The War on Public Transportation

Case study on Five Points Renovation, a controversial project put forward by MARTA Transit, and a broader conversation on effective transportation projects.

Intro

This metro station represents some of the biggest problems with American transportation planning.

That's right, Atlanta's Five Points station is the subject of some of the biggest controversies to face the region in a long time. "Keep Five Points Open" is the chant heard from a recent protest outside the station.

However, this project ended up becoming one of the largest PR disasters for MARTA in recent history. When news broke last minute that the city would close the station to street access for four years, riders protested as MARTA scrambled to deny, backtrack, and eventually put the project on hold entirely.

Five Points Station today is still open for normal operations. But we didn't get here without a lot of vocal opposition.

To me, this project is a prime of example of one of our society's biggest problems: we are in the middle of a War on Public Transportation.

Rundown

To start, lets get down to basics.

Five Points is the main crossroads of the MARTA rail system, the, ahem, largest and most expansive heavy rail system in the Southeast. The station is the converging point for all four lines in the system, and handles all rail transfers and over ten bus transfers in a single station.

And for a station built in the 1980s, its starting to show it's age. Broken escalators, garbage, closed storefronts, the impending doom of the brutalist canopy collapsing.

That's were today comes in. Five Points Renovation is a project that was pitched, planned, and funded as a transformation for Downtown Atlanta, set to start construction right now.

MARTA wants to renovate Five Points Station for two primary reasons:

1. First, the obvious goal. Facelift the aging station for visitors, especially since the World Cup will be hosting games in Atlanta in 2026.

   

   Now lets be clear, cleaning up and facelifting Five Points station doesn't hurt. The station is showing it's age, and honestly feels hostile most of the time. Theres no where to sit, there is no greenery, and overall doesn't feel like you want to be there for very long.

   

   But, it's functional. It works very well at transferring people between trains, and many bus routes converge here.

2. Second, the massive, brutalist, concrete canopy above the station is deteriorating and needs to be replaced somewhat soon due to water damage and age.

   

   For this reason, MARTA also has a major financial incentive. The project is getting a fair bit of state and federal funding, making it pencil out better on the local funding sources. Five Points Renovation is one of the major projects listed on the More MARTA bill from 2016, the bill that promises multiple expansion projects brought by an increased sales tax.

   Per MARTA, "In total, the project will cost approximately $230 million the More MARTA Atlanta half-penny sales tax, with $13.8 million from the state of Georgia, and a $25 million Federal RAISE Grant." (via MARTA).

Problems with Five Points Renovation

There are three main issues with the Five Points Renovation Project as a whole.

1. Station Design

   First, was the station design itself.

   

   One major critique made is that the station's redesign is not significant enough to warrant the investment. The station will remain a plaza, and according to Thread ATL, the station continues to cut off both sides of Broad Street. Once the renovation is complete, the overall function of the station will remain unchanged, as the redesign should include real estate development on top of the property and to reconnect Broad Street entirely, in order to create housing, destinations, and increase the density of downtown.

2. Street Closures and Bus Rerouting

   The second being the street access closures and bus reroutes.

   

   Five Points station is the heart of pedestrian traffic and transportation for this area, and closing it would put the area around the station in an even worse position than it already is. For a $230 million project, closing the station will do much more damage than a face lifted station could ever recover from.

   

   This is especially concerning considering the recent investment in South Downtown's historic buildings, with new shops and restaurants such as Spiller Park and Tyde Tate Kitchen along Hotel Row, two blocks from Five Points Station. And the gulch has several towers going up right now, as part of the new entrainment district that will fill in the massive parking crater between the Benz Stadium and Five Points Station. Do we expect people to drive to these locations?

   

3. Accessibility

   And lastly, being the insane accessibility accommodations.

   Most importantly, the accessibility solution for the four year closure is just completely unacceptable. Due to station design, the renovation plans would block elevator access in the station in certain directions. This means that riders who require elevators would be unable to use Five Points station for the four year closure.

   

   So MARTA has proposed a bus shuttle that would operate between Georgia State station and Peachtree Center Station. This could easily add thirty minutes to an hour to travel times across the board for riders that need elevators.

Priorities

Since the criticism, MARTA has put the project on hold indefinitely until 2026. While this may sound like good news, is also just kind of disappointing. I'd rather get some kind of investment in public transit instead of no investment.

