What mysterious machine is this?
I was in Atlanta this past week and rode something very strange. Maybe you could help me figure out what it is.
It was this thing they named ‘Marta’ and it was located in a large underground room that Atlantans call a ’station’, I was asked to pay $1.75 to enter, and inside this big ’station’ a strange vehicle on rails would periodically appear, people then got onto this strange vehicle which quickly took them someplace they wanted to visit.
Anyway, if you see one of these here in Seattle, let me know, I’d like to take it again.
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The inside joke on this is, of course, that MARTA is actually Seattle’s light rail system. The feds set aside a boatload of money in the 60s to pay for this X-shaped system not all that different than waht Sound Transit is likely to have on the ballot in 2008. Seattleites voted it down, so they gave the money to Atlanta.
I visit Atlanta usually once a year or so on business and always have to shake my head in wry amusement when I ride the system.
Because Atlanta did not pair the system with good land use policies, and because of some social issues we’re not currently faced with to the same degree, the system has done nothing important to combat sprawl.
I’d say it’s also because of the shape. If you look at a map of Atlanta, it’s flat and endless. Hilly coastal cities have pinch points that drive up traffic which creates density. For us, it’s the squeeze between a lake and the ocean, along with hills and bridges to deal with.
Without this geography, it’s easy to drive in any direction to cheap housing. Therefore without pinch points you need to rely on really good land development policies.
Of course that means we’d better start firming up our land use policies, or we’ll start to see Atlanta-style sprawl an hour past each Link end point.
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