On September 6, 2024, the Georgia State University Law Review invited Better Atlanta Transit President Walter Brown[1] and BeltLine Rail Now! Chair Matthew Rao[2] to discuss whether the Atlanta Beltline should implement light rail. Though the two had previously sparred online, this was their first time meeting in person. This transcript is adapted (with slight editing) from that conversation, which was moderated by Assistant Professor Anthony Michael Kreis.[3] The conversation touched on topics including the Beltline’s origins, the financial intricacies of constructing light rail, the historical impact of neighborhood advocacy on the city’s transit decisions, and their respective visions for the city’s long-term transit policies.
Anthony Michael Kreis: Within a generation, the Atlanta Beltline has jumped off the pages of a master’s thesis written by Ryan Gravel when he was a student at Georgia Tech in 1999.[4] Gravel’s proposal led to a twenty-two-mile ring of mostly abandoned rail corridor being reclaimed and transformed into a new public transit system through connected public and private strategies.[5] Today, the Beltline has firmly woven itself into the fabric of the city, and once completed, it will encircle the city’s core with shared use paths that are pedestrian and cyclist friendly by replacing the old rail lines with connected parks and transit.[6]
Seen as gospel by many, Gravel’s original plan carefully explained the importance of transit and how it would be shared with the Beltline, which included a light rail system circling the core of the city on the trail.[7] But now that the trail is actually in use and already moving people around without light rail on the Beltline, a disagreement amongst transit advocates has emerged as to which form of “transit” to complement the Beltline is best.[8] While these advocates may have once worked together to ensure the initial construction of the Beltline’s east side as it exists now, today, they are a house somewhat divided because of disagreements over whether to add light rail on the Beltline and what is the best way forward for changing Atlanta.[9]
Indeed, it is clear to those who grew up with a Beltline already in existence that city officials, neighborhood advocates and commercial developers have no uniform plan in use for how transit will be implemented into the Beltline. With those advocates who fought for the very existence of the Beltline now in key positions to determine its path forward, a new generation who is desperate for transfer transit alternatives, is waiting for the city to adopt a strategy to move forward. And while some may view the Beltline as a standalone project that should be left as is, or that might benefit from improvements on the edges, other advocates see something else, aspiring for something more structurally transformational, leaving us with major questions. If the Beltline has been good for Atlanta, why has that been? What do those answers tell us about the goals for the next stages of development? Will Atlanta implement a mass transit system through the Beltline, and if so, through light rail, micromobility, pods, or something else?
Today, we’re joined on this podcast hosted by the Georgia State University Law Review and made possible by the School of Music, by Matthew Rao—Chair of Beltline Rail Now!—and Walter Brown—President of Better Atlanta Transit—for a conversation about their visions for the Beltline. I’m Anthony Michael Kreis, Assistant Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law. I am so happy to be here to facilitate our conversation. Gentlemen, welcome and on behalf of the Georgia State University Law Review, thank you for agreeing to have this valuable conversation about Atlanta’s future.
So, I think we can just start off with you introducing yourselves and your groups to the folks listening to the podcast, and kind of lay out your vision and what you’re advocating for.
Matthew Rao: Thank you, Anthony. My name is Matthew Rao, and as you said, I chair BeltLine Rail Now.[10] We are a citizen advocacy group dedicated to holding elected officials and others accountable for the delivery of the light rail program on the Atlanta Beltline that was planned after the Ryan Gravel thesis became part of the city design, a part of the amended city charter, and a part of the plans that Atlanta Beltline Inc. has been working on since the mid-2005 timeframe. I have a background in interior architecture and industrial design, and I attended Georgia Tech, just down the road. I have lived in Atlanta since the seventh grade. I’ve been a lifelong transit user—transit aficionado—and I never saw myself leading this group. But in 2018 I was approached to come to a meeting because MARTA[11] was not including much of the Atlanta Beltline rail in its more MARTA program, which voters had approved with 71% of the vote in 2016.[12] So, I got interested; I became a volunteer; and then was soon co-chairing the group and I’m now its chair and have done that for the last four years.
Walter Brown: Great. Well. [I am] Walter Brown. Nice to meet Matthew for the first time in person. I am President of Better Atlanta Transit.[13] We are a very new organization—actually, we’ve only been in existence for a year now. I am also a native Atlantan, born at Emory hospital, graduated from Georgia State University. Go Panthers! I have a degree in Community Development. I’ll tell you a little bit about Better Atlanta Transit, and I’ll get back to a little bit about my story, I guess.
Better Atlanta Transit is an organization that is also a citizen group. It involves both business leaders, citizen leaders, professors from Georgia Tech and other places, and neighborhood leaders. I was an NPU chair in NPU-N, and I was president of Candler Park Neighborhood Association. I’m on the board of Little Five Points CID. I’m on the board of Propel ATL. So, [I am] also very involved civically in the life of Atlanta.
Better Atlanta Transit got involved because, well, quite frankly, we saw the world changing. I was one of the people that worked on Ponce City Market back in the day. I have an environmental background. My focus was on LEED certification[14] of all the buildings and creating bicycle infrastructure for Ponce City Market. I was actually a rail fan at the time. I know Ryan quite well, all the way back to when he worked for Surber Barber Choate & Hertlein, and I didn’t see any reason not to support rail at that time.
What’s happened for me is just the world has changed. I’ve seen what’s happened to the Beltline—and not only I, but members of our advisory group—have seen how the Beltline has evolved. We’ve seen the economic development that has come. We’ve seen the explosion of micromobility. We’ve seen the Beltline Arboretum and other things that have really changed and transformed the way people use the Beltline. So, we decided that there needed to be at least an alternative voice. Credit to Beltline Rail Now for being very organized and getting voices out there. But there really wasn’t anybody speaking for an alternative position. And so, I’ll just leave it at there, and then perhaps we’ll get into some questions and get into a little more detail.
AK: Well, I mean, I think at least we can all agree we love Atlanta, right? And certainly, are excited about where Atlanta has come from. And I think there’s no doubt Atlanta has improved rapidly, and our quality of life has improved, and our communities [have] improved. In many respects, the Beltline is certainly responsible for that. You know, the Beltline—nobody can deny that this is probably one of the most transformational—at least in terms of singularly transformational—projects in Atlanta. And it certainly has many stakeholders from across the city and people are increasingly invested in its success and concerned about its future. Let’s start with the very beginning, which is: What was the initial goal that the Beltline was attempting to achieve? And do you think it’s achieved that? Do you think we saw progress? What’s kind of like the baseline vision that you had for the Beltline? Maybe, you know, back when it was really starting to take shape and gain some steam?
MR: That’s a broad question, Anthony, because I think that if you look at history and what really happened, the Beltline was, and is, I would say, an equity project. What does that mean? And what does that have to do with transit? In order to sell the idea that we could tremendously upzone a twenty-two-mile corridor—really [the] seventeen miles of it that’s not an active rail corridor—and in order to grow the city into abandoned light industrial area that was the perimeter of the city 150 years ago, in order to do all that, there had to be somewhat of a contract. And I don’t use that word very often, because it’s not always relevant to every conversation, but we’re sitting here in a law school.[15] Contracts are written, but they’re also implied. And in exchange for that tremendous upzoning—the forty-five neighborhoods around the Beltline allowed built into the Beltline, TAD[16]—into the rezoning that’s going on now, there was an if and a then. If we do all this, then we will build transit to mitigate the worst effects of traffic, air pollution, gentrification causing displacement, and that the transit was, in fact, the thing that grabbed many of the neighborhoods—which at the time were poorer and more disinvested, and today, some of whom still are.
