Atlanta can’t afford to get new transit wrong
Mike Dobbins, Planner
First published as an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on June 3, 2018
Prefatory Note: While this piece is but two years old, the jolt of Covid-19 has scrambled its guidance, which at the time had some effect in supporting MARTA’s strategy and debunking some of the city’s persistent transit mythologies. Nonetheless, it serves as a framework for understanding the issues and prospects facing Atlanta’s transit and more generally its transportation thinking. But Covid-19 has introduced unexpected wrinkles into the mix, with uncertain outcomes, some of which I’ll address in later posts. Below, the original text:
A new day for Atlanta transit has arrived, and with new leadership at city hall the city has the opportunity to reconsider its transit direction to date. Fumbling along with the BeltLine as its narrowly focused de facto transit planner and its mostly empty downtown streetcar as its only on-the-ground transit accomplishment, it’s time to get real.
A transit system is about connections between concentrations of origins and destinations — where people are and where they’re trying to get, in which the coverage area and frequency of service are the most important factors in boosting ridership. Without ridership, transit becomes infeasible. Only after that kind of analysis does it become useful to consider what mix of transit modes best serves the system, evolving over time from right now on into the future. What do we need, who needs it most, and when do we need it? These questions must include consideration of fast-changing travel behaviors and technologies, like bike/pedestrian, lyft and uber, and autonomous vehicles. As part of that analysis, it is essential to consider cost and time of delivery. How are we going to pay for different modes, and how long does it take to deliver them?
Instead, somehow untethered from reality, our silly transit debate for years has been about streetcars versus bus modes, not about a multimodal system that provides transit for all our citizens. And, by the way, streetcars cost in the range of five times what bus rapid transit costs, a fact that affects both getting the money and the time it takes to deliver projects.
The city’s transit plan, prepared by the BeltLine, serves at best only a quarter of the city’s area, and thus is on its face not feasible for lack of coverage. That plan, furthermore calls for about 50 miles of streetcars, which, at about $100 million per mile, would cost in the range $5 billion in today’s dollars and would take decades to implement.
Understanding these points, explains why no BeltLine transit has happened over the life of its Tax Allocation District, now 13 years on.
The city should use this moment to close the widening gap between reality and fantasy in its transit planning. It should start by addressing the questions posed above and proceed in close collaboration with MARTA, whose recently released project list report appears to align pretty well with transit planning best practices. In that context, though, probably only two rail projects in the city make sense. First, extending the downtown light rail to Ponce, thus boosting ridership by connecting high concentrations of jobs and housing might make the forlorn streetcar become a good ideal after all. With luck, this project could be completed in five years for about $150 million. Second, linking Lindbergh MARTA to the underserved Emory/CDC area, whether by rail or BRT, could solve the region’s most serious access problem. Again, high concentrations of destinations and origins would guarantee high ridership and ease the area’s present vulnerability to access disasters like the recent I-85 shutdown.
Other pieces of the BeltLine’s streetcar fantasies won’t happen and should be scrapped, considering instead enhanced bus service for routes that serve needs and boost ridership. City leadership should step up and redirect its BeltLine agency, which the city has allowed to become a kind of ”alternate city” within the city, to carry out its co-equal tasks of building affordable housing and completing its trail system, projects that can actually get done. The city’s new transportation plan, still in draft, carries this general admonition: “spend less money on things that are proven not to work.”
Atlanta can’t afford to get new transit wrong.
Atlanta’s moment? Convergence of housing people can afford plus access to transit
Mike Dobbins, Planner
First published as an op-ed in the Saporta Report on May 15, 2016
Prefatory Note: This piece is four years old, yet lays out Atlanta’s persistent neglect of its people who are in the greatest need. Now, with the onslaught of Covid-19, these conditions of inequality are only worsening. This piece addresses problems of access and lack of affordable housing. It suggests ways to build a nexus between the two that could begin to reverse the downward swirl people are experiencing. Since publishing this piece, the words on both fronts have improved, but the delivery is meager at best. The pandemic’s devastating impact only makes conditions worse and more urgent. Yet these issues must be a first priority in any planning, investment, and development strategy coming out of the crisis. The original story is below:
Against the backdrop of an antagonistic and often toxic campaign season, two opportunities are emerging that could begin to lift Atlanta out of its wealth gap, the city’s own divisive and persistent stain.
First, the Gold Dome surprised Atlantans by allowing us to decide on transit options that work for a major city’s vibrant mix of needs and priorities and build a transit system that could emerge as world class. Second, the Atlanta City Council took a first step toward making housing more affordable in an action that placed affordability requirements on some multifamily projects.
Transit access is a key obstacle for unemployed people to get a job and a key tool for reducing congestion. And many of the city’s one-off moves of the past few years have displaced, dislocated, and isolated people who need this access and affordability.
The resulting patterns have worsened conditions for people who occupy the low wealth, disrespected and forgotten swath of neighborhoods from northwest through southeast Atlanta. Parts of nine of the city’s Neighborhood Planning Units in this swath show majorities living at or below poverty levels. These conditions account for the city occupying the basement among major American cities for its wealth gap, measured by the GINI index. And perhaps more damning is a Harvard/Berkeley study conclusion that our kids in poverty have the least chance of any city to escape it — no rungs on the ladder to upward mobility.
