A Christmas Wish for Atlanta's Transit

By Doug Alexander

There was a time, not so long ago, when a person could get nearly everywhere in the City of Atlanta on transit.

Of course, that was when the transit system was privately owned by the Georgia Power Company and consisted entirely of streetcars.

The system was enormous; tracks went up and down most major streets, and extended out as far as Marietta and Stone Mountain.

The streetcars were safe and reliable.

When Harry Norman Real Estate Broker Necia Kelleher was just six years old, she could get on the streetcar near her home in West End and ride downtown all by herself to do her Christmas shop-ping at Rich’s Department Store.

She wasn’t unsupervised, of course: her mother, Thelma Knight, put her on the streetcar at the stop near her home; her Aunt Lucy welcomed her downtown (and took her to lunch at the famed Magnolia Room); and the streetcar motormen kept an eye out for the young lady throughout her trip.

Children were not the only ones who took “the Car” with ease. My grandfather, Cecil Alexander, Sr., had a hardware store on Pryor Street. He also had a little black Scottie dog named Snuff.

Each day, he and Snuff would walk a block from their home on St. Charles Avenue to catch an inbound streetcar on Ponce de Leon, and then walk another block to the store to open it up for business.

After the day was done, Cecil and Snuff would lock up, and catch the Car for home.

According to family lore, as Snuff “got on” in years, he began sleeping in at home. An hour or so after my grandfather had left for the store, Snuff would head out by himself. The streetcar would rumble and squeal to a stop, the door would open with a woosh as the steps dropped down with a whump, and the little dog would bound up into the streetcar and sit himself down for the trip.

Family lore also tells us that after a year or two of this, as Snuff became elderly (for a dog), he decided that he didn’t need to stay at the store until closing. Snuff began leaving about an hour before closing to catch the Car for home. Georgia Power even gave Snuff a lifetime pass to use the system as he pleased, though his master still had to pay full fare.

Of course, one has to take family lore with at least a few grains of salt, but we do know that the part about the pass is true; years ago the late historian Franklin Garrett found and showed my Dad and me the entry in Georgia Power’s pass records for “Snuff – a dog.”

By the time I came along, Atlanta’s streetcars and the trolley buses that succeeded them were long gone, replaced by buses owned by the city. They didn’t go to quite as many places as the streetcars had gone, and as years went by they became less frequent too.

Fortunately, I was blessed with a grandmother in New Orleans, so on visits as a youngster I did get to know what it was like to ride a real streetcar, and it saddened me that we didn’t have these wonderful rolling park-benches on our streets.

 When I was a member of the City Council in the 1990s, I began a conversation about bringing street-cars back to Auburn Avenue to help in the redevelopment of that famous street. That conversation has at last borne fruit: a brand-new streetcar line is being built from the heart of downtown to the heart of our civil rights heritage at the Martin Luther King Center.

And so, on this Christmas Day, my wish for our city is that this will be the first of many new streetcar lines, and that they will help to re-connect our neighborhoods and knit Atlanta back into to a place where six-year-olds – and the occasional dog – can get around town in safety and with ease.
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Published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Christmas Day - December 25, 2012

(There is no link available without a subscription to the AJC)

No bucks, no Buck Rogers

What We Should Do with Money We Don't Have

The phrase famously uttered by Astronaut Gus Grissom is much on my mind as various pundits air their solutions for Atlanta's transportation morass.

 

In Tuesdays' Atlanta metro newspaper there's a marginally interesting piece with a "solution" to our traffic problem by the ever-auto-centric Robert Poole of the marginally libertarian Reason Foundation, and a more thoughtful response by Mark Woodall, chairman of the Georgia Sierra Club.

 

Dr. Poole now suggests that if we just build "managed arterials" we will solve all of our traffic woes.  Imagine, if you will, the intersection of Roswell Road and Hammond Drive in the heart of Sandy Springs looking like any one of the intersections on Peachtree Industrial north of the Parameter.  Perish the thought!

