Atlanta Beltline rail is not a threat. Failing to build it is.
Alex Taylor, chairman and CEO of Cox Enterprises, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and various companies in the automotive and media industries, recently asked a fair question about the Atlanta Beltline in his column for the AJC:
If we had it to do over again, what would we do differently?
Here is our answer: We would finish the project.
Not the Instagram version of the project. Not the brunch-and-boutiques version. Not the real estate marketing version. The actual Atlanta Beltline vision: trails, parks, affordable housing, economic development and transit, all working together to reconnect a city that highways, redlining and car-dependent planning spent generations pulling apart.
Taylor argues that trains are not the answer. But to make that argument, he has to describe a Beltline rail project that does not exist. He warns of concrete and steel swallowing the trail. He imagines green space destroyed. He suggests that light rail is some clanking 19th-century relic being forced onto an otherwise pristine park.
Simply put: This is wrong.
The Beltline has always been a transportation corridor. The public has been told this for decades. That is why the Beltline exists. That is why communities all across the city, many of them disadvantaged and many afraid of the consequences of the gentrification they knew the Beltline would bring, supported it.
The trail and rail were not competing visions. They were the same vision. The entire idea was to transform old rail corridors into a connected loop of trails, parks and transit. To repair societal damage. The Beltline itself describes the project as a 22-mile corridor where pedestrian-friendly light rail and urban trails coexist. In plain English: walk, bike, stroll, ride and take the tram.
That is not some late-breaking radical plot hatched by train enthusiasts in matching shirts. It is the project.
Rail on the Beltline would be an economic engine
Taylor is right that the Beltline has become one of Atlanta’s most extraordinary accomplishments. He is also right that the work of philanthropists, civic leaders, public agencies and neighborhood advocates helped make that possible. But that success is precisely why we should be honest about what made the Beltline so powerful in the first place.
It was never supposed to be only a park.
A park is wonderful. A trail is wonderful. But a park with transit becomes infrastructure. It becomes mobility. It becomes access. It becomes economic opportunity.
That is the part of the conversation Taylor’s column misses most. He treats Beltline rail as if it would merely carry tourists to destinations. That framing is convenient, but it is small. Beneath the vision of the citizens of this city, Beltline rail would be an economic engine because it would help people get to work, 365 days per year, hot or cold, rain or sunshine.
The Beltline is already surrounded by jobs, hospitals, restaurants, offices, construction sites, schools, grocery stores, corporate headquarters, hotels, venues, apartments, and small and large businesses.
It connects neighborhoods that have seen explosive growth and neighborhoods that have been waiting far too long for investments that serve existing residents, not just future ones. The question is not whether people will want to visit the Beltline. The question is whether the people who make Atlanta work will be able to reach the jobs and opportunities being built around it without being forced to own, maintain, insure, and park a car.
That is the difference between an urban destination and a real city.
Taylor praises the Beltline for producing jobs and private investment. Good. Now let’s connect people to those jobs with something more reliable than traffic, surge pricing and for-profit rideshare apps. Let’s connect workers to Piedmont and Grady Hospitals, the Westside, Pittsburgh Yards, Ponce City Market, Lee + White, the Eastside, Armour Yards, Lindbergh, Piedmont, Grant, and Shirley Franklin parks, MARTA rail stations and all 45 neighborhoods in between. Let’s make it easier for a restaurant worker to get home after a shift, for a student to get to class, for a senior to reach an appointment, for a family to live with one fewer car (or none at all).
This is not nostalgia. This is basic city-building.
The “trains are 19th century technology” line is clever until you give it critical thought. Electricity is a 19th-century technology. So are bicycles, elevators and the telephone. We have somehow managed to improve them.
Modern light rail is electric, clean, quiet, and efficient. It is not Casey Jones on a coal-fired behemoth. Cities around the world use it not because they are trapped in the past, but because it works. Strasbourg, Zurich, Vienna, Melbourne, Paris, Seattle, San Diego and many others did not invest in light rail because they are confused about smartphones. They did it because high-capacity transit on dedicated right-of-way moves people more efficiently, effectively and affordably than private vehicles can.
The anachronism is not the train. The anachronism is pretending that adding more cars to Atlanta will solve Atlanta’s traffic problem.
Adding more cars to the streets just increases congestion
Taylor proposes instead a network of autonomous electric vehicles, perhaps 1,000 Rivians, plus charging stations and subsidies. We appreciate the futuristic packaging, but once you peel off the Fortune 500 wrapping, the idea is still just cars.
