ATLANTA — Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens attended Thursday’s MARTA board meeting to discuss, among other topics, a proposed change for how the MARTA streetcar service would access the Beltline.
Dickens said the city’s planning and “vision” of the streetcar service and the Beltline was changing.
“I’m a fan of light rail, I always have been, it’s been my interest in it since the very beginning. The hope is that one day, more rail can be put on the Beltline. The short term look at this is: How do we start this process?” Dickens said.
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He said that he didn’t want to give the news before Atlanta Beltline CEO Clyde Higgs could discuss it, but two consultants had made recommendations for shorter-term changes to the Beltline, leading him to change his support for the MARTA streetcar and Beltline cooperation in certain parts of the trails.
“We think that the Beltline in its initial form is multimodal. We think that there’s going to be some places where there’s light rail and some places where there’s other types of transit in the short-term,” the mayor explained. “Because it takes so long to build out 22 miles for the loop, and certain parts of it are already extremely dense, with a lot of activity, a lot of walking, a lot of commercial nodes, a lot of restaurants, there’s a lot of disruption when we try to do it all at once.”
To that end, Dickens said having the MARTA streetcar access the southside portion of the Beltline made more sense, rather than accessing an east extension. Dickens said the southside trail area would be a transit-oriented community, with both a Beltline transit station and a MARTA transit station.
“The northside, where you’ll see you’ll have to take the streetcar to get to the Beltline, makes more sense,” Dickens said. “It’s the Beltline, so everybody’s got an opinion about it. It’s a little delicate to pull out at the MARTA meeting, but this is how much of a partner we think you are. Seriously.”
Dickens said they came to the meeting to talk about the recent MARTA audit, the Five Points Station permitting process and when they were there, they just “couldn’t hold back on the vision” anymore.
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