I think that original vision to create a project that could repair historic damage, bring opportunity, connect people in a new Atlanta—and I agree with Walter on this: Things have changed since the Beltline idea was created and since the plans were initially developed. We need more mobility than ever. And micromobility—which includes a variety of technologies, including your own two feet—is an important part of reaching your home, your job, your shop, your destination, the bar you’re going to, at the end of a journey coming from all over a very sprawling metropolitan area.
So, I think that the initial idea has not been achieved: This idea that we would connect every Atlantan, every visitor to this city, to what is going on and [to] what has become the greatest opportunity zone the city has ever seen.
WB: Well, I have a slightly different perspective. First of all, the Beltline Park, linear park, whatever, was not originated by Ryan Gravel in 1999. The concept had already existed all the way back to 1993; and originally the idea was to convert it into a rail to trail project. Yes, Ryan did write a powerful thesis in ‘99 and I give a lot of credit to Ryan for creating the energy around—kind of moving it forward, getting Kathy Willard involved. Even Mayor Franklin at the time was a bit skeptical about the rail piece, but essentially said, “Let’s go forward with it. Let’s build the trail. Let’s build the linear park. We’ll see what happens with transit down the road.”
So, you know, even back to something like the More MARTA program, there were seventy-three items on that referendum; there was no prioritization there. One of the things that people like to say is that that’s when rail on the Beltline was voted for. Well, it was one of many projects. Unfortunately, you know, the reality is, is that the cost of light rail is now extremely expensive. We’re over $100 million a mile. I think when Ryan wrote his thesis, it might have been $20 million a mile. The entire More MARTA program is supposed to bring in about $2.7 billion over forty years. It is estimated, even, I think, by Matthew’s group, that the entire twenty-two-mile section [of Beltline rail] is $2.5 billion by itself. So clearly, it’s taking the lion’s share of a program [More MARTA] that was designed to solve transit throughout the city.
As Better Atlanta Transit, we are huge proponents of transit. The Beltline is just one issue that we’re looking at that we think robs from all of the other projects that are worthy in the city. And we’re continuing to bicker today about whether the Clifton Corridor should have light rail or BRT,[17] or Campbelltown Road should have light rail or BRT, but it always comes down to—again, credit to BRN, they’re very well organized, and so they’ve been able to sort of focus on the one project, the small project, that takes away from all of the other projects that really need to be done and can be done much faster, much lower cost, much more flexibly.
In addition, we have seen how the Beltline operates today [with] nearly 5,000 users a day. Atlanta is the third largest users of Lime scooters in the country now. So, between Uber, between on demand transit, between all these new ideas—who knows what’s going to happen with Waymo, Robo taxis: Is that going to upend our entire transportation system? I don’t know.
I’m sixty-seven years old. I use an electric bike. I use MARTA. I feel like we need more ways to get to the Beltline. I’m a huge fan of the Beltline. Love the Beltline. I just disagree that light rail is the way to solve our transit problem. To call it the most important transit project in the history of the city of Atlanta is just disingenuous.
MR: I would take issue with that. Walter, I agree with a lot of what you said, including that we’re both men in our sixties. When I engage with people, we see so many people, most of them are younger than I and many of them have babes in arms. Many of them aren’t even out of college. And I think about, what is Atlanta? Who is it for? And what are we becoming?
I was a seventh grader when I moved to Atlanta, and there was a slogan at the time, since you’re a native, you’ll remember it: “The world’s next great international city.” And my dad used to say, “Where?” The population was around a million in five counties, and that was considered the metro area. And then a group of Atlantans—really forward thinking; led by Maynard Jackson, who was our mayor—expanded our airport, made it become a real international airport. And then another group of Atlantans, some of the same people, brought the Olympic Games here in the summer of 1996 and Atlanta started achieving things to make it a player on the national stage. And some would say the international stage, too, and the state had a role in that.
The city has been growing. That [one] million is now over six [million], and it’s spread across twenty-something counties. And the city of Atlanta, for the first time, has re-achieved more than half a million residents, and is expected to grow to 750,000 by mid-century—that’s going to happen. My vision for Atlanta is [to become] not just a nationally important city, but that international city. And big cities, which we are becoming, have transit. They have mass transit. They have rail transit. And they have exceptional bus programs, too. We haven’t done that in Atlanta. We have not expanded our mass transit system, except for the little bit of downtown streetcar, in twenty-five years.
AK: Why do you think that is?
MR: I think we bicker. (Walter used that word talking about “bickering.”) I think we revisit our plans and then we don’t even fulfill them. One of the reasons all of this is expensive: It’s not that it’s expensive only in Atlanta, it’s expensive everywhere. Everywhere you build transit, it is 40% more expensive than before the pandemic. And there are cities that got started on their rail projects in that time and they are delivering them now. We are living in the biggest rail expansion in American cities since the 1960s and seventies, when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon created all of that funding at the federal level for transit. We have a [heavy rail] MARTA system [funded, in part, by the Federal Government] that was supposed to go to Seattle.[18] We did one thing that they didn’t do: We voted a penny sales tax, and we got that third major commuter urban rail system [in the country]—the other two going to San Francisco and Washington D.C.
We, I think, sometimes aspire to being that big international city, and we’re actually having the metrics of one right now, but we don’t think of ourselves that way when it comes down to the decisions.
There are elements of NIMBYism in every city, especially when it comes to large infrastructure projects that have impacts. (In order to get the greater good, there are impacts. No one is saying they’re not.) But those against the more minor impacts often carry the day in dialog; and media loves to cover, sensationally, certain things without looking at what’s the long-term future here? If we can sit here in this room and say, “the long-term future is not to connect Atlantans on the Beltline with each other and the destinations there through mass transit,” that’s not a tenant I would be willing to accept, because the Beltline, as Walter says, is a success. It is generating the density—and that’s density of employment, density of entertainment, density of leisure and recreation—that it always was envisioned to do, but it is not delivering that connective piece.
I don’t view this as an either-or choice between getting to the Beltline and moving along the Beltline. And I certainly don’t view micromobility as incidental: It’s part of the solution. And so are future technologies like autonomous operation. There’s autonomous operation going on in light rail right now. It may not be what we want for the Beltline, but it’s going on.
We will have a need to carry thousands of people a day—[perhaps] tens of thousands—on the Atlanta Beltline. We’re creating a linear, circumferential city at a distance of two, three miles from the historic center where we’re doing this recording today, and it’s unlike anything any American city has done before. It is the model, actually, ironically, for so many cities that come here and say, “How did they do this?” We want to do that. Well, they can’t, because they don’t have a Beltline. The accident of geography and history gives us a dedicated right of way that other larger cities and smaller ones would give their eyeteeth to have, because it just doesn’t happen.
AK: So, [Matthew,] you think it’s a problem of vision. Do you agree [Walter]?
WB: Well, I think it isn’t a problem of vision—and I think that was a very eloquent, eloquent statement, Matthew—the problem, as I see it, is that Atlanta often only thinks about massive projects. We’re not excited unless it has a “B” attached to it, a billion attached to it. [Matthew, y]ou use the argument of the Atlanta airport. Well, it’s one of one. We’re not talking about one project. There’s many, many projects here. It’s about choosing the best project amongst many projects.
I would say that the problem also in this state, and I’m—I think we would both agree we’re probably very frustrated with the way that transit, transportation, generally, is funded. MARTA is the largest transit agency in the country without any state support. You look at New York. You talked about the largest rail expansion in the history of the country: It’s happening in places where the states are very involved in funding those improvements. Look at the state of New York. Look at California. Look at Illinois. Look at Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, Atlanta is up against a massive challenge. We are only 500,000 people in a region of eight million plus. We are shortchanged constantly here. Right now, GDOT is proudly announcing something like $5 billion to redo Georgia [State Route] 400, again!
MR: You know, Walter, for that money, we could get all of the four proposed infill stations and all of Beltline rail.
