This is the final posting to the Down & Outbound blog. For you few, the very few subscriber/friends you won't notice much change in the volume of your inbox since I've only been averaging a posting a month (for over four years). There are several reasons to end it permanently:
-- Because I haven't been working in Midtown Atlanta since the summer of 2019, I stopped riding public transportation in Atlanta. My two hour daily commute roundtrip consistently provided mass transit anecdotes mixed with grumblings about what it is like being a brave pedestrian in metro Atlanta. With all this grist and frustration being removed from my life, it left me with less to write/complain about.
-- Though I still believe in the importance of public transportation especially in the way it helps the environment, I think the Pandemic has pushed the public transportation issue down into the weeds for the foreseeable future. Ranting about scooters well, . . . seems kind of trivial at this point.
-- Overall, I am uninspired about metro Atlanta's future plans about transportation. Has even one additional mile of rail service anywhere been added in the decade while I was a commuter? In contrast, colossal interchanges, an express lane for automobiles on I-75 and more "studies" have dominated the budgets.
Archive of Popular Posts
The site will stay up in case you want to order a Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire book or the gorgeously printed D & O Thanks for Not Running Me Over Poster. The book is still for sale at Amazon, Alibris and on my own virtual popup book shop Destination: Books The site will also continue be the archive where you can also revisit some of its "more popular" postings, such as:
-- May 1, 2020. "We've All Experienced This Look on the Subway." Why Dr. Deborah Birx's reaction to Trump's suggestion that we should try injecting ourselves with bleach looks so familiar to commuters.
-- February 6, 2020. "Sixteen Metric Tons: A Climate Parody". A song about air pollution.
-- October 30, 2019 and November 13, 2019. European Transportation Options Parts 1 and 2. A pictorial account of public transportation in Venice, Berlin, Prague and Treviso Italy.
-- The MARTA Book Club. A series of postings on what people read while on Atlanta public transportation. These live on my companion blog about books (which still marches on.)
And thanks for reading the blog!
By coincidence last week, I stumbled on to a movie and a book where trains play a prominent role in the storyline. They even share an educational component:
Wim Wenders, The American Friend. Wenders directed this 1977 German-French film starring Dennis Hopper and a young Bruno Ganz the late, great actor who portrayed Adolf Hitler in “Downfall”, but is currently well known for all those Hitler memes.
"The American Friend" is set in Hamburg and Paris, and Ganz plays a dying man who is recruited indirectly by Hopper to be an assassin. Ganz carries out his first assignment in the Paris subway system and then with assistance from Hopper, he tosses a couple of men off the train while traveling from Munich to Hamburg. Later after the deed, Hopper poses a math problem to Ganz over beers, “If you throw a gangster out of train going eighty miles an hour, and then you throw a second one, (and you know the distance between the two discarded bodies), how much time passes between the two events if the train doesn’t change speeds?”
W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. The German-born Sebald (1994-2001) is one of my favorite writers over the past few years. Sebald often includes trains and train stations in his narratives. Black and white photographs – like they came out of an old family album – are always part of a Sebald book. One of the chapters entitled “Paul Bereyter” is about a retired schoolteacher who ends his life on a December night in 1984 by laying down on a curve of the railroad track. (Shown here)
The narrator is one of Bereyter’s students and he recalls how much “railways had always meant a great deal to him (Bereyter) – perhaps he felt they (railways) were headed for death. Timetables and directories, all the logistics of railways, had at times become an obsession with him…I thought of the stations, tracks, goods, depots and signal boxes that Paul had so often drawn on the blackboard and which we had to copy into our exercise books as carefully as we could.”
Readers of Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire can appreciate how these two works might have appealed to me. The main character of D & O works in “mass transit counter-intelligence” and writes in the form of a “personal journal of case narratives which he hopes to eventually turn into a television script.” However, the similarities end there, as I am no Wim Wenders or W.G. Sebald. The last sentence sounds like a possible book blurb.
