Streetcar will serve Atlanta’s tourism

By Tom Bell and Egbert Perry

A visit to a new city, or just to a place you haven’t been in a while, can be an exciting experience. New sights and sounds, new places to visit, dine and lodge; a symphony, a ball game, a museum or a play — this is the Atlanta that visitors experience and residents too often miss.

So it’s no surprise that some long-time Atlantans miss the significance of building the Atlanta streetcar, an exciting new amenity designed to attract the visitors and conventioneers who fuel our local economy.

Tourism and conventions are big business in Atlanta. The Georgia Aquarium, America’s largest, attracted 2.2 million people in 2008. The World of Coke attracted 1.1 million visitors. In 2008 we hosted 35.4 million visitors, and they spent $11 billion. Visitors help support more than 234,200 jobs in metro Atlanta.

Mayor Kasim Reed and U.S. Rep. John Lewis recently announced a federal award of $47 million to build the first phase of the Atlanta streetcar. It will serve the area of Atlanta where tourists and conventioneers throng: Centennial Park and its array of attractions including tours of CNN, the World of Coke, the Georgia Aquarium and the soon-to-be-built National Center for Civil and Human Rights.

This center of tourist activity will be connected to the one of the largest national historic attractions in the nation, the Martin Luther King National Historic Site, which has more than 600,000 visitors per year.

The streetcar will also tie together the student dormitories and classrooms of the expanding campus of Georgia State University, connect to AmericasMart (containing 850,000 square feet of exhibit space), five hotels, the Rialto Center for the Arts, high-rise office building such as the Georgia-Pacific Center, Grady Memorial Hospital and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Hughes Spalding.

Successful streetcar projects are also both city-serving and city-shaping by addressing existing demand for mobility in key areas, such as Atlanta’s downtown, the densest commercial activity center in the Atlanta region. The streetcar will have 12 stops and direct transfer to the Peachtree Center MARTA station. It will extend the reach of MARTA rail and regional express buses serving downtown and provide transit for future intercity and high-speed rail passengers. This initial phase of the Atlanta streetcar will also put in place the infrastructure for subsequent phases that will take the streetcar north up Peachtree Street to Midtown and connect it to the Atlanta Beltline.

Other leading cities already have established streetcars as a driver for mobility and economic development in their tourism districts with great success. Seattle, Tacoma and Portland have streetcars, and Washington, D.C., and Charlotte are building lines. If Atlanta wants to remain a top tourist destination and grow its convention business, we can’t afford to trail cities like Charlotte.

Forecasted to have 2,600 daily boardings, the Atlanta streetcar will more than double the daily ridership of successful streetcars in Seattle and Tampa. The Atlanta Streetcar project will also put people in our city back to work. The project will create 939 jobs during construction, 460 operational jobs and 4,204 jobs attributable to commercial corridor development. Over 20 years, the total benefits are estimated at more than $167 million.

Next time you get a break from your busy everyday schedule, take a trip to downtown’s Centennial Park: You’ll see that Atlanta boasts world-class tourism amenities — and the Atlanta streetcar will complement and connect them seamlessly. 

Tom Bell, executive chairman of SecurAmerica LLC, and Egbert Perry, chairman and chief executive officer of The Integral Group LLC, served as co-chairs of the Peachtree Corridor Task Force.