WB: Well, I’ll agree with part of that, okay? One of the things that I disagree with Matthew about is how transit is actually distributed through the city. If you think about the people in Sylvan hills or West End, folks that are being priced out of their homes today, they need affordable transportation now, not twenty, thirty years from now. The dream of Beltline rail eventually getting to them is not an equitable distribution of resources.
Right now, we need to move very quickly with bus rapid transit, for example. One of the best ideas I’ve heard lately is BRT from the Beltline along North Avenue all the way to Bowen homes. I mean, that is really connecting up a lot of the Beltline, a lot of heavy rail, and moving through very, very dense, existing-currently-very-dense centers that we need to support. I don’t disagree that one day, the Beltline will be a dense corridor, but really in pockets.
At the same time, we’re in Downtown Atlanta. We’re trying to build up Downtown Atlanta [and] Midtown Atlanta. We don’t necessarily need to think about the Beltline as the place where density is going to occur. There’s plenty of places that can be redeveloped, look at Midtown now. So, I believe we need find ways to distribute ourselves through the city to the Beltline, but not necessarily using transit on the Beltline as the only idea.
AK: So let me ask you about that. So obviously we’re getting increased density in Midtown. I mean, Midtown is just unrecognizable—the skyline—from where was ten years ago.
MR: Or thirty years ago when only three thousand people lived in Midtown in the 1980s. When I was a student at Georgia Tech, it was deserted at night. There are more than thirty thousand—I’m not sure exactly how many—living in Midtown now. Anthony, one of the reasons that has happened is MARTA. Midtown has three subway MARTA stations that connect to the world’s busiest airport and to other parts of the city. It’s not that we don’t have any transit. It’s that we don’t have enough. And we don’t have the right types. North Avenue BRT, which Walter is mentioning, with an extension to Bowen homes: The extension is new, but North Avenue BRT isn’t. It’s one of the three BRT lines in More MARTA . . .
WB: You’re right. It’s been on the plan.
MR: . . . that we are eager to see. What’s happening now—and the MARTA audit is another thing. If you plan to touch on this in specific detail later, I’ll hold what I want to say about
AK: We can actually talk about it now.
MR: A few things should be clear from the audit that has just been conducted by the city of the More MARTA program. One of the biggest things, is kind of a 38,000 foot look at how much time we’ve wasted, how much money we’ve spent that cannot be recovered, that (I think you would agree that) numbers don’t lie, and that we spent a lot of money on bus service, and then that bus service was withdrawn. So, we don’t have more bus service in the City of Atlanta than we had before we spent the $236 million on it. We were only supposed to spend $250 million in all of the forty years on bus service. So, we’ve already spent that. And what’s the consequence of that? We could not use that money to be the local side of the equation for larger projects, whether those were BRT or LRT—light rail transit[19]—improvements to other things in MARTA: We couldn’t do it. So, we are about four to six years behind in getting into project development on North Avenue BRT, on Beltline rail, on Streetcar West.
Beltline rail is not the only rail project in More MARTA. Two projects that should never have been downscaled to buses have been, and a year and a half ago when that happened, we were wondering why. We thought it was maybe more of a philosophical decision. It’s really about money. Walter pointed out quite accurately that More MARTA will raise $2.7 billion. Maybe three, because that’s based on a $68 million revenue a year, and not the $100 million it’s collecting now from sales tax. And it’s likely that that number is going to go up. But so are the costs of building transit. They’re going to go up too. So, where we are is having lost time, Anthony, and other cities—
AK: But isn’t it lost time because we have an entity that seems to be just incapable of administering the basic s—
WB: Well, let me jump in there. I know Matthew is a real student of MARTA, and I appreciate that—I’m learning a lot—but part of the problem with MARTA is, and in general—
You know, I was in real estate development because I was a green developer, and I that was my way of getting at the table and changing things slightly. But what I learned in working on hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate development is that it ain’t all about building the building: It’s the operating side—which has actually more cost over time.
MARTA is in massive deficit spending right now. They’re terrified of taking on another operation that they can’t find a way to actually fund. Building something is one thing, operating it is another. I can give you a beautiful building, but if you’ve got no resources to operate it, it’s no good to you.
So, take a look at the streetcar today. We’re at about nearly $50 a mile, passenger mile, to operate it right now. Now I get the idea that eventually it’s supposed to be more efficient, because it’s going to get connected up and have more “ridership.” But the original streetcar plan had fifty-three miles of rail, but now the only thing that’s we’re even talking about funding is one small extension onto the East Side trail—the busiest pedestrian, most beautiful part of our entire Beltline system today. So why are we forcing the city, forcing MARTA, to take on more cost, more operating debt? They only have so much in reserve. We’re going to bankrupt our most important transit agency by forcing them to take another—
AK: Is there a leadership problem?
MR: I would take issue with some of that and here’s what I would take issue with: MARTA announced yesterday they just got a AAA bond rating from national organizations, and part of that is financial solvency.
WB: Right now. Right now.
MR: Let me finish.
WB: That will not last.
MR: Let me finish, please. We don’t know what will last and won’t last, because the audit is a cautionary tale and a set of recommendations, as much as it is a snapshot of what happened since the program was started in 2017. And it’s not a pretty picture. When MARTA split the More [MARTA]—and I would say, yes, there were a lot of projects in the run up to the referendum, but it is clear, both in in print and in word, that the big transit projects—the LRT, BRT projects—were what the voters thought they were voting on.
How would we know that? MARTA conducted—under Keith Parker, the CEO at that time, and Ben Limmer—a very excellent public engagement campaign in late 2015 and throughout 2016 leading up to the referendum. I went to those—you probably did too—put my pin, wrote my comments, and it was clear to me that what MARTA was saying is, “If you want Beltline rail and BRT and you want a transit expansion in MARTA, vote for this half penny and you will get it.” Two weeks before the referendum, the then-CEO Robbie Ashe—who had said this publicly before—told Rose Scott on [NPR’s] Closer Look—one of our [most] valued, esteemed interviewers in public radio here in Atlanta; there may be some people listening in watching today who aren’t familiar with Rose—
AK: Rose Scott is the best
MR: She’s the best. She’s able to bring things out of people that they would never say otherwise, which I think is the true gift of an interviewer. And what Robbie Ashe said is, “If you approve this tax, you will get rail on the Beltline. Maybe not all of it, but a substantial amount.”[20] He said that to the public on Rose Scott two weeks before the referendum. And that referendum passed by 71%. There has been a process—I wouldn’t call it entirely a democratic process—but a process at a high level to decide what the projects should be.
AK: Let me ask you this: Walter seems to suggest that there have been substantive changes since the development of the Beltline, and those changes need to be taken into account. And you seem to have this more contractual view. Do you acknowledge that there have been changes or any dynamics in the in the interim period where the Beltline has been developed and has been used that might modify your view? Or is it like a very strict constructionist view of this contractual relationship and “that’s that?”
MR: This sort of binary choice is part of what’s wrong with the whole conversation, I think, [both] at a large level and at a small level. More MARTA is a network of projects curated and designed to connect to each other and work together with the existing MARTA system that we have. There has been a proposal for a major bus redesign of the city and that still has not been accomplished. It’s hard to redesign the bus system of the city unless you know what larger projects you’re connecting to. So, if there is no more rail, you design the bus system one way. If you’ve got rail at various different places—out to Emory, down Campbellton Road, to Grenbriar Mall, and so on, around the Beltline, through Atlanta University Center. If you’ve got rail there, you design your bus system to take that into account. And we need that.
