MARTA Ridership Down

AJC 6/14/18 Metro page 1 article “We love transit. We just don’t ride it” by Bill Torpy was excellent. He addresses the 22% drop in ridership since 2008 and has tips for MARTA clean-up and improvement.

Torpy’s research included talking to riders and previous riders and found that they don’t want to spend the extra stop and start time it takes to ride the buses and prefers using cars.

Our Tea Party Team research going in to the 2012 T-SPLOST revealed that Atlanta is the least dense city on the planet and commuter trains require high density like Madrid Spain or Manhattan NY of even Washington DC to be self-supporting. It also revealed that the per-ride cost of public transit is too expensive and all transit should be private. It also revealed that new construction costs for public transit trains ran $1 billion per mile and that could buy 40,000 Prius’ cars or build 5,000 lane miles of new roads. We also saw lots of political corruption in the “economic development” driven transit village scam we’ve seen in the US since the publication of UN Agenda 21 in 1992.

Atlanta is, for better or worse, laid out for single family houses on narrow roads with no sidewalks. It was built for cars. But it was built for a population of 3 million, not 5 million. We can either, finally expand the roads and make the highways function or continue to encourage industrial and residential expansion to the exurbs, away from the gridlock on I-285.  We need a new East-West highway to connect I-285 from Smyrna to Tucker to relieve the gridlock on the top of I-285.  We also need to connect US 27 to I-75 and I-85 to offload interstate traffic away from Atlanta.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader