It’s well-known that transit ridership fell off a cliff during the pandemic and has struggled to recapture the butts that once plopped in bus and train seats.
In 2019, MARTA had 118 million riders. Two years later, it had 46 million, a 61% plunge. This year, it should have perhaps 65 million, according to the American Public Transportation Association.
Last year the Federal Transit Administration looked at the post-COVID recovery of the nation’s 26 largest systems. MARTA’s was 25th, with a bit more than 50% of riders returning.
I stumbled upon those numbers this month while writing a post-mortem on the failed sales-tax referendums for transit in Cobb and Gwinnett counties. The post-pandemic ridership malaise is not surprising. What is surprising is that MARTA’s ridership used to be 170 million in 2001, a time when metro Atlanta had fewer residents. That’s 52 million more than 2019′s ridership.
But let’s not pick on MARTA, because transit numbers were dropping nationwide before the pandemic. MARTA’s neighbors, Cobb and Gwinnett, had hoped to beef up skeletal systems with added sales tax. They, too, have seen consistent drops.
Gwinnett dropped from 1.8 million riders in 2013 to 1.2 million in 2023. And “decline” is an insufficient term to describe Cobb. “Collapse” is more apropos — from 3.6 million riders in 2013 to 854,000 last year — a 76% drop!
It creates a self-fulfilling prophesy: People see near-empty buses riding around and think: “Why bother funding that?”
It was one reason Cobb’s sales-tax referendum was crushed at the polls, 62% to 38%.
Credit: Natrice Miller/AJC
Credit: Natrice Miller/AJC
A national study of the years 2012 to 2018 found U.S. bus ridership dropped 15% and rail dipped 3%, even though most systems had improved their service during that time. Reasons for those drops were attributed to “shared mobility” (scooters and services like Uber and Lyft), a drop in gas prices and increased transit fares.
Since COVID, add working at home. Empty office space is reflected in empty train cars and buses.
Buses, the transit world’s non-sexy option, have been more resilient. MARTA’s rail ridership that plunged 80% immediately after COVID has returned to more than half its previous ridership. Bus ridership, however, dropped just 37% and is about 25% off where it once was.
It turns out bus riders have to keep riding the bus. Many rail riders have other choices. Increasingly, the neighborhoods along MARTA’s rail lines have gentrified, with the new residents liking the idea of rail, but not necessarily using it all that often.
“Our perennial arch enemy, the car, continues to do well,” Collie Greenwood, MARTA’s CEO, told me.
I rode MARTA’s rail and spoke with two dozen riders last week to get a sense of their thoughts about the system. It was an eclectic group: a lawyer, chef, waitress, bartender, shoemaker, students, retirees, two homeless guys, some white-collar workers and even the dude who was charged with burning down I-85 in 2017. The charges were dropped. He’s rehabilitated himself and is now making a two-hour commute to work.
I asked about half the interviewees to grade MARTA and all but one shrugged, and gave it a “C.”
It was like asking a man eating an Oscar Mayer hotdog what he thought of his dinner.
“They’re doing what they can do, really; just doing what they can,” said Stacy Cook, a UPS employee. “I’ve got to get to work.”
“MARTA is for people who don’t have a ride,” said Kenneth Willis, a retiree, whose car was recently wrecked.
Credit: Bill Torpy
Credit: Bill Torpy
Cheryl Shaw, a lawyer who lives in Edgewood, was heading to Buckhead because her employer has called for a return to the office. She has lived in Boston and D.C. and took transit more often there.
“It’s not the same here; it’s only east-west, north-south,” she said.
Riders complained about dirty bathrooms, buses running infrequently and the ticketing machines. (I fed $2.50 into one, didn’t get a ticket, so I went to a second machine and gave a friendly homeless guy $2 for his “help.” So it cost me $7 for my ride.)
MARTA’s CEO knows the complaints well and has them reduced to talking points embedded in his noggin.
“We have these perceptions of safety, cleanliness and reliability,” Greenwood said. And he added, “It doesn’t go where you want it to go.”
Perceptions are in many cases real. And even it they aren’t, it doesn’t really matter because perception is reality.
Greenwood said the agency is hiring more police and wants to put a cop on every train during rush hour.
New train cars with “open gangways” between the cars will provide more of a sense of openness and a feeling of security for riders.
MARTA is also installing new entrance gates at stations because turnstile jumpers are often troublemakers, which adds to that, um, perception problem.
Getting people to buy into the system means that service must be consistent, that if you miss a bus, you don’t wait 45 minutes. The agency, he says, has been on a spree building bus stop shelters and is increasing the “frequent service” corridors from five to 18. That means buses should come every 15 minutes,
The increased service on these routes will mean cutbacks on other routes. To try and fill in that gap, MARTA will create 12 “on demand” service zones, kind of like Uber, to try and get people where they want to go.
MARTA, he said, is “doubling down” on investment and expansion, even with lower ridership.
“We can’t please everybody,” Greenwood said. “But we can please more people more often than in the past.”
A transit exec can sure dream.
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