Last Friday, I spent some time driving around the sprawling Atlanta, Georgia metroplex photographing some well-known trouble spots for pedestrian safety. Though some improvements have been made in places, there are still so many unsafe streets, corridors and intersections for pedestrians, finding streets that are “dangerous by design” is about as easy as blindly putting your finger down on a map.

The Atlanta Regional Commission has helped address some of these problems through their popular and oversubscribed Livable Centers Initiative that gives metro communities small grants to help make a dangerous street safer, improve MARTA access, add new crosswalks or streetscaping, or other small improvements to the built environment that help improve quality of life for residents. And T4 America partner PEDS has had their boots on the ground for years now, working hard to make metro Atlanta more walkable. But we need far more of these kinds of efforts — and similar efforts from others in cities across the country — to make the kinds of improvements we need to save lives and end the 4,000-plus deaths that happen to people walking each year.

Many of these deaths occur simply because the design of a road just hasn’t adapted to the changing needs of all the people who use it.

Consider: at one point, Old National Highway in South Fulton County was probably a sleepy state highway through a relatively unpopulated area on one’s way south out of Atlanta. Now, it’s teeming with retail on both sides of the street just south of Interstate 85. Add in the fact that it’s a relatively low-income area (read: people more likely to walk or take transit) with apartment complexes on both sides of the main highway and you’ve got a street that no longer meets the needs of everyone who uses it, and certainly not for the people who live there.

Though the first few miles away from Interstate 85 have sidewalks and there are a handful of signalized intersections with crosswalks, sidewalks soon end completely and there are many stretches where there are no safe places to cross for hundreds or thousands of feet — all in an area with MARTA bus stops on both sides of the highway. The sidewalks may end, but the walking doesn’t, as the “desire paths” through the grass indicate.

Of course, the most well-known road in Atlanta that’s dangerous for walking and biking is certainly Buford Highway. This stretch near Clairmont Road is a whopping 7 lanes across, with crosswalks often so far apart as to be merely dots on the horizon.

This corridor is lined with more affordable apartments and has also been a popular landing place for Latino and Asian immigrants for years, and many portions of the street are filled with small ethnic shops catering to the local clientele — many of whom are likely to be walking. According to the data in our map, in just the few miles from I-285 south down to 400, 20 pedestrians were killed from 1999-2009. There are stretches with no sidewalks on either side of the street and no safe crosswalks almost as far as the eye can see.

In this picture alone, not only are there no sidewalks but there are nine separate curb cuts where this man could be easily struck by a right-turning car before reaching the next safe crosswalk at the intersection.

Some key improvements have been made on Buford Highway in recent years, though, which have helped to increase safety. Thanks to recent efforts by Dekalb County and the Georgia Department of Transportation, a busy stretch of Buford Highway south of Doraville with high density of retail on both sides of the street received several new signalized intersections as well as new pedestrian-only mid-block crossings that use a special light called a HAWK signal. This is a light that stays dark until a pedestrian pushes a button, activating a light that flashes before turning red for cars. These crossings also include a refuge to shorten crossing distances and give people a safe place to wait while crossing.

And then there’s southern Cobb County, the northern Atlanta suburb where Raquel Nelson was walking when her son was killed and she found herself prosecuted after the fact. Some busy corridors have sidewalks and some don’t — though walking isn’t very pleasant next to seven lanes of traffic — and crosswalks can be interminably far apart.

This photo below bears some similarities to the conditions on the street where Raquel Nelson’s son A.J. was killed, which isn’t too far from here.

Note the bus stop on the other side of the street with a Cobb County bus approaching. See a marked crosswalk anywhere? Perhaps this man is trying to catch the bus? What happens when the bus drops you off and you need to reach a destination across the street? Should we really expect people to walk half a mile out of the frame to find a safer place to cross, and then walk half a mile back?

And some streets around here just have zero accommodation for pedestrians, including a busy street that serves two major universities and the county’s biggest employer (Dobbins AFB/Lockheed) right in the center of the county.

Keep in mind that these pictures represent just one busy American metropolis — there are hundreds more cities and thousands of places with similar conditions that need urgent attention. We have a long way to go to retrofit these streets to help make them safer for everyone that needs to use them. The complete streets provision in the Senate’s MAP-21 bill would be a step in the right direction, as would be the flexible funding that local governments can use to help address some of these dangerous areas under the Senate bill.

With 67 percent of all pedestrian fatalities happening on federal-aid roads — many of which that were designed in this unsafe way because of federal design guidelines and standards — there’s a clear role for the federal government to play in improving them.

So what would happen in our communities if we started by looking at our map of pedestrian fatalities to see where the worst trouble areas are and devoted a small slice of transportation money into small, tangible improvements like new sidewalks, new crosswalks, and new signals for making walking safer and more convenient? What if we made it a clear priority to make every day National Safe Walking Day?

Wouldn’t we be saving lives immediately? And for a small price?

Watch the full slideshow here, or click to watch full-size in a new window.

