Time for a new transit plan on the Atlanta Beltline

A decade ago, Mayor Kasim Reed tasked Atlanta Beltline Inc. to come up with a streetcar strategy for the whole city. ABI centered the “Atlanta Streetcar System Plan” on the Beltline. No surprise there.

But it is surprising that the SSP, adopted by the city in 2015, remains the closest thing Atlanta has to a transit roadmap. It’s even weirder when you consider that events have rendered the streetcar plan completely irrelevant.

The SSP imagined 52.4 miles of integrated rail lines, anchored by the 22-mile Beltline loop. That included the 2.7-mile Downtown Streetcar, which opened just before the streetcar plan was completed.

Since then, not a single foot of track has been laid. And the only streetcar project under design is the short Streetcar East Extension onto the Atlanta Beltline.

“Interoperability” was a key feature of the SSP.  The idea was that the Beltline streetcar and the other lines would attract more ridership if the Beltline served as a trunk line linking other routes into a contiguous network. This was based on reams of data showing that ridership plummets when passengers have to transfer to get where they’re going.

The plan called for other routes to “integrate seamlessly” with the Beltline streetcar at Armour Drive, Hollowell Parkway, Boulevard Avenue, Hank Aaron Drive, Irwin Street, Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard, Lee Street, North Avenue, Northside Drive and Peachtree Street.

Here’s the problem: Other than the Streetcar Extension, every route that was supposed to merge into the loop has been either abandoned or converted to a bus-based transit mode. Other than the Beltline streetcar and two short runs that would connect the downtown line to the Beltline, there no longer are any streetcar projects even contemplated for the city.

So much for interoperability. And so much for a system.

The critical issue has been money. With light-rail construction running around $100 million a mile, the remaining 50 miles of the streetcar plan might have cost $5 billion. To put that in perspective: The entire 40-year More MARTA program, which is supposed to fund a lot more than the proposed streetcar routes, is projected to collect only $2.7 billion.

Two of the once-upon-a-time streetcar routes – along Clifton Corridor and in Summerhill – have been converted to bus rapid transit, which runs around a quarter the cost per mile of a streetcar. Other lines aren’t moving forward at all.

Yet, the largest expense of them all, the 22-mile Beltline streetcar, chugs merrily along. Its first phase is being funded entirely by local taxes. With bus rapid transit now favored in competition for federal dollars, local taxpayers would be saddled with most, if not all, of the cost of the entire loop.

From Beltline rail’s start as the central idea in Ryan Gravel’s masters thesis, some  questioned its viability for a simple reason: It wouldn’t efficiently get enough people where they want to go. So, in 2005, when it was time to adopt a long-term Beltline strategy, the Beltline Redevelopment Plan opted to kick transit down the road. Atlanta Beltline Inc. was tasked with first tackling the trail, greenspace and affordable housing. The result was the smashingly successful Beltline that we have today.

But, pushed by streetcar enthusiasts and its own bureaucratic inertia, ABI kept coming up with ways to justify the streetcar. In 2010, the agency published something called the Atlanta Beltline Transit Implementation Strategy. That strategy didn’t emerge, as most successful transit projects do, out of unbiased study to determine the best way to serve Atlantans’ transit needs.

As ABI put it:  “The intent of the TIS was to develop a strategy to implement segments of the Atlanta BeltLine corridor incrementally to build out the vision of the entire 22-mile Atlanta BeltLine transit system.”

In other words, the tail was wagging the dog. The strategy wasn’t devised to address transit needs. It was intended to make Beltline rail more viable by combining it with other streetcar lines. Without those other lines, ABI acknowledged, it would be impossible to “[link] the BeltlLine to the major employment centers of Downtown and Midtown.”

Despite feeders into the Beltline, ridership estimates for the Beltline streetcar have remained low. For example, in 2013, the only actual ridership model for a footprint similar to the Streetcar Extension projected that a much longer segment (including the downtown streetcar and an additional leg into Piedmont Park) would attract just 5,621 daily passengers by 2040. Meanwhile, after 10 years of operation, the downtown streetcar is undershooting its ridership projections by about two-thirds.

Low ridership will also saddle MARTA with higher operating costs. The transit agency’s own figures show the existing streetcar already costs $48.60 per passenger mile to operate, mainly because there are too few riders.

Compare that money pit to how well the Beltline is already serving as a transportation corridor. Based on Beltline traffic counts by the PATH Foundation at Irwin Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue, pedestrians, cyclists and other users already rival the 2040 streetcar estimate. And that’s at single points rather along an entire five miles of streetcar!

As it turns out, the Dickens Administration has an opportunity to update its transit plan to reflect these realities. The city is in the early stages of developing a new  transportation plan, that could very easily include fresh strategies for both transit and micromobility.

If any urban transit system does emerge over the next couple of decades in Atlanta, it’s likely to feature bus rapid transit, because BRT allows MARTA and the city to stretch More MARTA sales tax revenue further. But that system will be pretty sparse – unless MARTA and the city shepherd those More MARTA dollars more wisely.

One obvious place to find the money: Shift it from the Beltline streetcar. Then, we as a community can work together on two new strategies. The first would be to develop a fresh Beltline model that builds on its success as a micromobility greenway. The second would be a transit plan that acknowledges the reality that the Streetcar System Plan is no longer.

The post Time for a new transit plan on the Atlanta Beltline appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.