In 2018, these big plastic planters in hideous purple, blue and orange colors were added to busy Dekalb Avenue to slow the traffic from Atlanta into Decatur. I don't how effective they were in calming traffic but nothing slows traffic like a pandemic. These plastic planters have met with some derision from local residents including this protest song.
Planted among the dead plants, volunteer flowers and distressed trees are countless signs of appreciation for people wearing masks, for people who stay at home, for Decatur city employees and for first responders. All worthy, no doubt.
Therefore it seemed appropriate to add a poster from the Down & Outbound collection as well.Unfortunately, since people don't always understand dry humor it has already been removed. But no problem I have plenty of them (for sale too).
Before the COVID-19 pandemic in March, this small parking lot near the Avondale Station here in Atlanta would be filled before 8:30 in the morning. Now if you drive in there, one has the uneasy feeling of: "Am I even supposed to be here?"
Inspired by the recent ESPN series "The Last Dance" about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dynasty, this posting is an excerpt from the 2016 book Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire (available online only from Destination: Books or Amazon). The map shows the fictitious Atlantis City Transit System known as ALACARTA, which stands for the Always Lovely Atlantis City Area Rapid Transit Authority*.
The North-South Dream Line
The stations on the north-south line (aka The Dream Line) had originally been named for the neighborhoods where they were located, but were renamed by the Atlantis City Council to honor the 1992 Olympic Dream Team that won the gold medal in basketball and restored pride to our hoops-loving nation. Led by the NBA stars Michael Jordan and Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the team featured 11 players who would later become members of the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame. It is no coincidence that the Stockton and Malone stations and the Pippin and Air Jordan stations are adjacent to each other, just as John Stockton and Karl Malone played side-by-side for the Utah Jazz and Scottie Pippen played with Jordan for years on the Chicago Bulls. The Dream Team re-established America's supremacy in basketball, which had previously suffered setbacks in international competition. Just outside the city’s perimeter (defined by the eight lanes of interstate that loop the city) there is Laettner station, a large bus stop disconnected from the rail line—named after Christian Laettner, the only college player on the Dream Team and the only team member not to be elected to the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame. To make the buses connecting the Dream Line stations easier to remember, the route numbers correspond to each player's uniform number.
The East-West Cross Line
The Stations of the Cross Line, or Cross Line for short, runs east to west. As if repenting for renaming city neighborhoods for basketball players, the Atlantis City Economic Task Force suggested capitalizing on the nation's growing interest in religion by creating a Christian-themed line to stimulate the city’s tourism industry. Unfortunately, neither this nor the additional activities devised to stir up interest, such as the creation of religious festivals, and press releases about miracles, brought tourism dollars to the city coffers. Maybe the names were too focused on Easter. Eventually, the lengthy names of the original stations such as Garden of Gethsemane or Pontius Pilate were simplified to address this issue. Besides who would want to live near Judas Station? Kiss & Ride was much more palatable to the locals.
*Any resemblance to Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority is mere coincidence. For more about the book, see the trailer video at http://bit.ly/2hgCOtO
It took me a few days to figure it out, but Dr. Deborah Birx's reaction to President Trump's "musing" about possible treatments for COVID-19 reminded me of a moment that all subway riders have experienced. You're just on the train trying to mind your own business when another rider exhibits bad behavior: cursing loud on their cell phone, yelling maniacally about poor train service, or specifically asking you questions about disinfectant. ( "Yeah, you with the big scarf. I'm talking to you." )
Fortunately, Dr. Birx is a savvy woman. Under no circumstances do you make eye contact with this person.
The phase "Down and Out" only begins to describe the public transportation situation here in Atlanta and other major cities. Deep cuts in service including reduced schedules for trains and the elimination of bus routes come as little surprise. As one who commuted daily on the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) trains for over a decade, a large portion of the ridership were service workers, students, and people traveling to and from the airport for work or travel. And we all know what that situation is right now.
