Riders on the fringe get the boot when Clayton kills C-Tran

By Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

You live in a city famous for long interstate commutes in shiny sedans and big SUVs and bumper to bumper traffic. But yours starts with a three-mile walk in the dark to a bus stop next to a county jail.

One day last week, just like every day last week, Deon Parks made it to the Harold R. Banke Justice Center in Clayton County a little after 5 a.m., in time to catch the first C-Tran bus of the day, the 501, headed north up Tara Boulevard to his job as a cook at Atlanta Hot Wings.

It was chilly some two hours before sunrise, but Parks smiled under the brim of a baseball cap and made little of his morning hike from his subdivision in this suburban county on the south side of metro Atlanta.

“I got a car,” he said. “I just don’t have a license. I’m working on getting that reinstated. Until then, this is all I got – the bus.”

And the bus, if the Clayton County Commission has its say, will be gone March 31. That's when, in a move the county says will save it about $8 million a year, it plans to shut down C-Tran and its five bus lines, stranding about 8,500 riders who, like Parks, ride it every weekday to work or school or to simply get around a sprawling metropolis that lives on wheels.

The economics and politics driving the decision are dense and hot but would also seem to be the latest instance of a troubled county evaluating what others might envision as the future – in this case, mass transportation – and heading like crazy in the other direction.

Shutting down C-Tran (slogan: “Tomorrow’s Transportation Today”) will make Clayton the only core metro Atlanta county without public transportation.

And it becomes another piece of the county’s problematic recent history: the loss two years ago of public school accreditation (since provisionally restored); the real estate meltdown it helped to hasten; and a continuing series of bizarre political and law enforcement scandals.

Clayton County Commission chairman Eldrin Bell, the former Atlanta police chief, is the only one of five county commissioners who voted to save C-Tran.

Bell says pulling the plug on the system is an act of “classism.” The rest of the commission, he said, "wants the poor out of the county.”

A C-Tran rider profile provided by MARTA, which manages the system for the county, is a sketch of life on the economic fringe. According to the study, 81 percent of riders earn less than $35,000 a year and 65 percent have “no car available.”

Commissioners opposed to saving C-Tran say the county is crunched like every other government by declining revenues in a lingering recession and can’t afford the system. They also advise it’s not the county’s job to provide public transportation. It’s the state’s or the federal government’s.

Schemes to get money from either Georgia or the feds have failed. (Bell claims they were sabotaged by the commission.)

The furor over shutting the system is getting louder with the March 31 deadline looming and politicians politicking -- “The governor hasn’t moved in any way to save the system,” said state Sen. Emanuel Jones (D-Decatur) – and activists activating.

“We need one regional transit system and that should be MARTA and the state should fund it,” said Terence Courtney, a public transportation advocate with a group called the Atlanta Public Sector Alliance.

Meantime, riders such as Latoya Inya-Agha are moving out of the county to Cobb or Fulton or DeKalb or Gwinnett, where they still provide public transit.

She got out of her lease at Premier Garden Apartments on Garden Walk Boulevard in College Park to move somewhere else -- anywhere else -- as long as she's out of the county by April 1.

“I may stay with friends in Midtown,” said Inya-Agha, who doesn’t own a car. “I have to move because I have to keep my job. I work in Buckhead in a law office and I take the bus from Clayton to the MARTA train to get there. It’s not like I have a choice.”

Pay the $1.50 fare, hop on the 501 one morning and you’ll hear what the riders think, which is about what you'd think they think: Something about the whole deal stinks.

“If you’re shutting this down and you say it’s because of money, then why don’t you raise the fare to get the money?” said hoof-and-rider Parks, who’s been commuting this way 18 months. “But they haven’t done that. You tell me why.”

Parks, like many other riders interviewed, said as financially stretched as they already are, they'd pay more keep the buses running.

Jocelyn Parks, an administrative assistant at the downtown Hyatt Regency Atlanta hotel who’s been taking C-Tran and MARTA to work for three years, winced when asked how much more was she willing to pay.

“Double,” she said. “Three dollars? I’d go for that.”

Driver Jeanne Maness says reports of C-Tran's death are just about the only thing riders talk about.

“They ask me fifty times, a hundred times a day. ‘When are they going to shut down the bus?’ ” she said. “I tell them as much as I can – and I try to console them.”

Maness, along with about 70 other C-Tran employees, will be out of work when the system shuts down. Drivers say they’ve already received termination letters.

The 501, full to standing room, pulls into the transit station at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport shortly after 6 a.m. A few riders gather at the stop to take the bus back.

John Green just got off his overnight shift at the airport Houlihan's restaurant, where he makes about $33,000 a year as a cook and manager. He’s angry, he said, “in shock” about the shuttering of C-Tran.

One reason he and his family chose Clayton County when they moved to Atlanta from the Bronx three years ago was because it had bus service, “just like they do in every other big city.”

No sooner had he bought a house off Riverdale Road for $78,000 than Clayton schools lost their accreditation and for the next year, he drove his four children to Atlanta public schools.

They’re back in Clayton schools now and he could take the car to work, he said, but it costs too much and there are times his wife needs it.

Green said he’s written the County Commission. He attended a couple of meetings and spoke up. Didn’t make a difference, he said.

“As far as I’m concerned, this county has two strikes and it’s out,” he said, shouldering a pack and heading for the 501 and the ride back home. “I regret moving here.”