfer played a key role in downtown Atlanta’s daily life.

Bus Transfer

The above slip of paper comes to us from the City of Cincinnati, but every town with more than one trolley or bus line had them.  The idea was that you got on the bus to ride across town to a destination, but this required riding on two different buses.  So, when you got on the first bus, you paid your fare and asked for a transfer.  This from the Roanoke bus system:

• Transferring to Another Bus Route

1. Free transfer slips are available for passengers who need to take more than one bus route to reach their destination. Ask the operator on your first bus for the transfer slip when you pay your fare.
2. The transfer slip is good for 30 minutes after the time your first bus reaches the end of its route.  This transfer slip is only valid at our Campbell Court transfer center, or at a connecting end-of-the bus line.

Bus Transfers

Notice the phrase “The transfer slip is good for 30 minutes after the time your first bus reaches the end of its route.”  So, you get to downtown Atlanta, where your first bus terminates.  You’ve got twenty minutes before your continuing bus arrives.  Or, perhaps, a bit longer.  In many cases, bus drivers could be persuaded to extend the life span of the bus transfer by merely slipping it just a bit further down before tearing it off.  You’ve got plenty of time.  What to do?

For many years, in downtown Atlanta you ducked into little grocery stores, or food shops, or a tailoring shop, or a watch repair shop, or a bank.  Lots of shops.  At that time, downtown Atlanta was alive because it was the center of commercial activity.  In addition to the tall buildings with lawyers and business executives, Atlanta was alive with the vibrancy of an active community of small businesses.

The unintended consequence came when the MARTA heavy rail system was built.  Once the system grew into its present state, buses which used to go all the way into town now were routed into the various rail stations of the system.  Bus transfers are still issued, but where once the point of transfer occurred in downtown Atlanta, it now occurs at a distant MARTA station.  The people that were once in downtown Atlanta because of bus transfers now ride underneath the streets through downtown.  Under the place where stores used to be.

It was probably nothing deliberate on the part of the system’s designers.  And the decay of the old downtown Atlanta was already well under way when MARTA came to town, but I’m old enough to remember a little French restaurant on a side street in what we now call Fairlie-Poplar.  It was Emile’s, and it is long gone.  Paul Hemphill declared his independence from the newspaper there.  Like so many other institutions in downtown Atlanta, Emile’s went away.  It is highly unlikely that Emile’s relied upon the paper bus transfer in the first place.  It wasn’t that kind of restaurant.  But the vibrant downtown Atlanta scene that once was has changed because the bus transfer traffic went away.

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