“The child, along with an adult and other children, were attempting to cross the street and they had crossed the northbound lanes and were standing in the middle turn lane when, according to the adult, the boy pulled away. He was then hit by a car traveling in the southbound lane,” DeKalb Police spokeswoman Mekka Parish said.

Just like Raquel Nelson’s story, the nearest crosswalk wasn’t “near” at all. The family could have walked either 0.4 miles roundtrip to the south, or 1.2 miles roundtrip to the north — a long trip which also would’ve taken them across the narrow bridge over I-285 where, incidentally, two other pedestrians have been killed in the last 10 years.

Image from our Dangerous by Design interactive map

Now, this point of this post isn’t to say that this driver was in the wrong — the preliminary reports indicate that the child pulled away from his stepfather and stepped out into the southbound lanes and the driver probably couldn’t have stopped. Though they’d done it dozens of times, perhaps the father made a poor judgement to try and cross the street there. But just like Raquel Nelson, this story does illustrate the insanity of how we fund and plan our transportation network in urbanized (and urbanizing) places like this.

Look closely at this graphic of the area.

This short section of Flat Shoals south of I-285 has no fewer than three relatively high-density apartment complexes, as well as a handful of restaurants, stores and other retail offerings fronting the roadway, ostensibly hoping to serve the nearby residents, at least in part. The street does have sidewalks on both sides, yet the two nearest crosswalks on Flat Shoals in either direction are at least .8 miles apart. Federal dollars (or at least federal design guidelines) were likely used when this road was widened to 5 lanes. The city or county approved high-density apartment complexes and retail on both sides of the road in a corridor without making any attempts to ensure those residents would be able to walk in the area safely, save for the tacked-on sidewalks on each side.

The planning and design of this corridor and the land use around it hasn’t kept up with the needs of the people living in it.

Should we legitimately expect residents of the apartment complexes on one side of Flat Shoals to walk nearly half a mile to reach the Jamaican restaurant across the street? According to several other media reports on the incident, the family wasn’t alone in trying to cross there that evening, and some residents have been asking for improvements to make a safe crossing there for a long time.

The family told CBS Atlanta that the street in front of their apartment complex has always been dangerous. There is heavy traffic and no stoplight or crosswalk. ”It’s very dangerous, very dangerous,” said Isaac.  “You would think they would have a crosswalk if you have a plaza right across the street and apartments right here.

There isn’t a crosswalk, even though dozens of people cross the street in this very spot each day. How many other streets like this are there in Atlanta? In Georgia? In the United States?

Will the stepfather will be charged in the child’s death, as Raquel Nelson was? Probably not, since the incident didn’t happen in Cobb County, where the prosecutor is prone to bringing such charges. Perhaps Dekalb County officials remember her recent trial and subsequent national media attention shining an angry spotlight on their neighboring metro county.

Beyond that, one would hope that local officials have learned the more important lesson about providing safer streets for people to get around on — no matter whether they’re on foot, bike or in a car. Local and state officials have great power in making some of those decisions.

While needed, that’s a piecemeal approach to a problem that is truly federal in scope. Two-thirds of all pedestrian fatalities in the last 10 years occurred on roads just like this one — state highways and busy arterials built with federal funds and federal design guidelines. Shouldn’t the federal transportation program be used to help fix these dangerous mistakes that it created in the first place? What we really need is a transportation bill that makes the safety of everyone on our roads a priority, so stories like this one — and Raquel Nelson’s among thousands of others — can become a distant memory.

No family in an urbanized area should have to choose between crossing a dangerous street or walking half a mile out of their way just to cross the street to their house. We can do better.

Updated (1/12/12): PEDS, a partner of ours that recently helped us deliver a petition in Atlanta on behalf of Raquel Nelson, submitted an op-ed to the AJC that ran last week.

Pedestrian facilities are often seen as a local issue. The proposed project list adopted by the regional roundtable, for example, dedicates just one-third of 1 percent of the regional funds to pedestrian and bicycle projects.

Yet the Atlanta Regional Commission’s 2010 on-board transit survey confirmed that nearly three-fourths of transit trips begin with walking trips. Research by the ARC also suggests that people who walk to transit are among the region’s most vulnerable road users. From 2004 to 2008, one-fourth of all pedestrian crashes occurred within 100 feet of transit stops.

David Goldberg, T4 America communications director, penned a thoughtful op-ed on the Raquel Nelson story that ran in the Washington Post today.

The prosecution of this grieving mother was shocking. In truth, though, no one should be surprised that tragedies like this are happening every day across America: Transportation officials and local planners routinely create the very conditions that underlie these “accidents” and allow them to persist…

…This is a major issue in inner-ring suburbs across the country, places originally built as auto-only suburbia that now are home to many lower-income families who don’t have access to cars. Neither the public transportation system nor the highway designs work for those who live, work and walk in these areas. People are being punished and killed simply for being pedestrians. Our research shows that thousands of lives could be saved — and millions more lives improved — by retrofitting these dangerous roads, as many communities are trying to do.