This spinning around that we’ve been doing—spinning and spinning and spinning—if you look at American cities, it really is notable that we’re doing that and most of the rest of them aren’t. The two largest transit expansions in the country right now are going on in Los Angeles and Seattle. Walter is right to point out that there’s state money involved [there]. But there’s also business money and there’s also road money. We have something called “flex funding” with Federal Highway dollars that flows to our Georgia DOT. They can spend it all on an interchange at Georgia 400 or they can spend it [on] a bridge that goes over a road where the Beltline goes. We don’t spend any of our flex funding flexibly on transit. We spend it all on roads. We can start doing that.
The state has, on specific projects, given money to them, such as the Bankhead platform extension and the still uncertain Five Points renovation. And I want to get into Five Points. But there is state money involved in both of those projects. What those systems have that we don’t have is recurring, regular, state money for operations.
The problem in More MARTA is that more than half of the money, or around half of the money, has gone to the operation of current projects that aren’t More MARTA projects. And what Walter is talking about is the future? That was never intended. That’s a misuse of current dollars with a compound effect because it is legitimate to spend More MARTA dollars on More MARTA projects, service, and operation when they are built. It is not legitimate to take that money and spend it on something else. So, what we need to be doing right now is, we need to be redoing the financial [model at] MARTA so that it spends the overwhelming majority of the money that’s coming in on actual transit, and holds the money that it’s not spending on that for the future, so that we can maintain those.
WB: Well—
AK: I am going to let Walter respond, but I also want to throw in this question: Do you also see this as being a problem of binary choices, and that that’s how the debate is framed? Or do you think that maybe the binary choice dynamic is because people are focused or hyper focused on light rail on the Beltline, and that’s really the decision that people are fighting over?
WB: Well, I think, Matthew, you’re talking about spinning: That was a good job spinning. I mean, the problem really is that, again, you’ve got Robbie Ashe—probably wasn’t a helpful comment, I suppose. I think that a lot of the people that are looking at Beltline Rail Now! to create leadership around this idea of “get this segment done”—that’s really the most important thing to them now. And I think Matthew’s vision is broader in some sense.
My concern is that the world has changed. I get delay. I remember talking to Maria Saporta—she’s been working trying to bring commuter rail to Atlanta, the whole multimodal concept. And she’s frustrated. “We just need to have something happen now.”
Well, this is where I would caution patience. Right now, the Atlanta Regional Commission has $2.4 million sitting on the table to create the most comprehensive—what we call a “comprehensive transit plan”—transportation plan for the City of Atlanta. It hasn’t been updated in five years. I really believe that, yes, we’ve had studies in the past. There was a study that said the streetcar downtown was going to have 2,600 riders a day. They claim they have 900 a day now.[21] Most people would say less. It’s kind of empty most of the time.
I feel that it is time to do a timeout—because of the audit, because of people’s disagreement about the Five Point Station, [because of] disagreements about how best to evolve the Beltline itself. $2.4 million is a lot. You know, we can do an incredibly smart strategic plan looking at all of our resources, all of the systems, and come up with a prioritization. And if rail on the Beltline wins, then I’ll stand by that. I just don’t believe that the process that we’ve gone through—and again, credit to BRN for being loud and proud. Why is rail on the Beltline more important than rail on the Clifton Corridor or Campbellon Road? And those people weren’t as well organized and so they’re going to have to take BRT? So maybe everybody needs to take a haircut here.
MR: So let’s talk about that assertion that because we’re going to build rail somewhere, we are robbing the rest of the program of precious dollars that it is entitled to or needs to do something else. MARTA split the program in half, roughly, a year and a half ago and put the big projects, the biggest of the big projects in tier two. In tier one, which are the projects moving forward right now, is Emory Clifton Corridor, Campbellton road, and the one first section of Beltline rail through the Streetcar East Extension. Both Campbellton Road and Clifton are larger projects, much larger, even as bus projects, than the streetcar East extension. In fact, $600 million is allocated for Emory Clifton Corridor. And I’m scratching my head trying to figure out just how expensive a bus that is for four and a half miles. You know?
WB: Good question.
MR: And at Campbellton road, rail which would have been used as a developmental project and connect to Beltline rail at Murphy Crossing—one of the sites of the infill stations that the mayor has proposed and that we’ve advocated for years as the way to make the Beltline really work over the long term—that project was downscaled to a bus. But it’s still a very expensive bus at $300 million, also more expensive than Beltline rail. (First proof of concept, if you will, to Ponce City Market.) And about 11% of the [More MARTA] tier one funding is going towards the Streetcar East Extension. So one cannot say it is sucking the remaining 90% out. There are eight other projects getting that almost 90%
WB: Are they being leveraged with federal funds?
MR: That’s another—Walter, I’m glad you brought that up. One of the things we’re calling for now is an immediate and complete overhaul of how MARTA obtains, applies for, and receives federal money. We have a very powerful congressional delegation in Washington that represents Atlanta and the state. One of them—our representative here in District Five, which was John Lewis’s seat—Nikema Williams, calls them the “WOW” factor: Warnock, Ossoff, Williams. And they have made it clear, individually, and collectively, that they’re ready to help this region get the money. The Biden Infrastructure Act has given away more money for transit than any administration since Richard Nixon’s in the early seventies, and it’s a lot of money.[22] The special bonus in Build Back Better is $23 billion dollars [sic].[23] Sixteen of it has been awarded already. Almost all to other American cities. And from the regular FTA budget, there’s $5 billion being given to the city of San Jose to build a tunnel underneath itself to connect BART[24] to future California High Speed Rail and Caltrain that goes to San Francisco.
These are not small amounts of money. These are big awards. We haven’t applied. That is the scandal, Walter. And how come we haven’t applied? Because we haven’t advanced any of these projects into what’s called “project development,” which is the place that a project gets to when it’s fifteen to thirty percent engineered or designed, when the federal government will let you in the program and ask for those big amounts.
AK: It almost seems like there’s this tension [created by] MARTA not actually doing what MARTA’s supposed to be doing. It might cause somebody to say, “Well, maybe we need to pause and see what’s going on with MARTA and fix that before we start.”
WB: I think Matthew’s hitting on some really important topics; I think we come to a slightly different conclusion. My fear is that what will happen is—because there is a lot of community pressure coming through BRN in particular to build a Streetcar extension—we’ll do that, but we will fail the way this region has always failed. That is: Doing the big things, getting the big money to the table, getting these projects done. It’s taken Midtown Alliance nearly ten years to create a Complete Street.[25] To me, Complete Streets throughout the city are far more important, and critical, to moving people through the city healthy, in a healthy and, primarily, friendly way, than even rail on the Beltline.[26] But we can’t even get that done!
AK: You seem to have a lot of very car focused [alternatives] like Waymo and Uber. Do you think that that’s something that younger Atlantans who are moving here and filling in the density in Midtown and hopefully Downtown—is that something they want?
WB: No. People—you mean the alternative of the car? Absolutely. There are young people now—
MR: We can agree on that.
WB: We definitely agree that people do not want a car. I mean, as soon as I got my electric bike, my car is only driven two or three thousand miles a year. We just disagree on how that’s going to work. To me it’s about land use; it’s about the way that our communities are connected; it’s about building safe, buffered bike lanes today. The same amount of money that they want to spend on the entire Beltline loop would pay for five thousand miles of buffered bike lanes.
Just to give you one example: For a one hundredth the cost of Beltline rail you could extend a bike trail—for wheels, micromobility—along the Beltline, serving far more people than the rail could ever do because people want to ride. They want to be on the Beltline.
Atlanta is the third largest scooter city now in the country. These are modern realities. I only bring up Waymo and Uber simply because they didn’t exist twenty years ago when [Gravel’s] thesis was written and we don’t know how disruptive a Waymo robo taxi system may be. Am I in favor of it? Not necessarily. I’m just simply saying delay is sometimes smart when change is happening this rapidly.
MR: I would say that that even with everything we’re talking about in the way of change— Waymo, pods, scooters, Uber—we didn’t have Uber twenty years ago.