Though I rarely ride anymore, (or drive for that matter these days since retiring last year), I feel for the MARTA financial situation. In a way, it's similar to the support I have for my local restaurants, the neighborhood hardware store, indie bookstores, and charities. So I ponied up for a couple of Breeze transit cards via their website. In the olden days I used to carry an extra Breeze card with me loaded with a couple rides in case I was solicited and felt the person was being honest about their need for help to get to work or home. (But on more than one occasion, I'd offer the card to the person asking for transit fare and the reply would be, "No, I'd rather have the money." Hmmm.)
It seems irrelevant whether I will use the cards or "gift" them as this is nothing more than a small, symbolic sense of duty to the memory of my commuter past combined with the future-Earth-Day-kinda hope for a fewer cars, cleaner air and less noise.
The MARTA Army is an independent grassroots action group, committed to enhancing the ridership experience on public transit in Metro Atlanta. Since the MARTA Army recently solicited suggestions for their book club, may I recommend Down and Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire?
Even though a satire based on the public transportation experience seems at odds with an organization that -- for the lack of a better word -- cheerleads public transportation in Atlanta, I disagree. The underlying nature of satire is optimism. Unlike comedy which accepts flaws, satire expects better or believes things could be better (optimism). Both MARTA Army and D & O share the same goal that better mass transit is vital for our community, but our approaches are different. The MARTA Army does good works like improving bus stops, D & O takes a more "See Something" and "Say Something" approach to identify problems.
In the likely event that you soldiers of the MARTA Army have arrived here looking for something to read, I hope you will proceed to the Down & Outbound Store. Never underestimate the power of unorthodox alliances.
Through the magic of algorithms and nestled in-between many internet ads for printer ink (I recently bought some at Office Depot) I am now connected to the New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens on Facebook. It is a moderated collection of transit-oriented humor and commentary, mixed in with reports around the world about various issues surrounding mass transit. You don't have to be a teen to belong or should I say the algorithm is not savvy enough to determine that I am not a teen anymore (does immaturity count?). Still I consider myself interested in alternative transportation despite discontinuing the daily slog to work.
Since New Urbanist Memes is thematically similar to my Down & Outbound website, I recently cannibalized some of my previous work on Smart Cones from Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire and made a submission. After it posted, I received about 100 comments, mostly centered around my misspelling of "gauge." This reponse exceeded the entire viewer traffic to the Down & Outbound blog since its inception in 2017. New Urbanist Memes gave me a brief sense of validation and belonging.
Book Selling Note
Copies of the book Down & Outbound will be on sale at the Destination: Books popup book stall on Saturday, March 7th and again on Saturday, April 4th at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center here in Atlanta. Destination: Books will be carrying many books on organic gardening and sustainability as well as a few others relating to transportation.
A few things I have been reading lately seemed relevant:
Barely Maps
Back in September, I mentioned that Down & Outbound became a Kickstarter supporter for a book project by Peter Gorman entitled Barely Maps. The project is a personal account of the cyclist and graphic designer's 11,000 mile bike trip across the United States and southern Canada. The end result is the gorgeously printed Barely Maps: 100 Minimalist Maps (2019). It's similar to an artbook with dozens of illustrations including a set of Intersections, where Gorman outlines the quirky, weird intersections of select U.S. cities. You can read a complete review of the book on my companion thebookshopper.org blog or visit Gorman's website at barelymaps.com.
Democracy and Public Services (Transportation)
Astra Taylor's book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone (2019) is a multidisciplinary and historical look at the where democracy stands as we the first quarter of the new century. Although you could say things are looking a little bleak for democracy, Taylor reminds us that "democracy begins where you live" including protecting the environment. She writes:
"Ultimately, more than 350 cities announced plans to break with national policy and honor the international accord. No longer advising people to go back to the land, environmentalists increasingly recognize the role cities must play if they hope to achieve sustainability Several earths would be required for everyone to live in a suburban home with a two-car garage, which means dense cities - compact, efficiently designed, and public service rich -- will be crucial to livable low-carbon future. "(Taylor is citing the work of Daniel Adana Cohen.)
