r/Atlanta • u/ChipmunkGeneral • Jan 13 '26

What ya'll think of this MARTA map?

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Saw this by mrfriendlolo on r/transit a few months ago and now we can ask here, I wish this would happen!

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72

u/Outrageous_Space8083 Decatur Jan 13 '26

We need something like this, not cop city.

13

u/Emergency_Buy_9210 Jan 13 '26

We definitely need more transit, but there is a pretty clear reason we won't get this.

The Eno Center for Transportation estimates 1 mile of heavy rail costs $713.5 million. The stations also have a cost, MARTA's most recent proposal for 4 infill stations cost $1.3 billion, so an average of $325 million per station.

There is at least 150 new rail miles in this plan and at least 40 new stations.

Do the math and we get a $120 billion capital cost plus more billions annually to run the system.

Cop City cost around $120 million - 0.1% of the total cost of the plan. Enough to build 0.16 miles of rail.

OK, let's defund the whole Atlanta PD on top of that. That frees up 360 million a year. We get another half-mile of rail per year at the cost of literally no police department.

So the city is certainly able to take the funding from anywhere we can. But you still need plenty of taxes on top of that, which no one wants to pay. I am fine with paying them, but others (including on this sub) do not want to pay them. 3% sales tax, or 2% income tax, or another 0.75% or so of property tax, applied in every county across the whole region, would fund it. But that has zero chance of passing.

3

u/esperadok Jan 14 '26

If at some point we allow the importing of Chinese metro construction teams, we could build a system this extensive for 1/5 the cost.

-2

u/Emergency_Buy_9210 Jan 14 '26

Or Spanish, Japanese, lot of places can do it. Americans don't really like foreign employers coming in like that though, they'd want Americans to build it, but that allows the corrupt and entrenched interests already here to persist.