Dan Immergluck gives a good summary of the troubled beginnings of MARTA in this excerpt from his book 'Red Hot City', which you should read.
Yes, metro Atlanta is a different place now and there's obviously a lot more support for MARTA in Cobb today than there was 52 years ago.
I'm not sharing this just to shame people. I'm sharing it because it's important to know how we got to where we are with our rail system, which reaches only a small portion of a very sprawled-out metro region. It's not MARTA's fault.
There was a period in the 1970s when the federal government was spending a lot of money to build rail transit in cities, but they still had to be judicious with where it was spent (Atlanta got its share of funding at the time it did partially because Seattle turned theirs down).
In the years since then, the price of building new rail in cities has skyrocketed for various reasons, even when adjusted for inflation. Cobb County could approve MARTA today, but getting a new rail track adequately funded there is a more difficult prospect now.
In 1971 no one was making transit-oriented density or a de-emphasis of cars in the transportation system a requirement for rail funding. The idea of building park-and-ride rail to a single office district seemed OK.
In 2023, we need to think differently. Work commutes are less than 1/4 of the trips we make, office districts have spread out, teleworking is more common -- it's time to reimagine transit so that it's paired with a more compact type of development, plus affordable homes, plus mixed-use neighborhoods designed at a scale for walking.
This was a tragedy of the past, but we can still fix our cities, we can again try to expand MARTA, we can build denser neighborhoods and we can make rail viable for the people again, all it takes if work from the people. We need to rethink transit and we can do that