WB: No, we did not. We didn’t have iPhones!
MR: And we didn’t have iPhones. All of that does not change the fact that people need mobility, and that people aren’t all or either going to choose or be able to engage with all of those modes as equal alternatives. One in every four Atlantans has a disability that prevents them from riding a bicycle or a scooter. We have the greatest income disparity of any city in the United States. Scooters are not cheap. To ride three or four miles on a scooter isn’t an insignificant cost to many people. To use a tax credit for a $1,500 e-bike still means you still have to pay several hundred dollars for a bike. This is not the equitable access that we’re talking about. Do I believe in all of these things and that they all have a future and a place? Absolutely, Walter.
We are at an exciting time in our history. But that doesn’t change—if that were the case, the leading cities of the world would be abandoning their rail projects and going for something else. But even in places like Dubai, they’re building more, and they’re building it with hydrogen, and they’re building it without overhead wires, and they’re building it fast. We are not building.
I would say that as these technologies come about—why would we take a former rail corridor that is beautifully green right now and pave more of it? Why would we do that? When we already have a road grid coming up to it, crossing it, and [going] all around it. I would say we shouldn’t do that. And [I would say] that the only technology that we could put on the Beltline—if we accept that the Beltline would benefit, and in fact, needs mass transit—is light rail in grass tracks, which was a pretty picture when Ryan [Gravel] drew it, but it has become the world standard.
And those cities that I told you, Anthony, that are coming here to look, they’re actually taking the idea and building it. Even our sister city to the northeast, Charlotte, is retrofitting a greenway, a rail-trail project, into its light rail system. What they have that we don’t have is a top-to-bottom unity around the idea that they want it, and they need it. They have generated billions in investment. They want more of it, not less of it. And where did that idea come from? Right here.
WB: You brought up so many issues. I want to take each of them individually, but I should have written them down.
MR: I tend to do that, Walter
WB: You string together them well.
So let me just talk about equity for a minute. One of the things that MARTA experimented with through a National Science Foundation grant was the MARTA Reach program, which was an on-demand transit system to help people in need. And I’d love to look at the numbers—I want to help those people too—what is the percentage of riders that would use, for example, light rail that couldn’t also be served by some other quicker, cheaper on-demand system? I did a little bit of number crunching for fun, and basically, you could have 100,000 people taking fifty rides a year on Uber for twenty-five years for the same amount of money. (I like to do these little comparisons.) So, for me—even Gwinnett County now is experimenting with micro-transit—why did MARTA stop the program after three years as successful as it seemed to have been? They just couldn’t figure out how to find the funding to do it. And I get that. But that doesn’t take away from the idea.
Los Angeles right now is experimenting with something called universal basic mobility program. They have a thousand people in their program. They get $150 a month to use however they want. They can go on rail, they can go on Uber, or they can rent a bike. I’m not sure this is the right solution for L.A., but apparently something like eighty percent or plus are actually taking Uber. You know, I wish they would grab a bike or get on their light rail system.
To answer the question about other cities: I’m a dual Dutch citizen. I’ve lived about three years of my life in Europe. Of course, I love the transit systems there. They’re amazing. The challenge for Atlanta—and I hate saying this because I share Matthew’s vision that we need to become an international city—we’ve not spent a hundred years investing, and reinvesting, and taking care of our transit rail systems. We tore it all out in the fifties, for God’s sake.
MR: Like every other American city.
WB: Well.
MR: And I might add, like every French city.
WB: Well, some have. But they also got right back to the business, apparently—whether it’s regional transit in Philadelphia, for example (which is extraordinary), or New York—we’ve not done that.
And again, I go back to the problem, [it] is twofold: One, we don’t have a society here. We’re not organized. We don’t have the political will to do what we ought to be doing about transit. Period. As it applies to the Beltline, I have a disagreement there in that that is not, in my view, in our view, the place to put transit.
For example, I don’t think it is tenable to remove over 225 trees and destroy 2600 caliper inches[27] just to build the streetcar extension to Ponce City Market so that somebody at Peachtree Center MARTA station can take forty-two minutes to get to Ponce City Market on a train. I can get there from directly on the shuttle to Ponce City Market in less than fifteen minutes. So, it’s not really going to be a very convenient system and it’s going to have [a] very high cost environmentally.
I don’t care if the grass track system—grass does not equal canopy. Right now, the canopy is overgrowing the entire Beltline on the East Side Trail. There is an arboretum there that has been funded by people supporting WABE (where Rose Scott works) for a decade, and yet we’re willing to just throw that away on an experiment that may never actually get extended at a terrible cost. We’re talking three or four or five years of business disruption while this thing is being built. At the same time, we’ve got thousands of miles of right-of-way throughout the city that we could be converting now to Bus Rapid Transit, LRT, buffered bike lanes. That’s where I want to put my money.
MR: Anthony, you talked earlier about this “contractual” idea. I don’t see myself as a contractualist. I brought that up because there is a contract. There are multiple contracts here.
When Walter says “the linear park”—the Beltline is not a linear park. The Beltline is a transit corridor. When you look at things like your home, my home, they have a designated land use. The designated land use for Piedmont Park is a park, and the designated land use for the Beltline is a transit corridor. Now what’s beautiful, and what the secret sauce of the Beltline is, is all of these things coming together: The arboretum, the transit, the trail that’s multi-use, the art, and the connection to all of the three city parks—the largest city parks, and many of the others—to twenty Atlanta public schools, [all] to the most important new entertainment, shopping opportunity zone in the city on the East Side Trail. That won’t be the only one. Bankhead will boom at some point. It’s even bigger and got a lot more land to develop, and it has one—maybe two, if there’s an infill station—MARTA stations at it.
What we’re talking about is the future here. As far as grass tracks go, they actually enhance the environment. Now, when I say that, I say in comparison to the other alternatives that you would do. It actually improves storm water runoff because the engineering of those rail beds is designed to, one: absorb about two-thirds in the plant life, and then: to direct some of the rest to the adjoining areas. And then what’s going down the drain is even less.
You know, far more trees were cut down to build the trail we love than will be cut to build the rail. There’s even a company here in town that repurposes all that wood and has an endless supply of wood to make flower boxes with. So, I think it’s important to remember that those trees that you’re talking about—there are some mature canopy trees, and some of those will be cut—but most of the trees you’re talking about that have been planted in the last ten or twelve years are not old enough to generate the environmental benefit that you’re talking about.
I think we have to look at the reduction in air pollution, the reduction in traffic on our road grid that we have. It’s great to say we can take Uber. Uber and busses get stuck on traffic if they’re not in dedicated right-of-way. What the Beltline gives us, that no other project ever has given us, is a natural, inherited right of way. That is so precious. It is priceless, in fact, because you can’t do that in most cities. And what it gives us is a circle.
AK: So let me push back a little bit—push back against this idea of maybe Uber is more traffic, and maybe that’s not the direction we want to go, but at the same time—
MR: What I mean by that is that Uber is in the same traffic as everything else, which is increasing greatly.
AK: But if it takes a long time to get from point A to point B on light rail, and maybe it’s not a convenient way for commuters, and maybe people don’t think it’s efficient enough, are we maybe not focused enough on the heavy rail and extending that? Why not focus on that first as opposed to light rail?
WB: I’ll pick up on that because I think that’s an important point. I will go back a moment to the grass-track concept because that’s more smoke and mirrors.
Basically, what they’re trying to say now is that, “We’re going to convert the Atlanta Streetcar, which is an overhead catenary system, to grass tracks in an underground fed power system.”[28] You can’t even use the same cars! So, we’re talking about more money to do something that looks like a pretty picture that somebody on their side is drawing with no fence, which MARTA will never do. And you know right now—
MR: I don’t agree with that.