And Ending on a Lighter Note
A couple of weeks ago around midnight on a Saturday night, my eye caught a "vehicle" scooting down my street in Decatur (GA). I live on a busy street with lots of traffic and even at that late hour automobiles pass by regularly. The vehicle had no lights or reflectors, but a large, older man was wearing white sweatpants (or pajamas?), a jacket and stocking cap was tootling along one of the lanes. I feared the worse for the scooter rider or an unsuspecting motorist and called the non-emergency police number. The next morning the scooter was abandoned a block away and it turned out it was a motorized shopping cart from a Walmart store which is about 3/4 of a mile from where I live. You cannot underestimate how people like their scooters.
Two-year old Myrick Poore (my grandson) is working daily on solutions to transportation problems in his living room lab. The first one deals with the problem of how can buses be better used to combat traffic congestion that would appeal to those who cannot give up their cars.
His second project is combatting traffic jams caused by highway construction, which involves removing barricades at optimal times.
No doubt that these "hand of God" type of solutions require some modification. But Myrick has time.
After spending four weeks in Europe using public transportation, trains and my own two feet to get around in Venice, Prague, Berlin and Ljubljana I pulled together random thoughts about those experiences. In Part 1, I wrote about Italy and Prague now in Part 2, I am adding some anecdotal observations about Berlin and Ljubljana, which is the capital city of Slovenia.
Berlin, Germany
The four-hour train trip from Prague to Berlin was much more relaxing than taking a short flight on the airlines. Not only do you pass several bucolic spa cities in Southern Germany, but the scenic Elbe River is a constant travel companion much of the way as well. But arriving at the Berlin’s enormous glass and steel Berlin Central Station or Hauptbahnof (Berlin Hbf) I was shocked from my train reverie by the size and magnitude of the transportation hub. The Berlin Central Station was completed in 2006 on the former site of the Lehrter Station, which was originally constructed in 1876 and heavily damaged in World War II.* The two levels of Hauptbahnof connects local train transportation (top level) with the regional train service (bottom level). Fortunately, my older daughter Cynthia, who lives in Berlin, greeted my partner and travel planner extraordinaire Denise Casey and me and led us to our AirBnb apartment in the Kreuzberg section of the city. Otherwise we might still be wondering around this "train metropolis."
When the Berlin Wall was built, Kreuzberg was a district surrounded on three sides by East Berlin and for years remained rundown before being inhabited by more bohemian and artist types. There was a heavy Turkish influence as well because of the Turks who emigrated to Germany to work in the factories in the 1960s could live there cheaply. After reunification, the 3oth anniversary was earlier this month, Kreuzberg retained its counterculture heritage but has been part of the gentrification controversy. We spent most of our time in Kreuzberg and the buzz and activity on the streets has a certain energy that sets it apart from other boroughs of Berlin (from what I’ve been told.)
In addition to the trains and buses which run constantly, there are plenty of cyclists in Berlin. The bike lanes and paths blend “too seamlessly” because I had to specifically look for the designations such as different color bricks or sidewalk lanes marked by reflector buttons so riders wouldn't yell at me, "Achtung, Bitte". Berlin has long, hard winters, and the cyclists had a gritty aura that showed their toughness. I half-expected to see a cyclist carrying a Panzerfaust. (* See footnote at the end of the posting for the full explanation and digression.)
After a few days, Denise and I felt comfortable getting around by ourselves and we took the subway to the central part of the city to see the Brandenburg Gate and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (shown here with cyclists on Hannah-Arendt Strasse.)
Ljubljana, Slovenia
There are limited rail and air travel options between Berlin and
Ljubljana so we flew from Berlin to Zagreb, Croatia and took a shared van service called GoOpti to get to Ljubljana. Once you are in this medieval city that is built on the peaceful Ljubljanica River, your transportation needs are few since you can walk to the most sites in the city within twenty minutes.
The central part of the Ljubljana is strictly limited to pedestrians and bicycles. Only a few automobiles are granted access relying these clever little obstacles (shown below). I am so easily entertained; I could watch these for hours.