The Revitalization Project

To add to the complexity, theres actually two projects going on here. The transformation project, which is the project above the station, is on hold indefinitely. However, there is also the Revitalization project going on underneath at the same time.

This project is updating the entire interior of the station, with new lighting, walls seating, and more, and is continuing as planned as it does not require station shutdown.

However, it is still unknown what will come of the Transformation project for the street level of the station.

The mayor has mentioned publicly a "10 year plan" to Five Points Station, but as this story is still developing, I don't want to touch on anything that's not concrete information.

Lack of Public Engagement

MARTA fell extremely short when it came to public engagement. There's a priority issue here for MARTA: the biggest thing riders ask for MARTA is to improve service, which means more transit lines, and better frequencies. This is stuff that makes the transit system actually useful for regular riders, and prevents riders from having to choose to take ride-share or drive a car.

Instead, the City of Atlanta and MARTA Transit prefer to invest in a mostly aesthetic project, just to appeal to the perception of two weeks of soccer fans visiting in 2026, instead of real residents of the city. And the project wouldn't even be finished by the games! It's the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, all over again.

And did MARTA engage with the public on this for this project? Not really - the news of station closures, bus reroutes, and accessibility shuttles was broken a month before the closure would occur.

Failure of Leadership

The cherry on top - recently, it came out on the news that 6 out of 16 of MARTA's board members haven't ridden MARTA more than 6 times in the past year. And the majority of them don't rely on the system for transportation.

Why are people who live suburban lifestyles, driving cars for most trips, making the decisions to guide our public transit system? These people do not represent the best wishes of actual riders, and don't actually know how to improve the state of the system.

So it makes sense that this board would care more about perception: cleaning up the main downtown station and making it more attractive to visitors and suburbanites.

And to make matters worse, as as of August 2024, an independent audit came out criticizing MARTA of misappropriating More MARTA funds, to the tune of $70 million dollars of tax paid funds being misused via the Saporta Report.

The audit called for by Atlanta City Council and presented by Mauldin & Jenkins claims discrepancies in upwards of 70 million dollars of mismanaged funds, which MARTA has publicly disputed. It's dramatic to say the least, and really unfortunate to see drama between our cities governing bodies being aired out in public.

MARTA Audit and More MARTA

So, yes MARTA has a PR nightmare at the moment. They aren't delivering very well on More MARTA projects, protests against Five Points Renovation stopped the project in it's tracks, and the recent audit revealed the organization may be misappropriating tax payer funds from the More MARTA bill.

More MARTA is the bill passed in 2016, that raised the sales tax by a half penny in the City of Atlanta for capital expansion projects. This tax would fund expansion projects laid out by the agency such as Beltline Rail, Clifton Corridor, and Summerhill BRT, alongside other improvement projects including Five Points Renovation.

However, since 2016 MARTA has severely cut back on many of the promised More MARTA projects in the timeline. We haven't really seen major progress, and the scrutiny from Five Points Renovation, ridership records reports, and spending audit have all not helped either.

To be fair, MARTA has been historically limited since it's inception -

1. The State of Georgia has systemically limited MARTA's funding, as the agency is the only large public transportation service in the country to not be supported by state funding.

2. Secondly, Cobb and Gwinnett county's historical decisions to not join MARTA have had severe consequences on MARTA's effectiveness, as the northern suburbs are by far some of the wealthiest and most populated areas of the region.

3. All this leads to MARTA often spending more on operations and maintenance instead of capital expansion.

   

   The agency heavily relies on federal grants for expansion projects, as nearly 70% of revenue comes from sales tax, TAVT tax, and fares from member municipalities, especially since ridership was decimated during COVID.

   

Broader Systemic Issues

So yes, MARTA has a PR nightmare at the moment. It does have me worried about the future of public transport.

This isn't really an excuse for the agency, but it is interesting how MARTA is systematically limited in many ways from expansion.

Look at Georgia DOT's recent announcement. Six more toll lanes for I-285, operated by a private toll company for profit for 50 years! And no one is batting an eye at this.

I do think the anger justified, but we really should be holding our leaders more accountable. Public transportation comes under so much more scrutiny than any other form of transportation, despite being the most efficient and most proven mode of transport across the world.

Without proper expansion of public transit, we just cannot handle all this sustainable dense growth.

Everything here with Five Points Station, is completely emblematic of the greater perception and priorities by our leaders. This stuff applies to every city in North America, and every city has a project like Five Points Renovation.

