For the third time, Gwinnett County voters rejected a plan to raise their taxes in order to expand the metropolitan Atlanta rail system into their county. Only three of the five main counties in the Atlanta urban area are part of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), and transit advocates have long blamed any MARTA failures on the reluctance of the other counties to join.
Thou shall not pass into Gwinnett County. Photo by RTABus.
Some implied that anyone who voted against MARTA expansion into Gwinnett County was racist. But it’s not racist to object to spending billions of dollars on an obsolete technology to serve a dying industry.
MARTA rail transit is certainly obsolete. Although it superficially resembles the Washington Metro and BART systems, MARTA’s trains are no more than six cars long and MARTA operates only six trains an hour on each route at rush hour. Even if you believe MARTA’s claim that each 68-seat car has room for 136 standees, then MARTA trains move no more than 7,344 people per hour — and probably rarely come close to that. Bus-rapid transit lines in Bogota, Guangzhou, Istanbul, Lima, and Mexico City all exceed those numbers at a fraction of the cost, making MARTA’s rail system functionally obsolete.
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Transit advocates, of course, do not hesitate to lie to voters about the benefits of obsolete transit. “The alternative is 20 mph commutes both ways,” says one. No, the alternative is to spend money on things that actually relieve congestion for everyone, not things that few people use.
Transit is also dying in Atlanta. MARTA lost 15 percent of its riders in the last three years and 27 percent in the last decade. Gwinnett County and other counties that aren’t members of MARTA have their own transit systems, and when taken as a whole, transit in the Atlanta region carried fewer riders in 2018 than in any year since 1982. Since the population of the Atlanta urban area has tripled since 1982, per capita transit ridership has fallen by two thirds.
Yet, for rail advocates, the main lesson they learned from last week’s vote is that they picked the wrong day for the election. They put the measure on the ballot during a minor election hoping that low voter turnout — less than 17 percent of registered voters cast ballots — would make the measure more likely to pass. Now they are saying they’ll put the measure back on the ballot during a major election, hoping that a strong voter turnout will make it more likely to pass.
That’s the wrong lesson. The real lesson to be learned is that transit’s importance is small and declining and in Atlanta rail transit is certainly the wrong solution to any transit problem. It’s time to stop throwing money at bad transit plans and time to stop lying to voters about transit’s ability to relieve congestion in regions where hardly anyone uses it.
“Some implied that anyone who voted against MARTA expansion into Gwinnett County was racist. “
Is it racist to not want a certain demographic in your neighborhood, a demographic that, according to FBI statistics, commits violent crimes at ten times the rate of white or asian people?
No the real lesson here is when an election season draws near, Keep an eye on your wallet…….
” They put the measure on the ballot during a minor election hoping that low voter turnout — less than 17 percent of registered voters cast ballots — would make the measure more likely to pass.”
Is there any evidence to support this statement? Everything that I read states that Republicans wanted it on the March ballot instead of the 2018 ballot which Democrats wanted.
Continued: When a transit system expands beyond the legitimate confines of a city’s jurisdiction. They do it to expand the tax base exponentially more. Look at Washington Metro, it stretches from Bethesda to Virginia.
a) The racism thing has crept into the urbanista circles. Just as they take an article of faith like “empty lots kill a neighborhood’s vitality” they’ve taken up the mantle that only rail transit is good enough, anything else is racist.
b) Referendums need to have a limit to them, like a decade before they can be on the ballet again.
c) What exactly is the appeal for the taxpayers of Gwinnett County? They get a tax increase, get stuck dealing with the grossly incompetent MARTA ( much better than Atlanta’s stab at running a trolley though ) and for what? What are they promised? Nothing but some beans and maybe, just maybe a rail line someday. WOW. That’s about as appealing as sticking my head in a vat of battery acid.
The reality is this was a move by MARTA to hopefully suck up some new revenues. I suspect a big chunk of them would go toward putting more bandaids on their rail lines which have $8B – $12B in backlogged maintenance. And in the meantime Gwinnet County would get some extra token bus service, service they could’ve done themselves for 1/5th the cost. The rail extension will always be that 5 – 10 years out.
Which would still be faster than commuting via MARTA. As for the specter of racism, nearly a quarter of Gwinnett County is black. Presumably many of these residents also voted against the measure. Does that make them racist, too?
This is the third time the same referendum has failed. Maybe voters just see it for the poor value proposition that it is.
Trump colluded with Russia to hack the referendum.