E-scooters are starting to appear in the city, but our food guide who was an avid cyclist is hoping they don’t take hold. In Ljubljana, I was wary at first because the way the cyclists darted in and out among the pedestrians effortlessly. The cyclists who dressed in normal clothes and followed the guidelines I mentioned when describing the cyclists in Treviso, Italy. (See European Transportation Part 1.)
We were in Ljubljana for a week and we wanted to see other parts of Slovenia. Slovenia is a relatively small country and we used Ljubljana as a base, because it takes less than two hours to drive to the glacial Lake Bled to the north (shown below) or the alpine shepherd’s village of Velika Planina or the Adriatic seashore town of Piran, which we did. It was the only three days we drove during the almost four weeks we were abroad. (Slovenia has good roads and the drivers are not particularly aggressive.) Unlike other European countries Slovenia does not much of a regional train network and when we left the country to return to Treviso, Italy for our eventual flight home, we used the GoOpti service again.
Panzerfaust Footnote *
Part of my Berlin experience was influenced by reading Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945 (2002) before I arrived in the city. This detailed account of the Soviet Army’s crushing defeat and punishment of Nazi Germany in the final months of World War II, is pure misery porn. Beevor’s book it describes the suffering of millions of German civilians and the horrors that the Soviet army put on the German population, partly in retribution for Nazi atrocities against the Soviet Union in 1942-44. Two accounts in the book stick in my mind: 1.) How the German civilians hid in the subways like Lehrter Station to avoid the heavy Soviet bombardment of the city (The Red Army even zeroed their artillery on the station entrances so if the civilians tried to get out temporarily get food and water it was only at great peril. And 2.) The Germans use of Panzerfaust, an anti-tank weapons resembling rocket propelled grenades that German soldiers riding bicycles would use to attack Soviet tanks with effective results. In this less than perfect photo of the Brandenburg (shown below), I found the helmeted tourists riding Segway-like vehicles amusing especially considering the Panzerfaust heritage. This may seem to be an odd narrative juxtaposing war stories and tourists on scooters, but since Berlin is a city that has been wrestling with its past, it seemed relevant.
After spending four weeks in Europe using public transportation to get around Venice and several nearby cities, Prague, Berlin and Ljubljana (Slovenia) I pulled together some random thoughts about those experiences that are anecdotal in nature. I begin with Italy and Prague in Part 1 and then move to Berlin and Ljubljana in Part 2.
Venice
When flying into Venice, no matter how tired your are, you immediately awaken to the fact that this is a public transportation network like no other. To get from Marco Polo Airport to the city you must take a water bus and dock at one of many “boat stops” on the way.
There are no cars or trucks in Venice and one must rely entirely on boats and your own two feet. Since hundreds of canal bridges populate the city, there are very few bicycles and e-scooters to contend with on the streets and sidewalks.
What struck me was that every function you expect from a car or a truck was provided via boat whether is was an ambulance boat, a fire fighting boat or a boat hauling goods or garbage. Why these boats didn’t collide was a mystery to me, and it reminded me of all those cyclists in Amsterdam I witnessed a few years ago crisscrossing each other without incident. (And yes, I did do a gondola ride but only for about five minutes just to cross the Grand Canal.)
Treviso, Italy
Treviso, Italy is part of the Veneta and is only 30 miles north of Venice. It serves as a regional rail hub to cities such as Verona, Padua, and Conegliano. Regional trains ran regularly thoughout the day and evening so it is fairly easy make day trips – vineyard tours outside of Conegliano, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and the Colosseum in Verona (shown left to right in the above collage). The train stops at smaller cities on the way, and one must be vigilant because these stations are not always announced. An added benefit is that on the back of your ticket there was a graphic reminding me how train travel was the best mode of transportation for the environment when compared to automobiles and planes.
Treviso is pedestrian-friendly in the center city because access by automobile is limited. Also, it is a fairly flat city with narrow streets and cyclists – sans bike lanes – effortlessly dart in and out among pedestrians (but not recklessly). Based merely on my observations, there were other unwritten rules among the cyclists encapsulated by the snapshot of this older woman who unknowingly embodied the following guidelines:
No Helmets – only children with their parents wore helmets.
