“Build us a streetcar line!” Atlanta screamed north towards the Chesapeake Bay.  “What?  I’m sorry, what was that?” seems to have been the response.

The AJC reports that Atlanta’s bid to get the Federal Government to build us a streetcar line down ol’ Peachtree Street with stimulus funding was totally ignored.

I like it when a reporter’s disappointment bleeds through onto the page…

In fact, in a two-page list of grant recipients including many in the Southeast, Georgia appears not to have a single project.

Atlanta, local business groups and MARTA applied for $298.3 million, the total amount needed to construct the streetcar. The city and the business groups would have shared the cost of operations, helped by ticket fares, advertising revenues, and naming rights. MARTA would have administered the grant. The city also suggested smaller versions of the project that would cost less, but no dice. Streetcars operated in Atlanta until 1949.

The loss for the streetcar is one more drop in the bucket of metro Atlanta’s mass transit misery.

But what did we do to deserve such overlooking?!  What MORE could we have done!?

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