MARTA is on board with the city’s vision.Įarly concepts propose connecting light rail, MARTA’s existing heavy-rail system and BRT corridors throughout the BeltLine. The BeltLine is being transformed into a mixed-used trail, and the city of Atlanta plans to develop it to connect the city’s neighborhoods. One of the biggest priorities to allocate funding for is the Atlanta BeltLine project, which calls for operating light-rail lines along 22 miles of abandoned rail right-of-way that loops around Atlanta’s inner core. MARTA has defined the priority transit corridors and modes of transportation, and now is working to determine what types of transit options riders would need the most in those corridors, Parker says. Much of those dollars would be used to acquire land or develop existing parcels during construction within the transit corridors the agency has defined. “We see this as a little over a $5 billion program through federal and private funds,” he says. Some of those projects will need to be 35 percent to 50 percent federally funded, while other smaller ones could be completed solely with local funding, Parker says. Initial expansion plans call for 29 new miles of light-rail lines, which will represent 44 percent of the agency’s plan, while bus rapid transit (BRT) and arterial rapid transit (ART) projects will make up the rest. “We’ve got to be competitive with federal funding to match the $3 billion worth of local funding that we have to maximize what we can build with this referendum,” Parker says. Since then, the agency has narrowed and prioritized the projects according to ridership needs, while remaining active in the federal funding process for future assistance. At the time, MARTA had more than $10 billion worth of transit projects on deck, Parker says. The tax referendum opened the door for several projects. That funding will be divided between both rail and bus system expansions. In 2016, Atlanta voters approved a half-cent sales tax that will generate about $3 billion in local funding for MARTA’s transit expansions over the next 20 years. But with a push from General Manager and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Parker - who’s led MARTA since March 2018 - funding support from a local sales tax measure approved in 2016, and a draft timeline in place slating major project completion by 2040, the current plans are inching forward. While MARTA has teased rail expansion plans since the 2000s, little has advanced past the planning stages due to the lack of state funding. To accommodate the influx of more riders, MARTA plans to improve its 48-mile heavy-rail system, better integrate and expand the Atlanta Streetcar, and weave rail into the city’s transit ecosystem through station upgrades and transit-oriented developments (TODs).
And the population boom the region is experiencing is expected to continue over the next three decades.īy 2050, the metro area is projected to be home to about 2.5 million more people, boosting the region’s population to 8.6 million, according to a forecast published by the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC). Meanwhile, the number of people in the metropolitan area climbed from nearly 5.3 million in 2010 to about 5.9 million 2018 - the fourth-highest population growth in the nation during that span, according to U.S. MARTA’s system hasn’t undergone a major expansion since it was founded 40 years ago.
With metro Atlanta’s population exploding of late and forecasts indicating millions more people are coming, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority’s (MARTA) rail network and the city’s transit ecosystem are playing catch up.
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