No Spandex – cyclists wore their regular daily clothes. Just because many Italians like to dress fashionably did not prevent them from riding bicycles.
No Shame in Walking Your Bicycle – Older riders were not hesitant to dismount and walk his or her bicycle up a hill or in a congested area.
No Age Limit – It was not unusual to see riders in their sixties and seventies riding slowly but effortlessly in the center city.
No Fancy Bikes – These bikes were more functional in nature with front baskets and back baskets and fenders to prevent muddy splashes on those nice clothes.
There is a city bus system in Treviso, but since my traveling partner and trip planner extraordinaire Denise Casey stayed in the center city, we didn’t need to use it. You can walk anywhere in center city in 20 or 30 minutes including the Treviso train station. This short video gives one some sense of the vibe.
Prague, Czech Republic
Prague relies on its electric trams and a major subway with three main lines. Our tour guide remarked that the only thing Soviets did right was build a subway system that commuters could get from the outskirts to the main centers of the city in a few minutes. (It is fifth busiest subway system in Europe in terms of ridership with trains running every two to three minutes at rush hour.) Since we were staying in the nearby Mala Strada, we quickly mastered the tram system, which we used regularly to take us back and forth to the more touristy Old Town and sites such as the Astronomical Clock. I regret not checking out some of the stations in the tunnels, but it was never necessary because the trams were enough for us to get around.
Like the drivers in my hometown of Atlanta-- even though traffic is slowed and not has heavy -- as a pedestrian you had to make eye contact with the motorists even if you were in a crosswalk. I almost got paved into a cobblestone street near the Prague Castle.
There was some cycling and the e-scooters in Prague as well, but I am not sure those e-pests will be widely accepted. I saw a few people riding e-scooters on cobblestone streets and their heads were bobbling so much I thought I saw a few teeth fly out.
At the end of our stay, we took the tram directly to at the Prague train station where we boarded a train for a four-hour trip to Berlin.
Based on our combined interest of a.) alternative transportation b.) graphic representation of information (as an old Tufte disciple) and c.) the entrepreneurship of creating a different type of book where form follows function (such as Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire), we contributed to the Kickstarter Project called Barely Maps. Check out the complete story here.
Pledges end September 25th, but they the project already made its goal. We look forward to getting our book later on this year.
Readers of this blog know that when I am walking, electric scooters are not welcome on sidewalks and as a motorist and a fellow human being, I fear being part of or witness to a serious accident involving a scooter on a street. You can call it envy because of my own lack of balance (and thus I am excluded from the Lime club), but when I see a 185 lb. person scooting 15 miles an hour with no helmet in traffic, I shudder, not gaze wistfully. Given the durability of a scooter -- estimated between one and three months -- gives me further anxiety when I see scooters weaving amongst traffic and pedestrians. See this article for details.
Atlanta Journal Constitution Article
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a long feature article in the Sunday, September 1st edition, which covered many of the issues surrounding the use of scooters in Atlanta. I’ve highlighted one excerpt that challenges the much-marketed assumption that scooters replace car trips (they replace walkers as well). Of course, there is a lot of big money pushing these assumptions. Lime is financed by Uber and Google-Alphabet.
(Click on article to enlarge)
How do you factor inspiration's role when writing a blog, publishing a book, or posting little photo essays about a experience that is as ordinary as going to work each day? Over this past decade of commuting, these activities have been part of my Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) experience. Writing and creating has been a coping mechanism for the frustration of the experience, but it also has been a positive shared communal activity with many of my fellow Atlantans, unlike attending a stadium-sized sporting event (an artificial sense of community).
From those daily commutes, I did begin to appreciate that there are plots, characters and themes, and these snowballed into what became Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire. Once I finished writing the book, I had some closure, resigning myself that MARTA “is, what it is” and as the saying goes --- “it” usually isn’t very good. Satires really are the work of optimists as they point out the fallacies in hopes of things will be better. Imagine my disappointment.