WB: Well, MARTA has a thirty percent [completed] design that says something completely different. So, until they show something that can be operated in a safe way, I don’t see them changing their mind on that because they don’t have sovereign immunity, unfortunately.
What I’m going to say is this: I’m an environmentalist. I’ve planted thousands of trees in my career. You cannot tell me that a grass system has anything to do with a full canopy system in terms of stormwater management and cooling the city. Right now, if I’m walking on the Beltline in the sun versus in the shade, there’s a fifteen-degree difference. That’s an enormous change.
And I’ll also say this: What their plan will do is take out forty feet of right of way that right now is pollinator meadows and trees in order to build a system that we don’t even know is going to work. It’s an experiment. It’s an idea. Maybe one day it’ll work. But the point is [that] it is already incredibly unsafe and busy right now. We need to separate our wheels from heels. We don’t believe in paving more of that right of way. We believe—
MR: You just said that you did. Wheels and heels are pavement.
WB: No I did not.
Let me explain an idea. One of the thoughts we’ve had is: Instead of just doing another bit of pavement for, let’s say, a bike lane, why not think of the Beltline as it is today as perhaps the wheels section? And then let’s create a very environmentally friendly trail through the meadow that does manage stormwater, that does allow people to have social spaces, that allows for people with dogs and jogging; and maybe we put a system in that absorbs stormwater. Anybody can come up with a cute idea to absorb stormwater, believe me, I’ve done that in many projects, okay?
MR: I would say that these sophisticated rail beds that are in deployment all around the world, even starting to be in this country are not—
AK: Do you have a model that you would like us to reflect or that you would like us to pursue, in particular?
MR: Meaning a place?
AK: Yeah.
MR: Sure. I’ll be there at the end of next week, in fact. So, we like to say that, “oh, Europe, we can’t have what they have there, because it’s Europe,” right? That’s a common argument when I meet with elected officials and people inside MARTA: “Oh, they have that. We can’t have that.”
Well, they didn’t always have that. And they didn’t always have the idea. The idea came from Atlanta, Georgia to have these grass tracks. The first systems were in Strasbourg, France and Bordeaux, and those were also the first systems to operate without overhead power and [to] either use battery or in-ground power. France had no light rail street cars, just almost none, in the early 1990s. They had done what we did.[29] They had torn it out. They had historic streetcar systems, too. When they decided to do this grass track, it pays one part making the city more beautiful, another part making it more environmentally friendly, and another part sustainability. There’s all of that going on and we can see that.
Legacy systems have had it for years in Boston and New Orleans. We can go there, but that’s not exactly what we’re talking about. I will tell you that the priciest real estate in New Orleans is on St. Charles Avenue, where that Streetcar is. With its overhead wire and it’s loud, clunky operation—and people want to live there more than they want to live three blocks away. And they pay a premium to do it.
So, I think, Walter, that we could agree that even the transit—you’re a dual Dutch citizen, I probably know Amsterdam better than any other city except Atlanta. And it has had the tram network. They are retrofitting grass where they didn’t have it. They are taking pavement and turning it into parks that streetcars and trams run through. This is a proven idea. This is not somebody’s pretty picture.
Now will we have to work with MARTA? Where I would love it—to have more partners that have the energy that you do and the knowledge that you do—is on delivering that world class, state of the art system. We have to do a lot of things in Atlanta for transit. More MARTA as a tax and as a program is a relatively small start. It’s not all that we need. Yes, we have to look at the future. But by stop, we—It has taken ten years, almost, to get where we are—from the time that MARTA decided to design the project list that would be voted on as a big picture, to the time we voted, to the time we collected the money. Every other city that does this gets into action as soon as they start collecting the money and we haven’t.
We need leadership at MARTA. We need it in City Hall. We need it in the City Council. We need it at the ARC,[30] who has consistently advocated for Beltline rail, and its RTPs, the Regional Transit Plan that they do every four or five years. We need all of it, Walter. We need micromobility too.
We need to figure out how to house 250,000 more people in this city and where we are going to place them without destroying our vast tree canopy, our historic, beautiful neighborhoods, or tearing down other places. And the Beltline is the place to do that. One of its beauties is all of the undeveloped land, particularly on the Northwest Side of the Beltline and the Southwest Side.
AK: So—
WB: Well, I was just going to respond. I disagree about not wanting what Europe has. In fact, I want—
MR: Not wanting? Not believing we can.
WB: I believe we can.
MR: Well, I do too.
WB: And in this way. Right now, Mayor Hidalgo in Paris is completely transforming the city of Paris to a car free city. How is she doing that? She’s not building light rail. They have plenty of money to do it.
MR: They are building light rail.
WB: Well—
MR: They’re building a Beltline of their own.
WB: What they’re doing is building far more bike lanes than they’ve ever had before. What is happening is—it’s micromobility. McKinsey has estimated in 3035 there’ll be [a] $550 billion annual industry in micromobility alone. So why aren’t we first taking the steps that we need to be taking in the city.
Again, I go back to: we always want to do the big thing, the big billion-dollar project. It’s the thousand little things. It’s not Robert Moses, it’s Jane Jacobs. We need thousands of miles of bike lanes now, buffered lanes to get people around. We can’t even get that done and so we’re putting all of our eggs in this one basket, and I think we need to spread those eggs out all over the city and do it fast.
MR: I’d just like for the record to say I’m not advocating one basket. I do chair a group whose mission is to see light rail delivered on the Beltline. That is who we are. It’s in our name. It doesn’t mean we don’t understand the importance of, priority of, connection of this project to others. If it were an isolated project, as you call it, “an experiment,” in the sense that it’s an experiment—everything’s an experiment, because until you’ve done something, you don’t know its impact. It was an experiment.
WB: The Beltline is not an experiment. It works today.
MR: We’re talking about rail on the Beltline. I assume you meant when you said, “an experiment,” Beltline rail.
WB: Yes.
MR: If you meant something else—
WB: I didn’t say that.
MR: I think you did. That’s what you said.
And MARTA was an experiment. There were so many people that said, “Why are you building a subway through Atlanta?” At the time, in the early 1970s when this got going, the focus of everything was right where we’re sitting, Downtown. The department stores, the offices, the federal government, the city government. It was all right here. You came downtown to do many things in civic life.
Midtown was nothing. There wasn’t even one tall building in Midtown in 1972 when they started planning MARTA. But look at it today. Things that you do—do you think that if it were today, we could build MARTA under Midtown today? Couldn’t even do it. It’d be so expensive and so disruptive. You’ve got so much property in the way, so many high rises and mid-rises, you couldn’t do it.
We have a narrow window of opportunity to build Beltline rail before all of that happens on the Beltline too.
We’ve got six million visitors at Piedmont Park—which would have two stops on Beltline rail—every year. And they will tell you at the Conservancy that most of those people arrive by, not foot, not cycle, by car. And when there are festivals, there can be twenty-five to thirty thousand people in that park. We have Grant Park, a slightly smaller, also beautiful park, and we have the Westside Park, also all on the Beltline. It makes sense to connect those places not just to each other, but to MARTA.
We talk about Emory and how big an employer Emory Hospital is, but Piedmont Hospital and the Shepherd Center are, not as large, but a very significant employer [sic]. Twenty-five to twenty-seven thousand people work there. Plus, everybody that visits people there. It’s not insignificant. And I think that we go back to something I said early on. We’ve got to grow up and see ourselves as the big city we’re becoming.
WB: Well, the mistake we made early on with the streetcar plan is—where it should have run was from Downtown to Buckhead. Everybody would agree with that.
MR: I would too.
WB: Michael Lanier couldn’t get it done. People for whatever reason—you know, Mayor Reed got fascinated with, essentially, a tourist trolley over here.
MR: The reason is: the federal government turned us down.
