TORPY: Why does MARTA go where folks aren’t going?

It was, my colleague Sara Gregory wrote, one of the worst rail ridership drops in the country, with only Cleveland and Los Angeles seeing bigger dips.

Fewer than 30 million people rode MARTA’s rail last year. By comparison, almost 62 million did in 2019, the year before the pandemic.

Overall, MARTA had a total of more than 64 million riders on its buses and trains last year, a 44% drop from 2019. (To make things even more of a bummer, MARTA had 158 million riders in 2008 — 86 million on trains and 72 million on buses.)

This seems counterintuitive, because metro Atlanta has added millions of residents in recent decades. They just don’t want to take transit.

There are many reasons for this.

How about gentrification for starters? Many of the neighborhoods along the rail lines were once occupied by working class and Black residents. Those areas are now hot real estate markets for the opposite of working class and Black. Living near the train is an attraction.

Credit: Bill Torpy

Credit: Bill Torpy

Now, the new residents don’t have to take the train. They just like the idea that they can. They can work from home or drive to work if they must. And then, on weekends, they can ride the train to the Atlanta United game.

Bus riders, more often than not, must take the bus to get where they need to go. And the bus lines are more widespread than rail, closer to their homes and taking them closer to where they want.

The rail lines were built decades ago to carry residents downtown to their jobs, or to shop or to offices and other destinations along those routes. However, Atlanta office space is hurting pretty bad, with unleased space hitting a new high last quarter.

And downtown resembles a ghost town some days.

National data shows bus and rail service was dropping nationally before the pandemic, as people use scooters and services like Uber and Lyft. Also, relatively low gas prices and increased transit fares kept riders away.

Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman told me that “post-COVID, the train experience is not great.”

Shipman is a buttoned down, reserved fellow and “not great” in his lexicon is “hot mess” in someone else’s.

“It’s partly because it’s not busy and because people don’t feel safe,” he said.

There’s safety in numbers for riders and when someone is loud, crazy or misbehaving, it seems less menacing when the car is full of other worried passengers pretending not to notice the disturbance.

While writing about MARTA late last year, I rode the trains for a few hours and talked with a couple dozen people. Few raved about the service, good or bad. Most shrugged and said it simply was what it was: MARTA.

I spoke with Doug Nagy, formerly Atlanta’s deputy commissioner of transportation. He now works in the private sector, taking the train from Midtown to Dunwoody each day.

Recently, he had to step over human waste at the Dunwoody station. (I assume some other poor soul failed to spot it.) Previously, he was accompanying his mother-in-law from the airport when a nut pulled a gun on him and others. No one was hurt, but I figure she’ll prefer Uber next time.

“MARTA has phenomenal infrastructure but it’s run terribly,” said Nagy. “I’m a Cleveland Browns fan, so I guess I’m used to disappointment.”

“MARTA has lost half of their customers from 2019,” he said. “What other CEO could lose half his customers and not lose his job?”

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Again, MARTA’s ridership is down 44% from 2019. Nationwide, transit is down 23%.

He noted that MARTA’s police force is down in numbers and, as a result, bus drivers and passengers packed a MARTA board meeting in January to complain about safety. Bus driver James Bodley, a veteran, told the board: “I’m afraid. Every time I talk to a police officer, they say they’re short. They’re short.”

MARTA officials told my colleague last week the ridership drop is partly because of an issue with Breeze cards not being read. There’s also a problem with fare evaders and broken gates that allow people to walk through uncounted.

A year ago, MARTA CEO Collie Greenwood told Atlanta City Council that “we will get back to those (prepandemic ridership) numbers. The only question is how long?”

In an interview late last year, Greenwood told me the agency is on a cop-hiring drive (as is every other police force in the country) and they want to put an officer on every train during rush hour. They are also fixing up all 38 train stations.

One way to get people to become regular riders, he said, is to cut back on less popular bus routes and increase the frequency of service on busier routes. He said new trains with “open gangways” between the cars will put more riders within view of each other and provide an increased sense of safety.

“We can’t please everyone,” he said. “But we can please more people more often than in the past.”

Pleasing some of the people some of the time would be a start.