Down & Outbound will be making one its rare public appearances at the Georgia Book and Paper Fair at the Decatur Book Festival. I will be working at the Destination Books pop-up book stall all day Saturday, August 31st and Sunday, September 1st. (Details here) Stop by and we can discuss this further. Perhaps you can buy a book (any book), and may be you can apply to be the next president of the MARTA Book Club.
I have maintained throughout this blog, that one of the main, lesser known reasons that people do not choose MARTA, is that once they get off the station -- summer heat and humidity aside -- that walking on the sidewalks is a miserable experience. In January of 2018, I dedicated an entire posting on Ten Ways Midtown Torments Pedestrians and I can say that in the last 18 months there has been no improvement and with the addition of e-scooters to the streets and sidewalks, the experience is even more unpleasant. Crumbling sidewalks, deafening loud construction, closed sidewalks, vodka trucks stopping on sidewalks, motorists cutting off pedestrians, crosswalks with either faded or no paint contribute to the dysfunction. Making it even worse are those futuristic depictions that transportation nirvana is just around the corner.
My daily walk along Tenth Street from the MARTA station across the I-75-85 overpass is the lowlight of the shitty experience. ( Georgia Tech has the right idea for providing a shuttle for students and staff.) It was along this stretch that I was knocked to the pavement by an automobile making a right turn.Sometimes I take the 14th street bridge, which is wider, but crossing at Techwood or Spring Street is deceptively dangerous and a work colleague of mine was struck there last winter. He was seriously injured with a concussion to the point that he missed work for several months (but thankfully he has recovered).
Again, public transportation pundits, always like the point to the cost of gasoline as the gating factor to determine ridership in MARTA, but the year the I-85 bridge collapsed in flames, MARTA ridership decreased. Why? My theory is if people rode MARTA maybe it was an okay experience, but if they had to walk anywhere in Midtown that summer they probably felt that it wasn't worth the hassle and opted for even a longer car commute.
A Bridge Too Far? Open House on Proposed Improvements
It's too late for me, but Midtown Alliance and City of Atlanta are holding an open house on Thursday, September 5, 2019 to gather input on some of the proposed conceptual designs for 10th Street Bridge Multi-Modal Enhancement Project. But is it too late? Maybe I should take the train down there for old time sake and advocate for the future.
Below is the proposed vision of MARTA Midtown station and the current Midtown station after a heavy rain.
After 10 solid years of commuting roundtrip from Decatur to Midtown using MARTA ( Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) I am calling it quits or rather I am retiring from my daily commute. So as I make my final regular trips on the train, I will share some random thoughts in a series of postings.
I am a little bit of a data guy so I logged most of my trips on Georgia Commute Options, and I even won a few gift certificates and a gorgeous commuter participation trophy for blogging. But it has been more rewarding than that. As the numbers show, in a small way I saved money, put thousands of less miles on my car, and kept 7 TONS of pollution out the air.
What the numbers don't show is that my employer paid for a partial monthly pass and by walking to and from the stations, I have probably kept more tonnage from accumulating around my waist. One of the main factors, is that I am not a big fan of sitting in traffic and much prefer reading on a train. (I am the lame duck President of the MARTA Book Club - another posting to follow). For the most part I avoided MARTA buses as the sitting in traffic with automobiles for an hour on those hard, hard seats made my back sore.
My quick summary of the MARTA experience is when I started riding in 2009 it was okay, then it got worse, then Keith Parker took over as CEO and it got better (and more solid financially) to about the same level as it is today. Safety-wise it's okay, but Atlanta is a big city and you have to be aware of your surroundings and the electrical system is aging, and things catch fire from time to time.
These two news items appeared on the same day during the week when President Trump announced his re-election bid in Orlando, Florida. The first was an Associated Press story that appeared on the front page in the June 20th edition of the Chicago Tribune. The second graphic was an article that appeared in The Guardian about the costs of seawalls to keep certain coastal states from ending up under water.
Check out which pivotal state in the 2020 election is projected to pay the most in seawall construction as a result for continued reliance of fossil fuels.