Waiting for the northbound train at Five Points station
On MARTA this morning, in rapid succession
— A young man offered a young woman his seat (she declined).
— An older man thanked the young man for offering his seat to the young woman.
— Another young man complimented another young woman on her shoes.
— I braced myself for some shitty counterbalance, but nothing came.
Yay — I like good MARTA stories.
Changes to some MARTA bus routes start this weekend
Blogger cityhaul writes about some changes to MARTA bus service that are starting this weekend.
Saturday is April 20, and you know what that means. No, not just the Dogwood Festival. It’s the first day the latest round of bus service cuts.
Route 110, which normally manages to dodge the axe, will see some big changes: From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. trips will alternate between running all the way from Lenox to Five Points and running only between Lenox and Arts Center. From 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., the route will no longer run between Arts Center and Five Points at all. Saturday and Sunday service between Arts Center and Five Points will change from every 20 minutes to every 40 minutes.
Cutting the Arts-Center-to-Five-Points leg of the route for so many hours isn’t just a self-contained inconvenience. It also eliminates the only workaround for the 20-minute headways on the Red and Gold lines after 7 p.m.
Similar (and equally confusing) modifications are being made to Route 6. The route currently runs from Lindbergh to Inman Park, but from 6 to 9 a.m. and from 3 to 7 p.m., every other trip will now turn around at the Emory Village traffic circle on weekdays. The route will run as normal at midday and at night on weekdays and all of Saturday and Sunday.
The good news is that the Route 6 rush hour frequency will increase from every 18 minutes to every 15. The bad news is that it doesn’t do you any good if you have to wait half an hour for a bus that’s going all the way to Inman Park.
Details, maps and new schedules for all 21 routes being altered “to improve overall service and on-time performance” are here. Enjoy!
I’m sad about the 110 Peach Bus no longer going downtown at night (it won’t go south of Arts Center starting at 7pm). We can use the train instead, but it was so much easier to check the location of the bus with MARTA’s WebWatch bus tracker catch it without a big wait. There’s no online train tracking tool, which is fine when the trains are on time, but not so fine when they aren’t.
The convoluted bus routes aren’t doing MARTA any favors when it comes to gaining ridership. Gah.
Yet another 1970s MARTA nostalgia post
Look at this great find from Flickr user grabbingsand, who writes that he discovered this at an estate sale. It’s described as:
…part of an invitation to witness the introduction of MARTA’s East Line in June, 1979. There’s a guidebook, a ticket (good only on the first day), a invitation and even a certificate of commemoration.
Nice. Go check out all the scanned pages. I love the little descriptions of the stations. For the Reynoldstown/Inman Park station, they describe 1979 Inman Park as a “reviving” neighborhood. A good reminder that even that was once a down-on-its-luck, struggling neighborhood.
Thanks to Twitter user Mplunney for the tip.
Mario MARTA map. I don’t know what to say about this except that it makes me smile.
via fritztape
More 1970s Atlantans waiting for a bus
I can’t get enough of these vintage 1970s photos of people waiting for MARTA buses. Thank you, Wiki Media! First there was this guy, and now we have a whole group (see larger photo). My 1970s urban nostalgia knows no bounds.
I took MARTA to work this morning and nobody at my bus stop looked half as cool as the folks in this picture. The woman in the poofy white hat is particularly awesome.
The photo credit goes to Jim Pickerell.
Does anyone know where this street corner is? I can’t tell.
MARTA’s new transit-oriented developments could break ground this year
Just look at those acres of parking lot above, waiting patiently to be turned into new residences, offices or stores. This is the lot just south of the King Memorial MARTA station, an area particularly ripe for development given the growth of popular spots nearby in recent years.
The transit agency is looking to have lots like this turned into transit-oriented developments, similar to the one built years ago at the Lindbergh Station.
According to a post on Saporta Report, this King Memorial TOD project, along with others near MARTA rail stations, could get started very soon.
A quote:
Proposed developments at three MARTA stations are so hot that they could start in a matter of months, according to MARTA records.
The proposals involve the stations of Avondale, Chamblee and King Memorial. Each proposal has “advanced to the point of the board’s decision/action and could be put into action this summer or early fall,” records show.
The post includes photos of the available land around the stations.
This is great news — not only that these projects are finally happening after decades of letting prime transit-connected space get wasted as surface parking — but that the properties are so desirable to developers. It’s kind of a dream come true for me: land near MARTA stations has become more valuable as walkable urban growth rather than as storage for cars.
