For two years now, MARTA has been in the black. Here are some ways they’ve spent the surplus and their longer-term budget, which approaches $890 million annually for both capital expenses and operations.
- Increased bus and train service
With rail service, $10.2 million went to more frequent trains and better connections. Bus service was also increased.
- The hi-tech loo
1 pilot project at Lindbergh so far cost $100,000. If it works, others could be installed for $1 million.
- Bus replacement
Finishing replacement of 265 buses over the last couple years, for $132.5 million. Some of those buses are also a buildup for service starting in Clayton County in March.
- Comprehensive route evaluation
$1.1 million contract with the Parsons Brinckerhoff consulting company also involving MARTA staff to evaluate the current transit grid from the ground up.
- Rebuilding reserves
At $170 million
- Smartphone apps
“See & Say” app for reporting to police and “MARTA on the go” for real-time arrivals. Development cost “in the hundreds of thousands.”
- Hiring
More than 300 new employees since 2011 including 60 new police officers.
- TOD
MARTA has ramped up its long-term commitment to developing Transit-Oriented Developments of real estate around some of its stations.
Source: MARTA
Where’s the money from?
- Improving economy and tax revenues
- Increasing ridership
- Closing bus doors when idled
- Parking payment oversight
- Improved bond rating
- Select streamlining, as in IT dept. cuts
Source: MARTA
Hi-tech bathrooms, smartphone apps, a shiny new fleet, new hires tasked with customer service, and ambitious plans to gobble up additional territory.
After years of red ink, service cuts and waning credibility, MARTA has clocked repeated surpluses, and it shows. Perhaps more startling, it’s drawn glowing praise for its management and innovation from some of Georgia’s top conservative leaders.
In the midst of this, Clayton County has approved the first significant expansion of MARTA's borders since its founding, and the new Atlanta streetcar, though run mostly by city employees, is driving home the importance of trains to a coveted younger demographic.
MARTA is at a major turning point, raising questions: Can it keep up the momentum? How should it spend the money? And what comes next?
“I think a lot more is possible for MARTA going forward,” said Rep. Mike Jacobs, citing better fiscal management and improved quality of life on the system. The Brookhaven Republican chairs the legislative MARTOC committee that watchdogs the agency, with which MARTA has often had a strained relationship. “Over time I think you are going to find more interest on the state level in helping MARTA along to a better place.”
Those are magic words for MARTA advocates. Their ultimate goals are a steady outside funding stream for operations, permanent freedom from a mandate that half their sales tax revenue must go to capital projects, and, eventually, service to Cobb, Gwinnett and other counties beyond the current service area of Fulton and DeKalb. For four decades, those goals were out of reach, and may still be in part. But recent events are raising hopes.
A new passenger experience
If nothing else, one event made 2014 historic for MARTA: Clayton County residents' overwhelming vote to pay a 1 percent sales tax to join the transit system that began operations in 1972.
Metro residents now have legitimate reason to hope they could one day live in an affordable condo at a development near a rail stop in Clayton County, taking the train to work in Buckhead as they breeze past traffic for 30 miles. MARTA plans to start Clayton’s bus service in March and is investigating the feasibility of a rail line.
Meanwhile, the daily experience of MARTA’s current passengers is changing, due to initiatives small and large. They stem in part from a $17 million operating surplus in the fiscal year that ended in June.
With the economic recovery fully under way, MARTA reversed devastating cutbacks in service, cutting wait times for some trains to as little as five minutes during rush hour. It also reduced the number of breaks in some train trips and added more bus runs. Oh, and re-opened restrooms.
Far more sweeping changes may be in store. The agency has a $1.1 million contract with the consulting firm Parsons Brinckerhoff to re-evaluate its route system from the ground up.
To date, MARTA has made little progress on its long-held desire to institute distance-based fares; the cost of implementing such a system remains an obstacle. But the addition of Clayton County could bring the issue to a head.
On the technology front, MARTA, after years of withholding its trip data, released the information to app developers. Georgia Tech students pounced and created the OneBusAway app. MARTA subsequently released its own app, MARTA On the Go, so that passengers with smartphones can see when the next ride is coming and better plan their trips.
“There just wasn’t a culture of openness about that kind of thing,” said David Emory, a transit technology consultant and outgoing president of Citizens for Progressive Transit. Emory is the son of an original MARTA planner (as a baby he rode MARTA’s inaugural train).
“Really, in the last two or three years. we’ve seen them going from being one of the worst in the country among the large agencies to one that’s doing much better,” he said.
Such advances have much higher stakes than may be apparent. They’re seen as key to attracting “choice riders,” people who could drive but might choose transit. Above all, that includes millennials, the younger, tech-savvy generation that is increasingly attracted to in-town, urban living.
Parker is interested in technologies that would allow passengers to buy and use Breezecard fares on their smartphones.
