Can Gwinnett County Save MARTA?

Gwinnett County has the opportunity to join MARTA with the promise that the majority of tax dollars will be spent in Gwinnett. But is it too late to save MARTA?

MARTA ridership was below forecast for all of 2018 for buses and rail passengers. Will forecasting be any better with the addition of Gwinnett County?

The 3% Solution

So far MARTA is a 3% solution to the Metro Atlanta Urban population. If you assume that each MARTA patron takes a trip to and from their destinations, only 3% of the population uses MARTA on a daily basis.

That begs the question: How much more shall the 97% continue to vote and support the 3% solution?

MARTA has evolved into a two purpose system. The first is to get lower cost workers to employment areas.

The second is to transport those with private vehicles to both sporting events and the airport, where the hassles of drive times and parking fees can be avoided.

Will Gwinnett County voters be willing to commit large sums of money going forward forever for these purposes?

Or will they be wise enough to realize that MARTA just isn’t SMARTA?

For those that are supporting this push for MARTA, I have just one question:

Outside of the airport and sporting events, will you be using MARTA for your daily trips around your town, or are you hoping that your neighbor will be doing so?

That’s what I thought.

https://www.itsmarta.com/KPIRidership.aspx

One thought on “Can Gwinnett County Save MARTA?

  1. Public transit boondoggles are exercises in vanity. No city in the last 20 years has built a public transit system that has come in anywhere near original estimates or timelines, and even California has had to abandon its bullet train that had sky-high expectations and predictions of success. Locally, the most recent failure has been the Atlanta Streetcar that has never met ridership forecasts – even when the fare was free. That money losing project has now been pawned off on MARTA where its failure is more hidden within the now sprawling tentacles that MARTA is attempting to spread further around metro Atlanta. Will Gwinnett residents join Fulton, Dekalb and Clayton counties in throwing increased taxes into this bottomless money pit?

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