#atlanta streetcar

[atlurbanist]

Stop blaming Atlanta's streetcar for ridership failures and look instead at the urban design

There's a new, dimwitted rant against rail today from the libertarians at Reason. They argue that, because the current Atlanta streetcar is underused, any extension of it is bound to be useless.

This argument is similar to the one where people see a useless bike lane that lasts only a few blocks and they say "look! No one's using it! We shouldn't build any more!"

Unfortunately, Atlanta's failure to improve the land-use around the current streetcar (or to give it priority over car traffic during big events) gives these anti-rail rants a level of credence that they don't deserve. It's a damn shame.

It's been 13 years since the federal government awarded Atlanta a $47 million grant for the current streetcar. The fact that much of the route is *still* abutted by empty buildings and parking facilities shows a gross misunderstanding of how land-use and transit should benefit each other.

And the fact that the streetcar gets regularly shut down during big events in Downtown, due to car traffic, is so ridiculous I often have trouble finding words.

In short, Atlanta isn't doing itself any favors when it comes to making a good case for street-rail expansion. These libertarian rants should be easier to rebut. We should have improved the urban design of Downtown to a level that helps street rail make great sense.

We still can, and should. Better late than never.

[threadatl]

Atlanta Streetcar service halted until next year due to $7.4 million in needed repairs

According to the AJC, MARTA has removed the streetcar from service until some time early next year due to the vehicles needing an estimated $7.4 million of repair.

From the AJC article:

"Board members quizzed MARTA’s staff..some wondered why the agency did not have spare parts that could have been used to fix the vehicles in short order."

Good question. It's concerning that we're planning to extend this streetcar to the Eastside Beltline and yet we can't keep it maintained well enough to prevent a long period of service outage.

Some interesting perspective on this closure comes from @mdasilva1563 on Twitter, who writes:

"Light rail vehicles last much longer and actually have fewer moving parts than buses, making them cheaper over a 20+ year timeline. The issue here seems to be that the Atlanta streetcar is a tiny orphan system with no economies of scale."

"For example, the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail in New Jersey is still using its original fleet 22 years after the system opened. The vehicles are estimated to still have another 15 years or so of life left before they need to be replaced."

In that light, it seems possible that expanding the system may be beneficial for keeping street rail in better repair.

[barithoene]

[atlantathecity]

I still get happy every time I see the streetcar. I like the sound of it -- the quiet hum of the wheels, the ding of the electric bell. I know all the reasons there are for criticizing it. But I prefer the reasons for improving it and building great things around it.

[calilili]

Cali Lili : “JD Salinger Is My Tap Water (but I still love a Hollywood ending in four part harmony)“ ©️ The Ironies & Ecstasies of Escalating Risk in Film, Art, Life ; Or How I Spent International Women’s Day & Memorial Day 2024 while John Roberts’ So Called Supreme Court Revoked Women’s Rights “ ©️ Cali Lili all rights reserved

©️ Cali Lili reflections 🏊‍♀️ from the cali lili indies ™️ 🏝️ currents leaps n’ landingZ ™️ 🌊🐬🌊 JD Salinger Is My Tap Water (but I still love a Hollywood ending) ; From Ramrod To Eve N’ God This Female Is Not Yet Rated ; The Ironies & Ecstasies of Escalating Risk in Film, Art, Life or How I Spent International Women’s Day 2024 while John Robert’s So Called Supreme Court Revoked Women’s…

[transit-fag]

Here are the 25 largest US cities

Of these cities:

10 have a heavy rail metro system (NYC, LA, Atlanta, DC, Philly, Miami, Boston, San Francisco, Baltimore, Chicago)

12 have streetcars (NYC, Boston, Seattle, Philly, Portland, Tampa, Portland, St.Louis, Detroit, Dallas, Atlanta, DC)

14 have a light rail system (NYC, Dallas, Houston, Portland, Pheonix, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Diego, Denver, Baltimore, Charlotte, St.Louis, San Francisco, Boston)

16 have Commuter Rail (NYC, LA, Chicago, DC, Philly, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, San Diego, Denver, Baltimore, Orlando, Portland, Riverside, Dallas)

And San Antonio has no fixed guideway transit

[kwebtv]

Richard Treat Williams (December 1, 1951 – June 12, 2023) Film, stage and television actor, author, and aviator.

Predominately a film star he starred as Dr. Andy Brown on The WB's Everwood (2002–2006), for which he was twice nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance in a Drama Series. He received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for his work in the television films A Streetcar Named Desire (1984) and The Late Shift (1996), respectively, and had recurring roles on Brothers & Sisters (2006), White Collar (2012–2013), and Chicago Fire (2013–2018).

Williams made several guest appearances on the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters as David Morton, a friend and potential suitor of Sally Field's character. He starred in the short-lived series Heartland on TNT as Nathaniel Grant, which was canceled due to low ratings. He also starred in a Lifetime movie, Staircase Murders, which aired April 15, 2007.

Williams starred in a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, Beyond the Blackboard, with his former Everwood co-star, Emily VanCamp. It was first broadcast on CBS on April 24, 2011.