MARTA does not yet have underground wi-fi like New York’s subway, but hopes to by next year.
MARTA’s other new app, See & Say, is to help passengers more easily report problems to MARTA police. It’s designed for use above or underground — sort of. The app holds on to a message until the phone finally surfaces, then automatically sends it.
Perception packs a punch
Crime has long been a complicated issue for MARTA. Agency officials say violent crime on the system is lower than on comparable systems elsewhere in the country. Nevertheless, they know that the perception of crime damages their attempts to sell the system to both choice riders and legislative purse-holders.
"We've always been a safe system, but we haven't been a friendly system," Parker said. His "Ride With Respect" advertising campaign, paired with an infusion of 60 new officers, aims to change that.
He now has a remarkably ambitious goal: To make choice riders think of riding a MARTA bus the same way they think of the trains.
Former Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell, president of the Buckhead Coalition and a MARTA co-founder, joked glumly that someone should “hire a psychiatrist” to figure out why many Atlantans shun MARTA buses even if they embrace the trains.
“Until he (Parker) started cleaning up the attitudes, I thought maybe that’s it,” Massell said. “I think it’s psychological with busing — people had a racial connotation to it or something. I don’t know, there’s something wrong there.”
MARTA is about to finish replacing 265 buses at a cost of $132.5 million. It’s important for the system’s image, officials say, but also for its reliability.
Some of Parker’s success may be due to improved management, but some may be luck in the form of an improved economy.
Revenues from the 1 percent sales tax that Fulton and DeKalb residents pay went from $318 million in the 2010 fiscal year to $346 million last year. If those revenues tank again and Parker is suddenly in the cutting business, will he still be so admired?
“I remember when everybody considered Bev Scott a breath of fresh air,” cautioned former MARTA board chairman Michael Walls, referring to MARTA’s general manager from 2007 to 2012.
Scott eventually became known for blunt, impassioned advocacy that grated on some conservative leaders.
A quiet reformer
Parker’s style is different.
In a recent knock-down drag-out with the union over a contract approved last month, union leaders published Parker's $345,000 pay and a photo of his elegant home, along with a call to "save our city and send Keith Parker and his cronies packing."
Asked how his relationship with the union is, Parker replied, “It continues.” And said no more.
The new contract gives union members their first blanket raise since 2008 and a one-time bonus, but institutes modest reforms, too. Employees will now be fired after going AWOL for three consecutive days without a medical note, or for being late to work eight times within a 12-month period.
MARTA officials and observers give Parker credit for genuine streamlining and improvements, including, paradoxically, slashing the information technology budget after audits found mismanagement and spending violations.
Other efficiencies include hiring parking employees to make sure drivers who ought to pay do, and closing the doors of idling buses to ensure passengers can’t board without the driver there to watch them pay, a plan that was in the works when he arrived.
And sometimes money breeds money. More money begets better service, which begets more riders, which begets more fare revenue. And when MARTA has more money in the bank, lenders have more faith that it will make debt payments, so they charge lower interest. Moody's upgraded MARTA's bond rating, a move that could help save the agency millions in interest payments over time.
Parker and his boosters say he’s not political. But no transportation leader can avoid politics.
The state and conservative areas of the region have often treated MARTA as a political pariah. That’s not the sentiment right now.
Parker’s marching orders were first to fix perception of MARTA, to make the case that it had put its house in order. Then MARTA would be better positioned to ask for state funding.
At a crossroads
The Legislature is poised to begin a historic session, in which it could raise significant transportation revenue for the first time in more than a decade. A preparatory report released last week gave specific ideas for road funding, but not mass transit. However, it contained a remarkable section, in which it declared that it was "in the state of Georgia's … best interests to establish a separate, permanent funding stream" for the state's transit systems.
Parker said he had not studied the declaration and could not comment. “I need to know, how much? When? Are there stipulations that go along with it?” he said. In order to have impact, the amount would have to be “meaningful,” he said.
And if the big money ever comes, money for rail expansion, he will have to recommend which projects to build — meaning, which neighborhoods to serve. The Clifton corridor, from Midtown to Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control? Or I-20 east, serving a lower-income clientele?
Such choices are freighted with political consequences.
State leaders aren’t showing their hand yet, though many had praise for Parker. Gov. Nathan Deal said Parker created a new atmosphere for MARTA at the Legislature. However, he said, MARTA doesn’t yet have value to the state as a whole, at least “probably not in the short term.”
If areas such as Clayton county or some north Fulton cities choose to invite MARTA onto their turf, that’s fine, Deal said. However, he said,“it’s quite different to try to force MARTA on a constituency.”
MARTA chairman Robbie Ashe agreed, and acknowledged that some expansion plans may be a heavy lift.
“I don’t know how quickly we will have serious conversations with Cobb or Gwinnett county,” he said. However, he added, “I certainly hope that this is not the last time we talk about expanding the MARTA system in my lifetime.”
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