Inside MARTA’s Nerve Center
Decatur Metro | August 2, 2010One of my favorite regular features in Atlanta Magazine is Thomas Lake’s “Firsthand” column. Lake “wanders the city with a notebook and pen” in hand, documenting the daily happenings of our sprawling metropolis. He’s covered everything from a “midnight makeover” of Phillips Area from a hockey rink to a basketball court to burying Atlanta’s homeless in Palmetto.
This past month, Lake spent a few hours inside MARTA’s main control room, giving us an idea of what it takes to keep Atlanta’s transit functioning on a daily business. Lake’s descriptions must be read for themselves, but here’s a taste…
The Rail Service Control Center runs nonstop, seven days a week, with nearly sixty workers in rotating shifts. They are the railroad equivalent of air traffic controllers. Before them, two Mosaic Display Boards dominate the room’s eastern wall. The boards resemble the black grids from the old board game Battleship, magnified a thousand times. They show diagrams of MARTA’s 48.1 miles of tracks, with 750 volts of direct-current electricity flowing through the third rail. The left board shows the trains moving. Each train glows red against the tracks.
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Interesting article. The whole issue is a good one in fact. Enjoyed the TBS and GSU football articles too. How about that number cited in the Marta article: $7.27 per ride to break even without external funding.
So who is going to pay the $5.00 per ride or $10/work day difference between current fares and what it really costs? Blue collar workers can’t afford an extra $10 per day and other workers won’t–they’ll drive and park all over downtown, midtown, Buckhead, the Perimeter, wherever they can, legally and illegally. Should employers? Should the private sector be responsible? Or should it be the public sector like in most cities?
Why narrow that question to MARTA?
It’s as if all the road and highway construction, employee parking subsidies and Hummer tax rebates were magically created by “the invisible hand” instead of our tax dollars.
A congestion charge works well to put the hidden costs of “free” driving back onto the users and not the “public sector”.
Aren’t roads, by and large, paid for from gasoline excise taxes? And if so are you not proposing a fee to penalize users of the roads that were paid for by the collection of fees and taxes on the users of the roadway previously?
Isn’t congestion enough of a “fee” or deterent in and of itself?
Regarding MARTA, I have not read the article so forgive me if this is covered, but is the $7.27 operating expenses per trip or does it include a pro-rata share of acrued debt? It would seem to me that this would make a big difference in the discussion.
Actually, only about 60% of the expense of roads is paid by so-called “user fees” like gas tax, sales tax on gas, tolls, etc. The other 40% is paid for by everyone from general tax funds. No form of public transportation entirely pays its own way.
And let’s not forget traffic enforcement costs, particulate-related health care costs, lost productivity costs…
Oh, yeah. Those are externalities so they don’t count!
Unfortunately, our motoring infrastructure is not self-sustaining as many believe.
Motorist related fees and tax revenues only pay part of road maintenance and operations, not new construction.
I’m starting to come around to the idea of distance-based fares on the rail. If the baseline fare is two dollars, then maybe the fare for the longest trips should go to five. Of course, I still want to see some state funding.
Large scale systems use a zone system of fares that makes the distance charges simpler to manage. I suppose it’s not so great if you live near one of the zone borders.
Oh, and there is also a short but nice article on the Book Festival that calls it one of the “signature literary events in the country.”
Bit more MARTA news:
http://www.ajc.com/news/marta-workers-suspended-for-581237.html