It’s easy to hate public transit when you’re
receiving donationsbeing paid by the fossil fuel lobby.Expand MARTA!
Georgia public transport is shaped by racism and class politics. When Atlanta first started building MARTA, Cobb county didn’t want it so they established a 300 foot wide township that ran along the border of Cobb and Fulton counties. The only law this township had was that no public transit could be constructed in it. The township effectively blocked MARTA from reaching into Cobb county.
Why did this happen? Because when civil liberties came to be Atlanta experienced a “white flight” where white people moved in large numbers out of the city. Most of the white flight landed in Cobb county and wanted to keep black people out.
That’s one of the major hurdles that mass transport has had in Atlanta, there are plenty of others.
It was even wilder than that – Chattahoochee Plantation, established in 1968, was only 10ft wide by 30 miles long, the entire length of the border between the two counties. It had no city government so it didn’t have any laws.
But, GA law doesn’t allow annexation across city borders (Atlanta would have to annex the unincorporated parts of southern Cobb to build MARTA at the time), so this 10ft wide “city” stopped the expansion.
The charter for the “city” was quietly revoked in 1995.
Thank you, I was working from memory, should have said so in the post.
This follows from my assumptions.
- the American South is generally governed by conservatives
- conservatives have bad ideas on everything
- public transit is a good idea
- conservatives oppose public transit
The second bill, being pushed by Sen. Anavitarte, would have an even more chilling impact on the ability to expand transit in the region.
The bill he is proposing would eliminate GRTA, which was established by former Gov. Roy Barnes to help expand transit in the region. It would also eliminate the ATL, which was established in 2018, to better connect transit options across the 13-county region.
MARTA was already stolen from the control of Atlanta/Fulton/Dekalb (i.e. the places it actually serves) and subjugated by “ATL” so that the board of directors could be stuffed with the state government’s (conservative) appointees. But apparently even that isn’t enough; this fascist fuck wants to completely disenfranchise Atlantans by putting it under the control of SRTA (the State Road and Tollway Authority – just the name alone tells you its position on transit), whose board is comprised only of state appointees.
