Atlanta Forward readers responded to a recent column about organizing regional transit systems with a central website and perhaps more. Here are some select comments:
Chip: Here we go again. Even the recent crushing defeat of the T-SPLOST vote means nothing to the central planning control freaks. The wholesale rejection of regional mass transit means nothing. The actual "people" so celebrated by the hard left soundly rejected the notion of an out-of-control, corrupt, bungling, incompetent, money-burning regional mass transit system … and still the control freaks keep coming and keep coming totally obsessed with their fanatical plan to force people out of cars.
Matt P: I'm unclear why we are inventing a new layer of management to handle a state problem. Cities and counties obviously are incapable of handling the challenge of people commuting from all over North Georgia to various areas in the metro Atlanta area — just as they are incapable of setting up rail lines from Atlanta to Columbus, Atlanta to Macon, Macon to Savannah, Savannah to Augusta, etc. This is why we have the Georgia Department of Transportation. Let's use them.
Moliere: Sen. Beach, folding MARTA into a regional agency is not going to work. The reason is that MARTA has been supported by the city of Atlanta and Fulton and DeKalb counties for going on four decades, while the rest of the metropolitan area hasn't invested nearly as much economic or political capital on their transportation infrastructure (let us not forget that Atlanta and Fulton have also invested a lot in Hartsfield). So why should Cobb, Gwinnett, GRTA etc. get to benefit without having to invest a dime all these decades? To put it another way, the money that Atlanta/Fulton spent on MARTA could have been used to make improvements to the city that would have retained the Braves and also allowed the city to hold onto a lot of businesses and high-income residents that have skipped town for the suburbs.
Now that Cobb County has the Braves, and Kennesaw State/Southern Poly are growing, I see Sen. Johnny Isakson has finally gotten around to lobbying for the mass transit projects to connect Cobb to downtown that should have been pursued decades ago. Fine, welcome to the party a day late and a dollar short, and yes, a lot of it is due to the fact, Cobb County officials realize they will need low-income workers to staff those Braves jobs without actually living in their county. But let Cobb and Gwinnett spend a couple of decades paying for their own mass transit systems before there is any talk of merging with MARTA. Otherwise, it is just a state attempt to grab an Atlanta/Fulton/DeKalb asset without having to pay for or maintain it.