Atlanta boasts of its “Atlanta Way,” an accommodation between black and white leaders to seek cooperative approaches for moderating racial strife from the ’60s. Now the city’s hundred year run of discrimination and disinvestment in these neighborhoods continues, forsaken by the “Atlanta Way.”
What if Atlanta could use this new upwelling of transit and affordable housing possibilities to climb out of its shame and claim the greatest national reduction in its wealth divide, the greatest improvement in the prospects for its low wealth children, and set out on a path to become a city for all?
Between the ’60s and the ’90s, the city of Atlanta lost 100,000 people and began to lose its primacy as the region’s jobs and economic development center. Since the Olympics, albeit dampened by recession, the city has experienced moderate and sustained growth in population and new investment, ticking up even now. The city itself has risen to become very competitive in the metro area in attracting new investors, employers and residents. So it has resources.
Unfortunately, the projects where public subsidy dollars are being spent — the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Atlanta BeltLine, Fort Mac, (with hope still out there for the Turner Field redevelopment) — have skewed away from maintaining affordability, from providing better access, or form providing significant numbers of jobs for those who most need them.
Instead, they have displaced stable, mixed income neighborhoods, ignored low wealth neighborhoods, and so tended to exacerbate and highlight the wealth gap in our city.
Now, with the opportunity to get transit right and the possibility of city-private sector recognition of the importance of neighborhood stabilization against the ravages of residential displacement and gentrification, the city could use its resources to make good on the vision of a city for all.
Both at the local and the regional scale, the problem that the city could begin to address is often called the “jobs-housing mismatch.” Here, people who need affordable housing often have to “drive ’til they qualify” for mortgages that they can afford. The tragedy and failure of this option is that what they save in house payments they lose in travel costs to get to their jobs, and they both cause and suffer the consequences of traffic congestion in the bargain.
Diverting and shortening car trips with the choice of closer-in housing, coupled with what already are emerging choices for non-car alternatives, like taking MARTA rail, hopping on a bus, cycling, or just walking, begins to frame a better picture for how we get to a city for all.
In that picture, the access obstacles that loom large for the unemployed could begin to disappear, so that the 20 percent plus of Atlantans living below the poverty line could begin to participate in the mainstream economy. Kids and their families could begin to be able to live in more income and race diverse neighborhoods. The base for demanding better education for all would broaden.
The transit focus, then, should be on getting people across all income ranges to the places they need or want to get to. These are the major concentrations of jobs, services, hospitals, schools, shopping, amenities, cultural and sports venues. Today, that means Downtown, Midtown, Buckhead, the CDC/Emory area, and emerging concentrations around Historic Fourth Ward Park. These are the places where the infrastructure is in place to serve and absorb the lion’s share of the city’s growth over the next couple of decades. Here will be the kinds of jobs, services, and residential densities (if mixed income) that make these areas walkable and attractive to the crosscut of metro Atlanta’s citizens. Importantly, daytime is when the city is at work and play, when people need and use the infrastructure and amenities to which good transit provides access. And our centers’ daytime demographic profile is diverse, comparable to that of the region as a whole in terms of mix of income, ethnicity, age, and gender.
These, then, are the areas where transit service expansion and closer-in housing strategies should be aiming to prioritize. This means buses, where buses arrive frequently and predictably, where the stops are sheltered, safe, digitally connected, well lit, and altogether cool to look at and be in. Fixing and promoting a really well connected bus network can begin to be delivered right away, at costs and delivery time a fraction of any rail or other more capital-intensive alternatives.
To put the trade-offs in perspective, the cost of tricked out bus shelters, installed, averages about $25,000 each. The $1 million approved recently by Invest Atlanta for an environmental consultant to study a two-and-a-half mile piece of the proposed east-west streetcar would buy 40 bus shelters.
Specific to housing opportunity, there are a number of initiatives underway that provide glimmers of hope, potentially rewarding an intrepid, dedicated, and long-suffering community of equitable housing advocates that have been convening for some 30 years under the banner of the Regional Housing Forum.
The recent action by the Atlanta City Council to tie public funding for residential development to the provision of at least some affordable units, under the leadership of Councilmember Andre Dickens, is a great start. While the metrics, 15 percent of units available to people whose income is at or below 80 percent of the Area Median Income, are a little pallid for meeting the greatest needs, the move signals a concrete commitment by the city to crack open the door to affordability. In the works, too, are modifications in the city’s Zoning Ordinance to echo such provisions for allowing development of multifamily complexes.
The Regional Housing Forum, too, is actively seeking ways to raise funding to reactivate the city’s Housing Opportunity Bond Fund, where $100 million or more could begin to write down land costs and other cost impediments to providing closer-in housing. Seizing the opportunities of a sensible transit future linked with overhauling our approach to neighborhood stabilization and affordable housing should allow us to understand the real and present wealth gap problems comprehensively and to get at solving them, opening up the city for all Atlantans.
