Mass-transit advocates seek boost from highway collapse

ATLANTA -- The collapse of an interstate in the heart of Atlanta has more than 2 million metro residents sitting in even more traffic in the already congested city, and mass-transit advocates hope the headaches will spur new interest in expanding rail and bus routes.

Many commuters come from surrounding counties that long have resisted mass transit, creating a car-centric region shaped by issues of race and class for more than four decades.

Georgia transportation officials hope to reopen Interstate 85 by mid-June after a 350-foot span came crashing down March 30 amid intense heat from a fire set beneath the roadway.

Until then, 250,000 drivers who depend on that route each day are stretching the limits of Atlanta's other highways and surface roads, or using the region's transit system at unprecedented levels.

Ridership has gone up 20 percent since the collapse.

Skeptics of expanding mass transportation in metro Atlanta wonder whether residents of such a sprawling region will leave their cars behind, barring a crisis of this magnitude.

Georgia lawmakers created the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority in 1965, envisioning a system to serve the counties that made up metro Atlanta at the time.

But three of the five counties backed out of MARTA in referendums before its 1971 startup.

On the heels of the civil- rights movement, white Atlantans were fleeing to the suburbs in droves and had no interest in closing the distance between their new homes and the city's core.

"There's no question in my mind that since the 1960s, race has been the underlying factor in all of these attitudes against bringing MARTA into the outlying areas," said Ronald H. Bayor, a professor emeritus of history at Georgia Tech and author of the 1996 book "Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta."

"White flight was well underway. People were running away from the desegregation of the Atlanta schools. Some of the opposition was from whites who worried that it would lead to the integration of the suburbs."

Long after MARTA began operating, Bayor said, whites privately would joke its nickname stood for "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta." Publicly, opponents were less explicit but warned mass transit would increase crime or diminish property values in the suburbs.

Violent crimes haven't helped MARTA's reputation.

On Thursday, a man was fatally shot on a MARTA train and three passengers were wounded in what police called a "targeted, isolated incident."

MARTA police have investigated four other killings since July, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

There were no slayings in the previous four years, though several dozen aggravated assaults and robberies were reported each year.

The transit system is limited largely to Atlanta's core, which doesn't give most commuters a practical route between home and work.

Ted Johnson typically drives 45 minutes from his suburban home to his downtown office, a trip that takes twice as long using mass transit.

He doesn't mind using the train to avoid the collapse issues, but he's not sure MARTA will be a good fit when everything is back to normal.

"I've used MARTA before when my car was in the shop or I needed to get to the airport," Johnson said. "But compared to driving a hybrid car that doesn't use much gas, parking at a station and paying a train fare is more expensive."