WB: Well, that’s a mistake. We should have fought with Nakima Williams and others, who, as you say, are perhaps leading the way. There were places that a streetcar made sense. The problem with a streetcar in general, wherever it is, is it’s inflexible. Once you put the track there, it’s stuck which is one of the reasons they argue for it. But I’ve fallen down on my bike riding next to the Downtown Streetcar before. There were some nice homeless people that helped me get up. I was very happy with their performance as I was laying on the ground.
But the point is, we’ve got thousands of miles of right-of-way right now that can be converted to BRT lanes, which can be shared with other forms of transportation. There are other cities that do bike and BRT lanes. We could do that if we had the will to do that.
My point is, there are so many other places we could be investing our money, work with the systems that we have in a much more robust way, much more networked, than just a small section of rail on the Beltline.
And by the way, have you ever looked at the engineering studies of how they’re going to actually get to Piedmont Park or get through Krog tunnel? They’re quite daunting and very, very expensive. And they have not been solved—
MR: And very preliminary.
WB: And they not been solved. That’s right. Again, it’s an experiment. Do the little piece that’s easiest, and unfortunately, most disruptive to what has become a very successful place, hoping that we’ll figure out where the money’s going to come from, how we’re going to operate it, how we’re going to solve the engineering problems that we haven’t solved yet.
AK: So, we’re running out of time.
MR: I would just say: Solving problems is a function of a decision to move forward, right?
WB: Engineering companies love to have problems given to them to solve.
MR: And we solve them all the time. That fourteen-lane extravaganza at Georgia 400 is the biggest engineering problem lately to be [inaudible] to the city.
WB: And the same engineers that work on rail would happily work on either one.
MR: Absolutely.
WB: “Just give me the give me the project, I’ll solve your problem.”
MR: But what I want to emphasize is: how you get across Monroe Drive with Beltline rail, over, on, or under, is a function of saying you do want to get across, and a function of moving forward. I believe in the creativity of designers and engineers, and I believe in the prior experience of other cities who face much more daunting challenges than our own to accomplish these things when we decide. As Shirley Franklin, our former mayor recently said, “In Atlanta, it’s never about the money, it’s about the will.”[31]
WB: Let me just end with one question. Okay? In the 1960s they were going to build the Stone Mountain freeway and [Interstate] 485.
MR: Thank God they didn’t.
WB: But it was always in the plan. It was seen as the right answer until a citizen group got up and said, “Wait a minute, what are we doing?” It became untenable to think about destroying all the historic neighborhoods; to put a right-of-way all the way through Druid Hills, through Morningside, Inman Park, Candler Park. That didn’t happen, but it was always part of the plan. And so, my point being, we have to change. We have to be flexible. Just because somebody thought it was a great idea and embedded into some fancy words, doesn’t mean it’s the right idea.
AK: I’m gonna—
MR: Oh, I have to respond to that and please let me.
AK: I’ll give you a second. So I think—you know, we’re running out of time here—but I want to ask, just to wrap up, and you can include whatever response you want: What do you want the Beltline to look like in, say, 2050? And if you were to quickly identify the biggest misconception that people have out there that will prevent us from getting there, love to hear that. And then let’s end it on a nice note. What is the most important thing in common that you have—goal or vision that you have in common—that you think you can work together with, to get to that vision of the Beltline in 2050.
MR: Well, we have a lot more in common than might appear when we’re focused on a conversation that is about one thing. We both believe in the future of the city. We both believe in getting out of cars. We both believe in environmentalism and the power of sustainability to transform our modern life. We both believe in beauty. We both believe in leisure and recreation. We both believe, it sounds like, in that term that’s often used, “the good life.” I think we both believe in extending that opportunity to as many people as possible.
I think we disagree on how to get there. I would say that while it is so important that we didn’t destroy our intown neighbors with two freeways, those were top-down plans. We have an NPU system because nobody even knew what was happening until the bulldozer showed up. And that Beltline rail is part of a long, city-wide public engagement process. The largest the city, maybe any city, has ever undertaken. And that voice of people is the voice that produced the consensus to arrive at the place we are now.
What does the Beltline look like in in twenty-five or fifty years? It looks complete, and that means transit ringing it. It looks like a place where 150 to 250,000 people are living. It looks like the opportunity is extended all around the circle. It looks like we are connected. It looks like everyone, people with disabilities, older, younger, can use it and to get where they’re going in a variety of ways, not just a few. So that’s what it looks like to me. It looks beautiful. It looks like something no other city has.
WB: That’s a nice thought, and in fact, I’m glad we do agree on that list. I won’t repeat the list because I agree with that.
My vision for it in 2050 is that, again, it’s complete, and that there are literally tens of thousands of people walking, and biking, and using micromobility, and possibly small electric vehicles that can pick up people on demand, that that have some disabilities or inclement weather responses, and I don’t know what that form factor is. That needs to be studied. But I truly believe that it will be exceptional, and it may or may not have the density that Matthew’s talking about that could happen in other places.
But in addition to that vision, I don’t see forty feet of double track rail because I don’t think that allows for the growth that I think can happen in an environmentally friendly way. I do see the city connected through much greater extension of bus rapid transit solutions, possibly more autonomous vehicle connections, and literally, a tenfold increase, if not more, in the use of bicycles throughout the city. That, to me, is a complete vision. It’s not just about the Beltline.
AK: All right. Well, gentlemen, I, on behalf of the Georgia State University Law Review and the University at large, thank you for coming and having this conversation. I think it was a really healthy, productive way to talk out differences and to, you know, suss out the commonalities that we have for Atlanta’s future. So, thank you for coming and we really appreciate it and enjoyed the conversation.
MR: Thanks Walter. And thanks Anthony.
WB: Thank you very much. Thanks so much.