He appeared in the CBS television pilot Peachtree Lines as Mayor Lincoln Rylan. The serial is an examination of political, social, and cultural issues in Atlanta.

He played the role of Mick O'Brien in a Hallmark Channel television series called Chesapeake Shores which aired from 2016 to 2022. (Wikipedia)

IMDb listing

[memoriae-lectoris]

Even car-friendly engineers never believed that Americans would abandon mass transit the way they did.

Frank Turner, the father of the interstate, took the bus to work most days and, as head of the Federal Highway Administration in the late 1960s, would open his meetings at bureau headquarters by asking: “How many of you came by bus today?” In 1953, fewer than half of the fifty-seven thousand people arriving in downtown Atlanta every day came by car, and in their parking assessment that year, city leaders believed that transit ridership would stabilize.

But the more parking lots cities built, the more people drove. Transit executives, whose long-held (and widely despised) monopoly was coming to an end, were some of the first to sound the alarm. The general manager of the Cleveland transit system, D. C. Hyde, argued in 1952 that parking was doing the opposite of what its builders believed: “Destroying buildings and using valuable land for more and more parking lots and garages hastens decentralization. . . . It is just as sensible to stop doing things that bring more automobiles into already congested areas as it is to stop buying drinks for a person who is already drunk.”

Like transit officials in Detroit and elsewhere, Hyde reminded his audience that streetcars and buses were by far the most efficient use of precious street space—and were being rendered useless by automobile traffic.

[penn-central-official]

I have decided that my "fuck Dwight Eisenhower" tangent bares mention sooner, given most people don't hate him. Eisenhower was the sun of a KATY railroad station agent, before his father got laid off, which destroyed his family. After coming back from Europe, Eisenhower spearheaded the interstate highways which not only targeted Railroads with surgical precision, killing affordable interstate travel by train, but also...

-Demolished black neighborhoods

-Enabled white flight

-enabled industrial flight

-accelerated the affects of over 100 years of segregation and forced poverty

-destroyed our cities.

Dwight Eisenhower is personally responsible for the US being as horrible as it is now, for killing a streetcar network so robust you could take a streetcar from Portland Maine to Atlanta Georgia without long distance walking. For destroying small town transit. For making sure if you don't own a car, your life will be extra hard. For making racism worse. Fuck that guy.

[petervintonjr]

"One of the problems in the United States is the refusal on the part of our young people to remember or to want to remember, or to recognize the experiences of the past as being relevant, germane, important to the present and to the future. They simply don't want anything that's painful. They want to live in a painless society where everything is pleasant, and everything is joyful."

The quiet but unrelenting legacy of historian John Hope Franklin might be said to have been foreshadowed years before his birth in Tulsa 1915; the son of Buck Colbert Franklin, himself a successful attorney and an eyewitness to the events of the Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath. John, himself named for John Hope, the first Black president of Clark Atlanta University, would later graduate from Fisk University in 1935, and then earn advanced degrees in history at Harvard --an M.A. in 1936 and then a Ph.D in 1941.

It would not be an easy path: as a child in Tulsa he rushed to help a blind white woman cross the street until she realized he was black and ordered him to take his "filthy hands off her." As a student at Fisk, he tells the story of having handed a $20 dollar bill to a streetcar employee and asking for change, inviting a racial slur. During World War II Franklin taught at both St. Augustine's College and at the North Carolina College for Negroes (today known as North Carolina Central University). Later in 1953 he worked with then-judge Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers on developing some of the legal arguments for what would become the Brown v. Board Of Education decision --during preparations, for a time he worked at the state archives in Raleigh, NC, where he was restricted to a small anteroom across from the "whites-only" research room. Franklin also participated with other fellow historians and academics in the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.

Over the course of his career Franklin published many books and historical studies, to include The free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 (1943); and The militant South, 1800-1861 (1956), but Franklin's greatest accomplishment comes in the form of his 1947 publication of From Slavery to Freedom: a history of American Negroes, which first appeared during his tenure at Howard University (1947-1956). To this day the book remains a seminal text on African-American studies throughout the United States, now into its Ninth Edition and having sold upwards of 3.5 million copies. Fellow historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., cites the book as the definitive work on race relations in America, and named Franklin as his intellectual godfather and "the prince of black academics."

Following his time at Howard University, in 1956 Franklin became chairman of the Department of History at Brooklyn College --the first Black person to do so. In 1967 he then became a professor of American History at the University of Chicago; and in 1982 he returned to North Carolina, this time to teach at Duke University as Professor Of Legal History. In 1997 President Clinton appointed Franklin to lead One America, a national initiative on race.

"I hardly needed to seek a way to confront American racial injustice. My ambition was sufficient to guarantee that confrontation."

Franklin died at his beloved Duke (Duke Hospital) the morning March 25, 2009, having lived long enough to see a Black man elected to the U.S. Presidency. In 2010 the City of Tulsa renamed Reconciliation Park, established to commemorate the victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, as John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park.

[atlurbanist]

This lovely graphic shows the evolution of Atlanta's old streetcar system. It comes from a 2012 paper by Dawn Haynie at the GSU Urban Studies Institute.

