The Beltline

Atlanta has a problem. If you look at a roadmap of the city, you will notice that it's grid is shaped like a baseball. Look a little closer, and you see why: hundreds of smaller state and US highways looping around each other and railroad after railroad, freightyard after freightyard, and neighborhood after neighborhood to make there way in to the city. For commuters, this is a horrible arangement: it means that everybody and there city gets forced on to a 5-lane one-way street that curves, curves, curves to add miles to your travel distance and has more merging traffic and traffic lights then can possibly be believed to slow you down. The freeways (I-20, 75, 85, US-21/GA-400, and US-76E, along with 285 and minor spurs) are every bit as bad and, through downtown 3 (75, 85, and GA-400) are routed together on to the same ginoromous, ugly, 20-lane, merging traffic speed limit of 50 MPH concrete torment from hell.

Courtesy of Scott Ehardt. Public domain.

Of course, then again, were it not for the sheer volume of traffic carried by this array of roadways they might not have anywhere to commute too. Supporting a city of 5.3 million metro requires a lot of business centralized in a small area, and those legions upon legions of small highways may be awful for the commute from Alpharetta, but my friends from Elijay (100 miles out) find them very convenient for getting to Georgia Tech.

So eliminating the "problem" isn't a possibility, and building more roads on top of the curvy swurvy's already available, would lead to a maze of congested intersections and too much turning, and would involve costly demolition of (possibly hundreds) of buildings with valuable commerce, industry, or workers, in every single one. The most important areas to improve would cost the most to do so.

Railroads are very efficient in that for a fairly small width (around 8 feet) tens of thousands of passengers can travel. They also, through right of way restrictions, tunnels, and elevated structures, and through their own engineering advantage of the guiding force of their rails, can travel through an urban area at a much higher speed (70 MPH for a MARTA train) then the 30 MPH that a car or bus can manage in an inner-city, and can run predictably. This is the thinking behind MARTA, which is very convenient for the tiny percentage of the city it covers:

MARTA Route map. Public Domain.

Please note that only the bright colored lines are railroad. The light blue are freeways.

Now, if you're actually near one of those handful of stops, the trains come about every five minutes, can hold about a thousand people, and have extra wide doors for the luggage of people going to the Airport (Airport Station) or Greyhound (Garnett Station.) But clearly, most commuters cannot use these lines, and one of them (the one going east-west, blue-green) is almost entirely unused as it essentially goes to nowhere, while the other (north-south, red-orange) is very heavilly used and probably generates a profit for the authority.

The proposal is to take miles of unused railroad track encircling Atlanta and turn it in to an operating light-rail line, moving at a slightly lower speed (~50 MPH) through its turf and hitting more stations:

Proposed Beltline. Source: beltline.org

Much of the project is actually being funded by donations, and a broad grassroots action has been underway for years, under a action group called "The Beltline Partnership," to get the line built. The eastern section of the line runs through the highlands, a vast area of under-utilized land just east of Midtown, and in one case, just a few blocks east from the tallest building in the city. This section may also help conduct some traffic for the more developed midtown, downtown, and piedmont areas south from Lindbergh and north from the east-west line. The Collier Hills area, location of Piedmont Hospital and the Amtrak station, is at the far northern part of the line, west from Lindbergh.

Technically, the line will service 100,000 citizens within a half-mile (very reasonable) walking radius, though I suspect it will service some areas better then others.

The southern section of the line runs through vast areas of impoverished ghettoish former cityscape, notably the Grant Park area, where small, antebellum mansions from another era decay against neglect and the poverty of their new tennants (Boulevard, the main street, is often reffered to as million dollar drive, because a million dollars worth of drug deals are done there daily), and West End, where old factories and warehouses stand idle with billboards from decades ago and another world still blurting out their messages in that old style paint to the best of their ability along small, potholed streets. This southern section, unfortunately, does not connect well with the main MARTA line, as it crosses the north-south line halfway between the West End and Fort McPherson stations, and the line itself does not arrive at any major commercial or CURRENT industrial area until it reaches the east-west MARTA line, miles away and with miles more of backtracking east from west or west from east to downtown. The chance for development in this region is slim, as crime rates in this area are stifling, it's dangerously close to the airport, a major real estate discount, and the beltline, with its circle and extensive backtracking (look at map), creates an I-75 size commute WITHOUT CAR and through dangerous areas that would interest only the poorest of citizens.

Further, in a city where our main industries are Banking, Corporate Headquarters that moved here from somewhere else, main-stream media going bankrupt for years, airlines with rising fuel costs, and selling weapons to exactly one customer (US Congress), constant, steady, reliable growth and demand for development is not something we can count on, and for West End & Grant Park to develop sufficiently to support any kind of mass-transit, you'd need a gold rush. This section should've been discluded altogether, the line cut at I-20 or the east-west MARTA line. But, if playing Robin Hood with public money was the only way to get Atlantans on board, maybe it really was the best proposal, and the good done by the Eastern and Northern Lines will far outweigh the costs of maintaining, for however long they do, the lines through West End & Grant Park.