After a blast of confetti 10 years ago this week, Atlanta’s first streetcar since the Harry Truman administration took to newly laid tracks and began its looping route.
Borne of a partnership between the city, the downtown improvement district and MARTA, the Atlanta Streetcar was a long-awaited and, at $98 million, expensive project — one envisioned to reconnect parts of the city bisected by the interstates and to spur economic growth along the corridor.
But besieged by 19 months of delay, the first rides were logged against a backdrop of vocal criticism, loud enough that one of the streetcar’s biggest supporters felt compelled to address the naysayers on Day 1, telling them simply: “We did not build it for you.”
A decade later, that backer, the president of Central Atlanta Progress and the downtown improvement district, is still bullish about the streetcar. While the Atlanta Streetcar isn’t perfect, A.J. Robinson said, the new developments that continue to spring up along its route show its power as an economic engine in parts of the city that had been struggling.
Robinson said the streetcar gets “a bad rap.”
“People need to appreciate what it can and can’t do,” he said. “It can’t solve every issue. It also shouldn’t be expected to.”
The first talks of reviving Atlanta’s shuttered streetcar system began with inspiration from other cities. Business leaders like Robinson saw it as a way for the city to stay competitive in the arms race of attracting businesses and people, one that would incidentally also provide new transit options.
City leaders eventually settled on a 2.7-mile loop between Centennial Olympic Park and the Sweet Auburn Historic District — a route that positions it between major tourist destinations like the Georgia Aquarium, the World of Coca-Cola, the College Football Hall of Fame on the west and Georgia State University, the King Center and the historic district on the east.
Those neighborhoods were cut off from one another by the interstates when the Downtown Connector was built in the 1950s, destroying what was once one of the most prosperous Black commercial districts in the country and displacing Black residents. Old Fourth Ward’s historic and struggling status helped secure federal funding that ended up paying for half the project.
As a connective tissue, the streetcar has done what it set out to do in repairing those fissures, said Peter Bruno, MARTA’s senior director of operations and planning. Bruno has been involved with the project from the start, first as a consultant and now at MARTA.
“It’s brought new life into the Old Fourth Ward,” he said. “It’s really doing its part as far as economic development.”
One of the enduring criticisms of the streetcar has been its failure to meet ridership estimates, which were predicted to be as high as 1.1 million trips in the first year when rides were free.
Credit: Ben Gray
Credit: Ben Gray
The streetcar gave 880,000 rides that first year of operation but hasn’t met that mark since. After a $1 fare was introduced in 2016, ridership more than halved. Ridership fell further in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the slide in bus and heavy rail ridership locally and nationwide.
MARTA has struggled more than most transit agencies across the country to get riders back, but the Atlanta Streetcar is a bright spot in those efforts. Streetcar ridership in 2024 through October was 97% of the 2019 figures, according to Federal Transit Administration data. By contrast, MARTA’s bus ridership was at 56% of pre-pandemic figures and heavy rail was at 40%.
“It’s the only part of the MARTA system that’s returned close to pre-pandemic numbers,” Robinson said. “I think that’s telling. It’s serving riders.”
Robinson and MARTA officials theorize that the streetcar’s use by tourists, as opposed to daily commuters, might explain why its ridership has rebounded faster. Lawrence Graham, MARTA’s light rail superintendent, said the streetcar is also heavily used during special events downtown.
Daniel Hecht, MARTA’s chief mechanical officer, thinks there are lessons to be learned from the streetcar’s ability to recover ridership. It speaks to how people are using transit differently since the pandemic, when many no longer have to commute to an office. It also speaks to how much the mode of transit matters, he said.
When the streetcars were taken off the road because of wheel safety concerns in late 2022 and replaced with shuttles, ridership fell even though they traveled the same route.
“What that tells us is the mode matters,” Hecht said. “There’s always going to be an argument, ‘we can replace it with a bus,’ but when we did that, we saw ridership drop quite a bit. It tells us that people are excited about the vehicle of choice and they’re excited about the streetcar vehicles themselves.”
The other enduring criticism of the streetcar is that it is “always stuck in traffic.” The streetcars do not have their own right of way and travel alongside vehicular traffic, making it susceptible to congestion.
In fact, the streetcar has been on schedule 93% of the time since 2018, when MARTA took over operations, according to an analysis of MARTA’s performance data by transit advocate Alan Babilinski that was reviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In some months, the streetcar’s on-time rate has been as high as 98.6%.
That’s on par with heavy rail’s on-time performance and higher than it is for buses.
Babilinski said he doesn’t understand why MARTA doesn’t publicize that record more. He said it took him months to receive the data through an open records request.
“When someone says, ‘oh but it’s always struck in traffic,’ I feel like it’s the duty of someone from MARTA to say ‘that’s a misconception,’” Babilinski said.
Graham said MARTA plans to begin publishing streetcar performance data online in January. Bruno said MARTA and other transit agencies face a constant fight against misconceptions like that.
“We have to toot our horns a little more,” Bruno acknowledged. “We really do have a good story to tell.”
Robinson’s hope for the next 10 years is that the streetcar can overcome its critics. He’d like to see MARTA reconsider the fare and do more to make it fun to ride, like put musicians on the vehicles. If tourists and special-event goers make up the bulk of its ridership, cater to that, he said.
“It can become a much better forward-facing opportunity when you think about how people are using it,” he said.
And he is still asking people to give it a chance.
“In the scheme of things, 10 years is not a long time,” Robinson said.
About the Author
