Call made to extend mass transit

Atlanta has missed the boat on public transportation compared with some other cities, said the president of a national mass transit organization. Now that more people are driving less, the consequences could be grave.

“You’ll get left in the dust,” said William Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association, an advocacy group of mass transit companies and government agencies.

Millar pointed to cities like Charlotte, Denver and Salt Lake City that are building or expanding their mass-transit systems. He said they will be able to draw more employers with good jobs and offer a better quality of life.

Millar’s words echoed a warning last year from a top national business-relocation consultant who told the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce that some employers were rejecting Atlanta as a potential place to bring jobs, because of traffic congestion.

Millar was in Atlanta on Thursday to address a “transportation summit” held by the Georgia Engineering Alliance at the Georgia World Congress Center. He said that so far the very recent declines in gas prices had not reversed the trend of people taking more mass transit.

As a young planner in 1972, Millar visited Atlanta, wanting to see for himself the place that was so ahead of the curve on transportation, he said in an interview. Atlanta had undertaken MARTA, he said, and was planning large stations at places that didn’t seem immediately to call for them, but that later turned out to be big activity centers such as the CNN Center. Atlanta also “built one of the world’s pre-eminent great highway networks,” he said.

Since then, he noted, MARTA’s expansion stopped, and Georgia is unusual in providing no significant sustained state funding for mass transit. He said he was hopeful that the region would turn that around. Activists are hoping for more transportation funding in the next legislative session.