Look at New York City for example. Congestion Pricing was supposed to me a major funding source for the MTA, to fund expansion projects, while also making it nicer for both drivers and non-drivers in the congestion pricing region of Manhattan by reducing traffic with a toll that requires road users to pay fairly for the public infrastructure.

However, Governor Hochul of New York State, decided privately to cut the project without proper public engagement after a decade in the making, despite also engaging in dissonance that the city needed to reduce its traffic congestion in the city core.

Congestion Pricing was the primary funding source for most of the MTA's future expansion projects, as well as the primary funding source for adding accessible elevators to existing subway stations, and this move single handedly hurts the MTA's future efforts to improve coverage and accessibility. (New York Times)

The root problem

Public transport has a perception problem. And I don't think we're going to get pas this without significant effort in education on the topic.

With more than half of the American population living outside of population centers in suburban and rural communities, its easy to see why many Americans don't see a ned for public transport. When all you know, often for multiple generations, is how to get around with a car, its going to be really hard to break that generational expectation.

Thats a difficult problem to face, how do we encourage sustainable, transit rich development, and convince people to use this development?

It's a difficult task, and its a major reason transit agencies face so much difficulty in the modern day. It's pretty much impossible to expect a budget strapped transit system, to cover large swatches of suburban sprawl that is systemically designed to be traversed by car.

Not to mention, the negative stereotype people have for public transportation. I grew up in Cobb County, a very suburban region of Metro Atlanta. Not to mention the horrible racially motivated nicknames MARTA itself has been given over the centuries.

Overall, a century of automobile and gasoline lobbying, alongside long standing classism, and racial stereotyping of transit riders, has been fighting a war on Public Transport that is difficult to fight to this day.

Concluding

So what do we do here? Well, actually what happened here in Atlanta was an amazing example of what the average person can do in response to a bad project. The outcry by the local advocacy organizations and local politicians through the rally, community outreach, and online messaging had an immense impact on the progress of this project.

On the bright side, in a lot of ways we are actually in a rennasaince on public transportation investment. We are seeing so much support on a federal level for rail infrastructure and public transportation investment. I just hope we see that trickle down to the state level, especially here in Georgia.

Overall, I want to be clear that while this project isn't perfect, the idea of renovating five points can be a good idea. But it needs to be done with more care, and hopefully MARTA can prioritize riders and get the project done right.

That's all anyone wants in their city really. We just want to get around our city using clean, equitable, and accessible transportation.

Thanks for reading! See y'all next time.

Get Involved

• See the petition here by Propel ATL: Propel ATL Petition
• And the next steps form: Next Steps Form
• Big thank you to Carden Wyckoff for being my first interviewee! See her pages here, where she posts her experience as a wheelchair user traversing Atlanta.
  • TikTok
  • X/Twitter
  • Instagram

References

1. ThreadATL. "MARTA’s Mess: Outrage over Five Points Station Is Justified." ThreadATL, 29 Aug. 2023, www.threadatl.org/blog/martas-mess-outrage-over-five-points-station-is-justified.

2. Propel ATL. "Keep Five Points Open." Propel ATL, 2023, www.letspropelatl.org/keep-fivepoints-open.

3. Davidson, Justin. "Race, Class, and the Stigma of Riding the Bus in America." Bloomberg, 10 July 2012, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-10/race-class-and-the-stigma-of-riding-the-bus-in-america.

4. Shoup, Donald. "The High Cost of Free Parking." UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, 2005, shoup.bol.ucla.edu/Chapter1.pdf.

5. Donnelly, Grace. "More MARTA Audit Raises More Questions, Tension over Accounting Practices." Saportareport, 4 Sept. 2024, saportareport.com/more-marta-audit-raises-more-questions-tension-over-accounting-practices/columnists/gracedonnelly.

6. Fitzsimmons, Emma G. "Hochul Defends Congestion Pricing to Fund Transit and Reduce Traffic." The New York Times, 9 June 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/06/09/nyregion/hochul-congestion-pricing.html.

7. MARTA. "Five Points Station Transformation." MARTA, 2024, www.itsmarta.com/marta-five-points-transformation.aspx.

8. Mauldin & Jenkins. More MARTA and MARTA 2040 Audit. City of Atlanta, Aug. 2024, www.atlantaga.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/63018.