MARTA already serves many major corridors in Atlanta as it is. If Racicot had acknowledged or researched current MARTA service, he’d know that routes 10,23, and 25 cover Peachtree all the way to Chamblee; routes 2 and 120 cover Ponce de Leon all the way to Stone Mountain; route 48 covers Moreland down to Thomasville. As he’s a former city planner, I’d hope he could see the fallacy in hoping for a grid-like bus system in a city notably without a cohesive or substantial grid street system. grid segments would have to be too large; while walking to transit is an acceptable expectation, people won’t walk too far for a bus stop.

to further prove my point that MARTA already heavily utilizes corridor routes, here are a few more: route 39 covers the Buford Highway; route 21 covers Memorial Drive; routes 85 and 87 cover Roswell Road; route 33 covers Briarcliff; route 83 covers Campbellton Road; route 71 covers Cascade Road; route 15 covers Candler Road; route 73 covers Fulton Industrial; route 3 covers MLK Jr, Auburn Ave, and Edgewood; route 19 covers Clairmont, et cetera - these aren’t nearly all of them. MARTA’s got corridor service. Racicot would have had a much better argument had he said that MARTA needed to fill in the gaps, like on Piedmont from downtown to Buckhead. But look at the system map (www.itsmarta.com) and you’ll see a number of heavily linear routes that don’t deviate through neighborhoods.

Tuesday’s public hearing was full of people protesting the idea of MARTA removing routes 3 and 22 from small municipal streets. i haven’t heard of any city governments asking MARTA to remove larger vehicles from smaller roads, only very specific neighborhood organizations. the City of Atlanta was opposed to GRTA’s use of monster greyhound-sized coaches on Peachtree, but the typical transit bus sizes (like MARTA and GCT use) have been acceptable downtown for decades. If the small bus routes do okay, hopefully we’ll see more of those (with increased route frequencies) through some of the neighborhoods and narrow streets. local governments are critical to MARTA obtaining funding, and the Authority has *visibly* made service changes (see additions to service on rt. 22 on sunday, rt. 44 to moore’s mill, rt. 99 on saturday, not to mention the drastic improvement to a 15-minute schedule on north/south frequencies after the initial unpopular 20-minute peak/off peak schedule) based on public comment/concern. so while MARTA may seem large and fairly anonymous, it listens.