Walter Brown earned a B.S. in Community Development from Georgia State University. Brown has worked as a Program Manager for the Georgia Housing and Finance Authority for ten years. Brown has since worked in a career of green building technologies, such as with Green Street Properties to develop Glenwood Park. He was also senior vice president of Jamestown Properties during the development of Ponce City Market. During his career he has worked on many urban redevelopment projects worth over $3 billion in U.S. cities including Atlanta. Civically, Brown has been actively involved in many groups in Atlanta, such as the Candler Park Neighborhood Organization as a past president, the chair of NPU-N, a board member of the Freedom Park Conservancy, and others. ↩︎
Professionally, Matthew Rao is the owner and principal RAO Design studio in Midtown Atlanta. Rao earned his degree from the Georgia Tech College of Architecture as an Industrial Designer. Civically, Rao has been a Board Member of the Atlanta Community Food Bank since 2018 and Chairperson of BeltLine Rail Now! since 2019. ↩︎
Professor Anthony Michael Kreis joined Georgia State University College of Law faculty in 2020 and holds a courtesy appointment with the department of Political Science. At the College of Law, he teaches constitutional law and employment discrimination. Professor Kreis’s academic interests span the areas of constitutional law, civil rights, legislation, the law of democracy, and American political development. Professor Kreis holds a Ph.D. from University of Georgia, a J.D. from Washington and Lee University, and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He regularly contributes legal commentary and analysis to international and national media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) and the ABC (Australian Broadcast Corporation). ↩︎
Bill Torpy, The Beltline Guy, 20 Years After a Darn Good Term Paper, Atlanta J. Const. (Dec. 9, 2019) https://www.ajc.com/news/local/torpy-large-the-beltline-guy-years-after-darn-good-term-paper/pcrMCbz69etezThihCVGjN/ [https://perma.cc/GH5R-H2EE\]. ↩︎
Ryan Gravel, Belt Line - Atlanta: Design of Infrastructure as a Reflection of Public Policy 108 (Dec. 1999) (M.Arch and MCRP thesis, Ga. Inst. of Tech.) (on file with the Georgia Tech Library), https://repository.gatech.edu/entities/publication/c4c02e00-9638-4381-a8d2-c9bc8991d7a5 [http://hdl.handle.net/1853/7400\]; Ethan Davidson, The Atlanta Beltline: A Green Future, Fed. Highway Admin. (Sept. 2011), https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/septemberoctober-2011/atlanta-beltline-green-future [https://perma.cc/C87P-E573\]. ↩︎
Davidson, supra note 2. ↩︎
Gravel, supra note 2. ↩︎
Tyler Fingert, Petition Opposes Expansion of Atlanta Streetcar, FOX 5 Atlanta (June 23, 2023) https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/petition-opposes-expansion-of-atlanta-streetcar [https://perma.cc/4FFA-L9SG\]. ↩︎
Id. ↩︎
BeltLine Rail Now! Is often referred to in this transcript by their acronym, BRN. The organization uses the old spelling of “BeltLine” with a capitalized “L” in the middle. See @AtlantaBeltline, X (Jul. 17, 2024, 3:00 PM), https://x.com/atlantabeltline/status/1813649919280103560?s=46 [https://perma.cc/5WR4-TEFJ\] (announcing that Beltline should be spelled with a lowercase “l”). ↩︎
MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, is Atlanta’s primary public transportation operator. ↩︎
MARTA, April More MARTA Boards 3 (2023), https://www.itsmarta.com/uploadedfiles/MARTA_101/Why_MARTA/April 2023 More MARTA Boards.pdf [https://perma.cc/F6DY-SMKS\]. ↩︎
Better Atlanta Transit is often referred to in this transcript as BAT. ↩︎
LEED is a widely used green building rating system. LEED Rating System, U.S. Green Bldg. Council, https://www.usgbc.org/leed [https://perma.cc/YR9M-ATHR\]. ↩︎
This conversation took place at the Georgia State University College of Music, not the Law School. ↩︎
A TAD, or tax allocation district, is a redevelopment and financing tool used by local governments to reallocate property tax revenue toward infrastructure improvements or private developments. Tax Allocation District (TAD), City of Atlanta, GA, https://www.atlantaga.gov/government/departments/city-planning/plans-studies/citywide-plans/tax-allocation-district-tad [https://perma.cc/29T9-DFFZ\]. ↩︎
BRT, or bus rapid transit, is a “high-capacity transit corridor” featuring bus-only lanes built into pre-existing streets. Bus Rapid Transit, MARTA, https://www.itsmarta.com/brt.aspx [https://perma.cc/JQC4-TL9M\]. ↩︎
See Jon Talton, The Mass-Transit System Seattle Might Have Had, Seattle Times (May 20, 2015), https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/the-mass-transit-system-seattle-might-have-had-jon-talton/ [https://perma.cc/3X6K-6KKK\]. ↩︎
Light Rail Transit, or LRT, “is typically an electric railway (like a trolley or streetcar) with a smaller capacity than heavy rail trains. More MARTA Atlanta, Frequently Asked Questions 2018 2 (2018), https://www.itsmarta.com/uploadedFiles/MARTA_101/Why_MARTA/More_MARTA_FAQ (1).pdf [https://perma.cc/2D8E-CX7Y\] (adding that LRT “is characterized by rail cars operating singly (or in short trains) on fixed rails within city street right-of-way, similar to the Atlanta Streetcar, or in a dedicated right-of-way.”). ↩︎
Ashe spoke to WABE several months, not two weeks, before the referendum and said, “I think everybody shares a goal to do at least some amount of rail on the BeltLine.” Johnny Kauffman, MARTA Unveils its Dream List for Atlanta Transit Expansion, WABE (May 12, 2016), https://www.wabe.org/marta-unveils-its-dream-list-atlanta-transit-expansion/ [https://perma.cc/8CLR-R4UZ\]. This quote was to Johnny Kauffman, not Rose Scott. Id. ↩︎
MARTA claims to average sixty-, sixty-five thousand riders on the streetcar per month. Key Performance Indicators, MARTA (March 2024), https://www.itsmarta.com/KPIRidership.aspx [https://perma.cc/A4K4-N9YP\]. One study, however, estimated that 2022 Q3 ridership was less than 500 per day. Jack Daniel Summer, Opinion: Atlanta should consider vintage streetcars to boost ridership, Urbanize Atlanta (Mar. 13, 2023), https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/opinion-downtown-atl-vintage-streetcars-would-boost-ridership [https://perma.cc/Z5TU-W5PU\]. ↩︎
On April 4, 2024, the Federal Transit Administration announced that $20.5 billion in federal funding is pledged for public transportation making it the “largest investment in public transit in U.S. history.” Biden-Harris Administration Sends Another $20.5 Billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to Transit Agencies Across the Country, Fed. Transit Admin. (Apr. 4, 2024), https://www.transit.dot.gov/about/news/biden-harris-administration-sends-another-205-billion-bipartisan-infrastructure-law [https://perma.cc/Q5Q6-59KQ\]. ↩︎
Id. ↩︎
The Federal Transit Administration has pledged $5 billion to the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) for plans to connect San Jose to the larger BART system. Federal Government Commits $5 Billion to BART SV Extension, Valley Transit Auth. (Aug. 2, 2024), https://www.vta.org/blog/federal-government-commits-5-billion-bart-sv-extension [https://perma.cc/9EFB-AEQW\]. ↩︎
A “Complete Street” is a planning term used to refer to a street designed for all users regardless of means of travel. See Complete Streets, Dep’t of Transp., https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/complete-streets [https://perma.cc/Y25S-MVKC\]. ↩︎
In Midtown, both Juniper Street and 5th Street are Complete Streets projects that have not been completed as of October 2024. See What We\’re Working on, Midtown All., https://www.midtownatl.com/midtown-alliance/physical-improvements/projects#filter=.complete-streets [https://perma.cc/F3TS-ZSY6\]. Juniper Street began planning stages in 2010. See Juniper Complete Street Project, Midtown All., https://www.midtownatl.com/project/juniper-street-transformation-project [https://perma.cc/7KCP-RZJN\]. 5th Street began preconstruction in 2015. 5th St Complete Street, City of Atlanta Dep’t of Transp., https://atldot.atlantaga.gov/projects/5th-st-complete-street [https://perma.cc/5RPQ-DSPN\]. ↩︎
According to an arborist dictionary, caliper inches refers to the diameter of a tree’s trunk in inches. Len Phillips, Arborist Dictionary, Gibeneyce.com, https://gibneyce.com/arborist-dictionary.html#A [https://perma.cc/4CNH-EZLK\]. ↩︎
Currently, the Atlanta Streetcar is powered from overhead power lines, called catenary lines, and runs through the asphalt streets of Atlanta. BeltLine Rail Now! advocates for a rail system that is powered from the below the streetcars and running on lines that are surrounded by grass rather than asphalt or concrete. ↩︎
Until circa 1950, Atlanta streetcars functioned as an integral part of the urban environment. Mary Beth Reed, Patrick Sullivan, W. Matthew Tankersley, Sara Gale, and Mary Hammock, Historic Streetcar Systems in Georgia 1, 63 (2012) (showing a map of the former streetcar routes). ↩︎
The Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) was founded in 1947 to “plan for a better, brighter Atlanta region.” About the Atlanta Regional Commission, Atlanta Reg’l Comm’n, https://atlantaregional.org/about-arc/ [https://perma.cc/LK5N-5VBR\]. They are “the regional planning and inter-governmental coordination agency for the 11-county Atlanta region.” What We Do, Atlanta Reg’l Comm’n, https://atlantaregional.org/what-we-do/ [https://perma.cc/9KBF-ZNAK\]. ↩︎
Georgia State University Law Review cannot verify the accuracy of this quote by former Atlanta Mayor Franklin. ↩︎