Who’ll save MARTA? Good question, Maria
*Post has been amended and corrected*
Maria Saporta asks some great questions today in her regular Monday column at SaportaReport.
Namely, why did civic groups and private businesses rally to save Grady Hospital but no one is rallying to save MARTA or C-TRAN for that matter?
Maria quotes Mayor Kasim Reed as saying recently, “I…want to send a message to the economic development community and business people.”
‘If budget cuts force MARTA to cut back service to six days a week, he said, it will weaken metro Atlanta’s economy, especially tourism, and it will weaken the state’s attractiveness to business.’
“If Atlanta is going to remain dominant, if Atlanta is going to continue to be the economic engine that drives metro Atlanta and the State of Georgia, how are we going to do that with a train line that runs six days a week?” Reed asked.
(Or half the number of buses that run now, for that matter).
You can read her column here.
There was also a great op-ed about MARTA recently in the AJC by Jim Durrett, who is executive director of the Buckhead Community Improvement District and sits on MARTA’s board.
Thanks to kind reader Darin, you can see Durrett’s piece here.
What caught my eye was that the Buckhead is home to many businesses and residents that don’t rely on MARTA, and yet this group is smart enough to know that transportation is key for any community.
Durrett makes so many great points. For example, he says:
“The state Legislature should do three things. First, pass long-term transportation funding legislation (that has been considered for four years now) that includes transit operations and maintenance as allowable uses of the new funding. Second, permanently eliminate the 50/50 restriction on the MARTA sales tax revenues. Third, provide short-term funding assistance to MARTA during the next three years, such as state-supported bonding for capital projects, which, coupled with elimination of the 50/50 restriction, would help MARTA to make ends meet.”
So many smart people here in Atlanta and yet MARTA may have to cut 30 percent of its service next fiscal year (i.e., in July) and C-TRAN is on life support.
At this rate, I think I’ll stop trying to be smart because all of these “smart” people are giving smart a bad name.
One day downtown
One day recently I wandered around downtown Atlanta. Here’s what caught my eye.
A shot from the wildly popular pho place in the Fairlie-Poplar district. In some ways, it’s a great compliment that filmmakers sometimes shoot in this area when they want to affect a New York streetscape but don’t want the hassle and cost of an actual NYC streetscape. And yet sometimes it feels like the rest of Atlanta doesn’t even know this neighborhood exists.
To hear tell, you’d think we didn’t get successful businessmen like this guy walking around downtown. But there he is, having some international business conference call after a wolfing down the best falafel in town.
Nowadays downtown, with all the Georgia State students, you really see every type of person. Not every type of homeless person but every type of industrious, going-somewhere, doing-something kind of person.
And there’s some really great streetscaping and some cool buildings. Some awful streetscaping and awful buildings, too, but I didn’t photograph that. On this one day, I was just enjoying what cool stuff we do have.
It’s more than enough for us to build on.
will.i.am vs. John Boehner: ‘Yes, we can’ vs. ‘Hell no, you can’t’
Pecanne Log: Plaza Drugs through the ages
Great post on Pecanne Log Monday on the history of Plaza Drugs.
One of the several video links was the classic “never closed/fountain delights” ad that ran on local stations like Channel 17 well after it was out of date.
Hope and change
I had a glimmer of hope last night, while watching Nancy Pelosi stammer through her speech to the House of Representatives, that my son could grow up in country that is better place to live than the country that I grew up in.
The health-care bill passed by the House yesterday is far, far from perfect. And there are other big things to worry about: Climate change, our nation’s debtor status, nuclear terrorism, yada-yada-yada.
But this was progress. Really significant progress. The biggest step, perhaps, toward fulfilling the promise of America since the civil rights era.
It said to all of us that something can be done to overcome the special-interest-induced sclerosis that has stoped up our political system for so long. It said that change can bring hope.
Did tea partiers really call John Lewis the n-word?
John Lewis being arrested during the 1960s. Now a congressmen, Lewis was known for putting himself in the line of fire as a practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience.
I tweeted yesterday about the epithets spewed upon Democratic congressmen, including Atlanta’s John Lewis, by tea party protesters on Capitol Hill yesterday.
Two of my conservative Facebook friends raised the valid question of sourcing: Who actually saw the verbal attacks and attempted intimidation of members of Congress?
