Sunday, July 25, 2010
Opinion, Politics, Atlanta

A streetcar named nonsense

People in wheelchairs use the road because there are no sidewalks, or the sidewalks are not navigable.

One of many similar Atlanta streets: No sidewalks, cracked pavement and boarded up homes.

By Stephanie Ramage

They filed past in wheelchairs or leaned on other peoples’ arms as they made their way  to where the Atlanta City Council sat at last week’s regular meeting. There was some awkward shuffling: The council chamber lacks appropriate space for wheelchairs and the ramp to the council dais is so steep you'd have to be a paralympian to roll yourself up it.

The disabled guests were there to accept a proclamation offered by Council President Ceasar Mitchell in honor of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Mitchell recalled how, in law school, it had struck him that America should have had such a law a long time before it did.

Atlanta should have had its public facilities up to ADA standards a long time ago, too, because now the city has to spend millions of dollars to build about 6,000 ramps by July 15, 2015, in order to be in compliance with the federal law.

These two things—Mitchell’s proclamation and the July 2015 ADA deadline—are connected by a streetcar that seems to rumble through the City Council on a fairly regular basis: It’s the streetcar that some folks want to build regardless of the city’s fiscal condition or its myriad other needs.

Last week, the City Council resuscitated the Shirley Franklin administration idea and passed legislation to set aside $10 million to pursue a federal grant to build the streetcar. This time around, the proposal was hatched by Mayor Kasim Reed but it's most outspoken supporter is Councilman Kwanza Hall, who recently opposed Reed’s increases on alcohol license fees for bars and restaurants discussed elsewhere in this issue.

On the other side of the matter is Councilwoman Felicia Moore, probably the most fiscally conservative member of the council. She cast the lone vote against Mayor Reed’s budget because it is not balanced—it relies upon revenue from asset sales that have yet to close. She has cast the lone vote on issues many times, and withstood great pressure from the previous and present mayors.

Hall and Moore are both smart, popular council members. But Moore rightfully refers to the streetcar as “nonsense.”

According to the mayor’s urban redevelopment plan, of which the streetcar is the centerpiece, “the Streetcar Project will ultimately run from Buckhead in the north to Fort McPherson to the south and east-west between the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic Site and Centennial Olympic Park. The east-west link will serve Auburn Avenue and the Fairlie-Poplar historic districts and provide critical ‘last mile’ service to MARTA heavy rail and regional express bus riders.”

When the plan came up in committee, Councilman C.T. Martin said "We got buses [on the same routes] now and there isn't anybody on them."

If you didn’t know about the plan, you’re not alone. It was updated so recently that the only version to which the public had access—the one on the city’s website—prior to the public hearing, was outdated. Also, the plan was only advertised in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; it was not sent to the neighborhood planning units. So only one person, Edith Ladipo, showed up for the public hearing.

“This public hearing is not really a public hearing,” Ladipo warned the council. 

The plan's sponsor, Councilman Michael Bond, says Atlanta has to build a streetcar at some point anyway because Charlotte, N.C.’s got one and if we’re going to compete with Charlotte we’ll need one, too. So we might as well put up the $10 million and let the feds help us out.

Councilwoman Joyce Sheperd, however, says if we don’t build those wheelchair ramps, we’re going to be paying many millions in fines or maybe even in lawsuit settlements. She said people in wheelchairs use the road because there are no sidewalks, or the sidewalks are not navigable. Or, she said, Atlanta could use that $10 million to address all the other many basic concerns we have: crumbling bridges, cracked streets, dangerous intersections, dilapidated houses, crime, etc. (Sheperd inexplicably voted to pursue the streetcar grant nonetheless.)

Moore repeatedly said the whole streetcar measure was “nonsense.” Moore is not anti-public transit, but she cast the sole vote against a city budget that required hundreds of jobs to be slashed. The cops and firefighters had to beg for a step-pay increase that was considerably less than the streetcar application’s $10 million price tag, and the garbage collectors, whose staff has been obliterated, got even less. Putting up $10 million for a streetcar for Downtown Atlanta seems, to Moore, irresponsible.

It’s easy to understand Hall’s and Bond’s desire for competitiveness in the tourism market. But the first time that a carload of tourists overwhelms a bridge’s weight capacity or is swallowed by a sinkhole on Peachtree Street will be the last time Atlanta even has to think about tourism for a while.

Like all grant-funded projects, this one would eventually require the locals to pick up the tab for maintenance and operations. Atlanta needs to make its neighborhoods places where people want to go before the taxpayers have to bankroll an empty streetcar. SP