 

But at least Poole admits that the idea promoted by him and his fellow Highwaymen, Wendell Cox and Randal O'Toole; that we destroy Atlanta and rebuild it with streets that are in a perfect, logical grid to ease our traffic (of course, the very act of destroying the city will have that effect), is "not likely."

 

Nor is it likley that a grid -- even if it could be done to Atlanta and if the city could survive the surgurey -- would solve all of our problems.  New York City is on a grid.  So is Washington.  I would not say that all is well with the the traffic in those cities.

Mr. Woodall's Georgia Sierra Club came out against the TSPOLST because they did not like the share that would go to transit over the 10-years of the penny sales tax.  53% just was not enough.  Apparently if they couldn't have the entire loaf, then no one should get any, which is not a terribly constructive approach to my mind.

But in his column, Woodall makes a point very dear to my heart; one I have been pushing for a quarter century:

“So what are other successful places doing that we aren’t? The answer is not building “managed arterials.” Instead, they are building the multimodal transportation systems the 21st century requires. They are investing in proven options such as commuter and intercity rail. They are addressing issues of regional transportation governance and are creating efficient, integrated systems. They are making the most of their existing transit infrastructure. In other words, things Atlanta has been failing to do.”

Yes, these are things Atlanta should have been doing and that Atlanta (and Georgia) have thus far failed to do to improve transit and transportation in Georgia.

Some of those things could have been done, or at least seriously begun, had the TSPLOST succeeded.  But it did not, and at present we have no other vehicle for funding investments in transit. 

As per the Georgia State Constitution, our pittance of a gas tax can only be used for roads and bridges, yet the income from that source is not enough to address all the needs we have just in our roads and bridges.  So even if we had the flexibility to use those funds for other modes, there just is not enough to do the job.

But rather read about what we ought to be doing and how important it is that we do it and how sad it is that we have not done it already, we need come up with a way to fund these wonderful solutions that we need.

Oh, and while we're at it, we'd better be sure that it actually is do-able, both fiscally and politically, and not just a fantasy -- a fantasy, which at its core, was the essence of Sonny Perdue's TSPLOST proposal.

As the saying goes, "Money talks. Bullsh-t walks."  Without the bucks, we can only just dream of what we could and ought to do.

Just say "thank you" and shut up.

I remember being on a plane to Indianapolis about some 15 years ago, and a fellow passenger told me that we in Atlanta had a great transit system.  He came from a city with NO transit to speak of.

I thought about telling him of all of our system's shortcomings: How it didn't go enough places; how it was limited to only two counties because of bigotry among some who live outside of the city (really, what other reason was there?); because it catered to those who had no option rather than trying to be an option for those who had them.

Instead of all that airing of dirty laundry, being a Southern boy who was "raised right" by my momma I just smiled and said "Thank you.  I'm glad you like it."

T-SPLOST nay-sayers discover there are penalties for saying NO. Film at Eleven.

T-SPLOST Opponents Call for Repeal of Penalty on Regions that Voted “No”

http://pba.org/post/t-splost-opponents-call-repeal-penalty-regions-voted-no

Oh, this is just PRICELESS!

"Hidden penalties" indeed. It's there in the law, plain as day. For Mr. Brown to get all in a wad as if he didn't know... of course, if he didn't know that would mean he had not actually Read The Law, which means that he was proceeding from ignorance, which would...completely explain his position.

It's been amazing to watch this unfold -- I went to a "debate" (actually it was more of a turkey shoot) at the Fulton Co. GOP headquarters in Sandy Springs two weeks ago, and one of the NO people outlined the Tea Party's Plan B which calls for the Transportation Board to be elected (I guess he means "by the people" as opposed to the way they are elected now).

I cannot for the life of me understand just how that would change much, but they think it would - I guess they haven't read SB 200 either.

Oh well. Soldier on we must.