Big biz and MARTA
Big business has been surprisingly silent on the proposed MARTA cuts.
To get any comprehensive sense of how the city’s largest employers might be affected, you need to go back before this round of cuts was proposed and look at a story in an April edition of the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Yet many of the city’s largest employers have transit arrangements with MARTA.
A glance at a list of MARTA’s Employer Partnership Program, which provides discounted 30-day passes to participating businesses, shows some heavy-hitters use public transit, including:
AT&T
Coca-Cola
Georgia-Pacific
Georgia Tech
Earthlink
Hewlett Packard
Turner
There’s also a host of public agencies that participate, including the U.S Department of Transportation, U.S. Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety.
Where do these companies stand on the cuts?
Perhaps they think it won’t affect their employees, and maybe they are right. If you work a day shift (8 a.m. to 5 p.m., say) and you walk or drive to a MARTA train station, you may not see a high impact. Plus, these folks have the advantage of discounted tickets (or in some cases, free tickets; some employers subsidize the cost of mass transit) so the fare increase is mitigated.
Potentially that leaves us back at service industry workers, who will probably bear the brunt of the changes.
MARTA will hold public meetings today and tomorrow about the proposed changes, which include shutting down train service at midnight, eliminating less popular bus routes, raising fees at parking lots and a fare hike.
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