Waiting for a tram
May 9, 2007 at 11:48 am by Scott Freeman in NewsI spent a wonderful week in Dublin, Ireland, and one of the more interesting experiences was riding on the LUAS (Irish for “speed”) tram the city debuted in 2004.
The two tram lines, which run every four minutes down the center of Dublin, are clean and efficient and relatively inexpensive to ride (1.25 euros). Most importantly, they actually go places people want to go on streets that are dedicated to the tram – they even have to obey traffic signals.
The system – which totals a modest 23 kilometers — cost 700 million euros, which was three times the original cost estimate. But it still seems like a steal. In 2005, the tram carried 22 million passengers; in 2006, that rose to 26 million — an average of 80,000 passengers a day. By comparison, MARTA trains had 69.2 million passengers in 2006 and 47.6 miles of tracks.
The trams run on electricity, and give an idea of what could be in Atlanta with the Peachtree Street streetcar system proposed by Mayor Shirley Franklin and for the Beltline.
On the flight over, I read the April 16 issue of the New Yorker, which featured a story on “the soul of the commuter” and a long section on Atlanta.
Here’s the money quote from that story:
Atlanta, like Houston, sprawls without impediment in all directions, and an inordinate number of the commutes range from one edge of the sprawl to the opposite side. People live and work on the outskirts. For them, the city itself is little more than an obstacle and an idea.
Atlanta is a beltway town—it is defined by the interstate, known as the Perimeter, that encircles it. It has a notoriously paltry system of public transportation. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, or MARTA, operates two rail lines, which form a cross whose ends extend, at most, a few stops past the Perimeter. Most communities have no access to it, and there are prejudices against it. (You don’t have to be in Atlanta long before someone relates, ruefully or conspiratorially, an alternative source of the acronym—“Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.â€) Decades ago, residents of two counties surrounding the city voted down an extension of the MARTA system. Ninety-four per cent of Atlantans commute by car, and the city has the highest annual per-capita gasoline costs in the country. According to the last census, the travel time in Atlanta grew faster in the nineties than in any other American city, and it’s getting worse. Traveling ten miles can take forty-five minutes.
Road-building doesn’t much help. Atlanta is a showcase for a phenomenon called “induced trafficâ€: the more highway lanes you build, the more traffic you get. People find it agreeable to move farther away, and, as others join them, they find it less agreeable (or affordable), and so they move farther still. The lanes fill up.
Imagine inner-city electric-powered trams or streetcars in Atlanta that would connect people with the places they want to go. Imagine the impact of taking 80,000 cars off the streets every day. Franklin’s proposal for the Peachtree Street streetcar and the Beltline streetcar at least gives one cause to hope.
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May 9th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
MARTA crushes the soul of the commuter. it’s underfunded, overpriced, and notoriously inconsistent. They hire rude, lazy, and belligerent people to operate trains and buses. The joke that is the MARTA police are hardly around when you actually need them. There are delays on the tracks that have no real explanation behind them.
It’s true what the article said - there’s a way of looking at people who take MARTA (or CCT, GRTA, GCT, etc.) that is not flattering, and it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. You are somehow BENEATH those who drive. I’m white, and you can’t believe the sneers I’ve received when I say “I take the bus to work”.