Fair enough. Here are some of the claims and some of the evidence behind them:
• Rep. Andre Carson and Rep. John Lewis both said yesterday that while they walked from the Capitol, they heard members of the mob yell the n-word at them — as in “kill the bill, [n-word]!” According to McClatchy, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who was behind them says, said he heard that as well. So do staffers. The folks who put the following video up claim you can hear the n-word. I couldn’t say for sure, but something close to that word can be heard a couple of times around 11 or 12 seconds in — right after, ahem, the camera passes over the guy with the Confederate bandanna. Read more
MARTA to gain a few new bus shelters
Photo credit: Willamor Media via Flickr
I produced this short piece on MARTA bus shelters yesterday for WABE and I thought you guys might find it interesting that not only are there 11,000 bus stops that don’t have shelters but that most of them probably won’t ever have shelters.
I talked to Tony Griffin with MARTA and he said it’s just not feasible to outfit the agency’s 12,000 bus stops with protective shelters and benches. And it’s not just cost, apparently. At many stops, there’s simply no room, or the stop is on a sloping hill.
I find that amazing because it means there will be riders — Riders in the Storm, you could say, ahem! — who will always be subject to rain, heat, snow, sleet, whathaveyou.
I pestered Tony a lot about this but who knows? He might have been thinking, “Hey lady! Have you heard? We might have to slash 25 percent of our train and bus service over the summer because we have no money! I don’t have time to worry about bus shelters!”
And I suppose he would be right, if he were thinking that.
The story is actually about a pro bono project of the the Atlanta chapter of Architecture for Humanity to build and design bus shelters for free for MARTA. The group, which will cull designs for the shelters from an open contest, will start this year with three stops in south Atlanta.
For more information or to submit a design entry for the bus shelter contest, contact Rick at rick@afhatlanta.org. By the way, Rick says you don’t need to be an architect or a designer to submit an entry. And you don’t need to complete a fancy schmancy design on a computer. You can draw something on the back of an envelope, he said!
UPDATE: Read more
Let’s balance the budget by raising taxes on working people!
Here’s another story to remind us how far the political/media culture of Georgia has fallen. In Wednesday’s AJC, political columnist Jim Galloway lionizes Republican state Rep. Chuck Sims for bucking his party’s anti-tax fundamentalism.
The most interesting point made by Galloway is how much rural areas rely on government jobs. UGA sociologist Doug Bachtel told him in a fifth of the jobs in Coffee County, where Sims lives, are in the public sector. And the portion is higher in other rural counties. In other words, for all their pull-yourself-by-the-bootstraps, cut-the-pork talk, rural Georgia politicians — and their constituents — feed at the trough more than the typical Atlantan.
So when the going gets tough, Sims — the “conservative” — turns out to be all for big government: He doesn’t want to see all those jobs cut to make up for the state’s $1-billion-plus budget shortfall. What’s his solution? Eliminate the sales tax on groceries! Read more
Trees, glorious trees
I meant to post this piece I produced on trees for WABE (90.1) last week, but got busy.
As you’ll soon hear, Atlanta is losing its stable of tall, historic, shade trees at a rapid clip. As Greg Levine of Trees Atlanta says, the culprits are many: drought, heavy rains, new infrastructure including new sewers, etc.
Sure, lots of us are planting trees in our yards and along the medians. But often residents are planting small, flowering varieties that won’t give us the same shade canopy that has made so many Atlanta neighborhoods such lovely spots.
Please take a listen when you have a chance.
Let’s walk over to the Plaza and catch a flick
Photo credit: Karla Jean Davis via Flickr
I recently interviewed Jonathan Rej, the co-owner of the Plaza Theater, for the AJC and our conversation touched on so many different topics.
My main interest for the AJC piece was finding out about the theater’s transition last year from a for-profit enterprise to a nonprofit (the story was originally meant to run in the business section).
You can see his compelling answers in the Q&A that the AJC ran yesterday here. Unfortunately, much of the Q&A focuses on the challenges Rej and his wife face as they try to keep the historic 1939 art deco theater afloat.
But not all of the cool stuff we talked about could make it into the Q&A.
And me being me, I couldn’t help but bring the conversation around to walkable neighborhoods.
Read more
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