Electric cars are cars. Autonomous cars are cars. Rivians are cars. Cars take up road space. Cars get stuck in traffic. Cars need places to stop, charge, park and turn around. A thousand electric vehicles may be cleaner than a thousand gas vehicles, but they are still a thousand glorified minivans moving through a city on roads that are already choked by vehicles, doing absolutely nothing to directly connect the growing list of heavily used destinations along the Beltline.
A tram on dedicated right-of-way is different. It does not share lanes and compete with traffic. It carries far more people in far less space. It provides predictable, weather-proof service. It is public. It is not subject to surge pricing, app outages, investor panic, driver shortages, or whatever fresh euphemism Silicon Valley invents for “the product is not ready yet.”
And about those Rivians: Rivian makes impressive personal vehicles. It does not sell autonomous public transit. Even Rivian’s own driver-assistance features require human attention and control. So, the proposed alternative to a proven public transit system is, essentially, buying a large fleet of expensive luxury vehicles, hoping they retroactively get future technology and privatizing public transit. As much as we are seeing cars advance in technology, rail is matching, and sometimes exceeding, this speed. Battery operation, low floor level boarding crash avoidance systems have all become standard in recent years.
Atlanta has been waiting on promised transit projects long enough. We do not need to trade one delay for another, this time with better branding.
Jacksonville’s autonomous vehicle experiment is also not the utopia that Taylor suggests. Rather, it’s a recent cautionary tale. A short 3.5-mile downtown circulator that only operates five days per week is not a 22-mile transit spine around one of America’s most important growing cities. According to The Jacksonville Daily Record, their ridership is a whopping average of 76 passengers per day. And those massive numbers are from when it was first introduced and free; ridership has fallen by more than 50% since they started charging. Atlanta should be learning from the best urban transit systems in the world, not lowering our ambitions to whatever pilot program sounds most exciting in a boardroom.
Don’t abandon original vision and dismiss the will of the voters
The Beltline’s history makes this even more important. The project has brought enormous benefits, but those benefits have not been equitably shared. Property values have soared. Longtime residents have been displaced. Neighborhoods that were promised access and opportunity have too often seen it arrive wearing a luxury apartment logo.
Rail will not solve every affordability problem. Nobody serious claims it will. But removing transit from the Beltline plan would deepen the problem. It would leave us with a beautiful amenity that is easiest to enjoy if you already live nearby, can afford the neighborhood, or can drive to it and utilize one of our lovely urban parking lots.
That is not the full Beltline vision. That is the Beltline as lifestyle accessory.
Taylor also leans heavily on the Atlanta Streetcar as a warning. The Streetcar has real problems. No argument there. But using the downtown Streetcar to dismiss Beltline rail is like judging the entire concept of restaurants based on one bad airport sandwich.
The Streetcar is a short downtown loop that often operates in mixed traffic. It was never intended as a standalone route and was always conceived as only the first phase of a citywide system. Beltline rail would be part of a larger network, connected to existing and future MARTA service, running in a corridor that has already largely been preserved for this purpose. The lesson of the Streetcar is not “never build rail.” The lesson is “build rail where it goes somewhere, connects to other transit and has the priority it needs to work.”
That lesson points toward the Beltline, not away from it.
We should also stop pretending that this debate is simply about new facts replacing old ones. Atlanta voters approved the More MARTA tax in 2016 with 71% of Atlantans voting to expand transit. We have been paying it ever since. Beltline rail has appeared in years of planning, public engagement and election promises. If civic leaders now want to abandon that commitment, they should say so plainly. And they should be prepared to address the trust issue the public would rightly have about any future requests for financing of new ideas.
They should not claim that the trail was always meant to stand alone. They should not suggest that trains are a new intrusion into a project conceived around rail corridors. And they certainly should not describe the completion of the transit vision as the destruction of the Beltline.
If we had it to do over again, what would we do differently? We would start with rail, so that affordable housing would be car-optional. We would refuse to let the most transformative part of the project be endlessly studied, delayed, softened and rebranded until it disappears. We should stop second-guessing the overwhelming majority of public demand.
It’s too late for that.
Finish the trail. Keep the green. Build the rail.
Finish the Beltline.
Ivan Schustak serves on the board of Beltline Rail Now and works in communications and marketing for nonprofit arts organizations. He and his wife live in the City of Atlanta in a home adjacent to the Beltline. This view represents the consensus of the BRN board.
Send letters to the editor of 250 words or fewer with your name, city or town and contact information to letters@ajc.com.
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