Source:

Atlanta is a a city that was literally built around mass transit lines. Its original evolutionary path saw buildings organized in a format for walking to and from transit stops. I feel like a lot of folks aren’t aware of this.

People will say "Atlanta is a driving city" as if it's always been that way; as if the switch to car-centric placemaking wasn't an aberration in our history -- one we can absolutely change.

We can redesign Atlanta for inclusivity and sustainability by recognizing the mistake the city made by switching to a more car-centric type of urbanism.

We can grow in a better way, designing our new developments and our transportation system so that cars are de-centered and alternatives (transit, walking, cycling) are advanced.

That doesn't mean returning the city to exactly what it looked like in the 1920s. It means understanding that we veered off course from the evolutionary path we were on before we gave in to car-centric growth. We can connect back to that path and build a future that looks unique.

[threadatl]

Population growth & rail stations need better alignment in Atlanta

Darin Givens | April 10, 2024

Check out the maps above. They clearly show that the highest density of light rail & heavy rail stops in Atlanta is in Downtown, but that only a small amount of land near those stops is populated by any level of residential development.

This is data that we likely already knew, but seeing it mapped out so clearly is impressive. And it should make us think about whether we're doing all we can to make the best use of our biggest investments in rail.

As we've found out the hard way over the last 30 years, building new rail lines or infill stations is incredibly expensive and doesn't happen quickly (the last rail line MARTA built was the one to North Point Station which opened in 2000).

We shouldn't stop planning for expansion of rail, such as the line promised for the Beltline, but making the best use of land near our existing rail service is at least as crucial as expansion.

Our track record is grim. Many parking lots and empty buildings sit within a couple of blocks of the Atlanta Streetcar tracks. And this, below, is the blighted area surrounding Garnett MARTA Station in Downtown.

Matching development -- with a big dose of residential density -- with our rail stations is common sense, Urbanism 101 stuff. It shouldn't be as hard as we've made it out to be in Atlanta. We can and must do better.

These maps at the top of this post were made with an impressive mapping tool, Close.city at www.close.city

The tool was built by Henry Spatial Analysis in Seattle. It lets you create walkability maps of various data points such as supermarkets, libraries, transit stops, and more.

[whitesinhistory]

On September 22, 1906, after local newspapers reported sensational allegations that several white women had been assaulted by Black men, mobs of angry white men gathered in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, to attack and kill Black men on sight. The mobs seized Black men on streetcars, trapping them inside and shooting or beating them to death. When the streetcars suspended service due to the violence, the rioting mobs ransacked Black businesses and chased, beat, and shot Black men wherever they could find them. The police and fire departments called upon to quell the unrest failed to restore order, and the militia was unable to stop the violence. 

In a public statement during the rioting, Atlanta Mayor James Woodward placed blame on the Black men being killed rather than the white men doing the killing. “The only remedy is to remove the cause,” Woodward said. “As long as the Black brutes assault our white women, just so long will they be unceremoniously dealt with.”

Mayor Woodward’s statement empowered the mobs, and the massacre continued. For a total of four days, Black people were violently terrorized throughout Atlanta and its surroundings with little protection from authorities. In contrast, when Black citizens of the nearby Brownsville suburb attempted to arm themselves in defense, Georgia troops raided their homes, taking weapons and arresting those in possession of weapons. After four days of riots, at least 25 people were dead and countless more were injured.

[atlantathecity]

As I was reminded while walking here earlier today, the sidewalk on Edgewood Avenue is way too narrow. Folks regularly have to step into the roadway to pass others.

It shouldn't be like this anywhere, but especially not on the streetcar route. We're missing an opportunity to match transit investment with great pedestrian conditions.

Please look into redesigning this as a shared street, Atlanta! This is an incredible success story waiting to happen.

Some people complain that the streetcar "doesn't go anywhere people want to go," but I see the problem as being that we have 2.7 miles in the middle of the city that can be described by too many as a place they don't want to go.

What we should be asking is: how many people are we delivering to the streetcar by way of a combination of rail-supportive land use that puts an appropriate density near the stations -- and excellent pedestrian conditions that help alternatives to driving be competitive.

We're failing on all those fronts, but we can turn this ship around. We're capable of succeeding in Atlanta and becoming a city that truly supports alternatives to driving (like the streetcar) through our urban design and policies.

Every little piece of that puzzle matters, including the design of every block of street on the streetcar route.

[starrwulfe]

[Video] We have a ready-made 150 year old vacant right of way aro…

We have a ready-made 150 year old vacant right of way around central Atlanta begging for rail based transit… And the mayor is considering “slow moving people movers” and “pods” instead of connecting the downtown circulating streetcar to it (which it was why it was built)

Please watch this video and feel my frustration and rage right now. 😡

https://youtu.be/ViXU2ULsPn8

[transit-fag]

Transit projects I think would be fun:

Cincinnati Streetcar Extension

Louisville Light Rail

Chicago Loop Line

Septa rebuild of those trolleys that were destroyed in that fire

Red Line, Baltimore

Atlanta beltline streetcar

Raleigh Durham Light Rail

Buffalo Subway extension to the University of Buffalo