In related news, Nelson has officially announced her intention to seek a new trial, which will begin October 25. She talked about her decision with Ann Curry on the Today Show in a second interview. While Nelson is concerned with clearing her own name, she knows that others face the same situation every day.

“It’s for myself, my children, single mothers, anybody who has to take public transportation and had to be in a scary situation like that,” she told Today.

We’re still gathering signatures to join with the others petitioning Gov. Nathan Deal and the Cobb County authorities to pardon her and clear her of the previous charges without having to go through another trial. Add your name and spread the word.

Watch the full video below:

Despite the enormous pressure she must be feeling, she was poised and articulate. Listening to her, it was hard to imagine the horror that this past year has been for her, to lose a child and then be faced with such a heartless prosecution.

“You’re always going to relive the moment. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never been through something like this. But you can’t let it dictate what you do. When I’m at work I have to push it away. … My other two daughters are the only way I could have survived this situation, giving me a reason to push forward.”

We were a little disappointed that the Today piece did not give viewers a better picture of the conditions that Nelson and her children faced that day in April 2010. Ken Edelstein of Green Building Chronicle in Atlanta helps to fill that gap with this video he sent us a little while ago:

The response to our post on the Atlanta mother who was charged with vehicular homicide when her child was struck by a hit-and-run driver while crossing a street has been, to put it mildly, staggering. At last count, David Goldberg’s post has more than 150 comments, and many of the referring posts on the same topic have been similarly busy, some reaching into the hundreds of comments. More than 35,000 people read our post in two days and spread the story like wildfire on twitter. (Share the story with the #RaquelNelson hashtag.)

Though the response has been enormous — positive and negative — perhaps it really shouldn’t be all that surprising.

Considering that a huge percentage of Americans live in places not all that different from Austell Road in western Cobb County — once sleepy places near a larger city that were suburbanized around the automobile through the last few decades — many people could immediately relate to the story in some way.

Some may have been in Raquel Nelson’s shoes before, using sporadic public transportation or having to walk on streets where pedestrians are treated as an afterthought at best or a nuisance at worst. Some may be drivers who’ve seen pedestrians crossing without crosswalks from a similar bus stop and looked on in horror, having never considered what life is like in America’s suburbs without a car.

The comments on our story ran the spectrum. From sharing our outrage at the miscarriage of justice, to belief that the mother was wrong yet shouldn’t be charged, to people who would’ve obviously made the right decision in hindsight (with little understanding of what Nelson’s life was like), to shockingly callous comments suggesting she got what she deserved.  (Oh, and a fair helping of just plain offensive, racist, nasty things. We had to edit, delete or otherwise moderate more comments on this one post than in 3 years of comments on the T4 America blog.)

Most people commenting on the story were entirely focused on the question of whether or not Raquel Nelson was at all to blame, ignoring the larger question we asked: Isn’t this a systemic failure of how we design, plan and build our towns and cities?

One commenter did pick up on this, also hinting at a deeper issue of justice and fairness:

“The comments do not address the underlying problem. It is not a matter of who is at fault in this specific incident as much as what is being done about the problem wherever it exists. This incident is proof that there is a problem with the way transportation is planned.  The funding to fix these problems is being voted down. The ones voting against the funds are likely fine with that as the people affected will mostly not vote for them. Win Win for them.”

The people who are most likely riding the bus, walking along highways without sidewalks or crossing midblock to avoid 20 extra minutes of walking to cross a street in West Cobb County are people with few other options. They’re the people who the elected leaders in a place like Cobb County, that’s largely white and prosperous, probably aren’t going to spend a whole lot of time catering to.

This issue really is one of fairness and equity.

Should we be treating the people who have to walk (to say nothing of the people who want or choose to) as second-class citizens, forcing them to walk 20 minutes out of their way just to safely cross a street near their house or the store? Should we be more concerned with all the people who use a road, rather than just the ones who can afford to use a car? Is moving traffic as fast as possible, no matter the consequences to people on foot or bike, the only important function of our streets and roads?

One thing is certain: there are stories far too similar to Raquel Nelson’s all over the country. People walking along or crossing streets that weren’t designed for them, in places where the planning hasn’t caught up to the function — demonstrated in this instance where bus stops are placed across from residences with no safe, convenient way to get between the two.

We simply must do better. As long as we continue building and designing streets like these below, we’ll continue to see people die unnecessarily.

Photo courtesy of Dr. Scott Crawford	Photo courtesy of April Bertelson, Portland Pedestrian Coordinator	Photo by Stephen Davis, T4 America

This is an advocacy blog, but typically we’re rather measured in our tone. Sometimes, however, we see something so utterly outrageous, so emblematic of the failure of our current transportation system, that “measured” just won’t cut it.

The prosecution and conviction this week of Raquel Nelson – a metro Atlanta mother who lost her four-year-old son to a hit-and-run driver – on the charge of vehicular homicide is one of those times.

You heard that right: According to the office of Cobb County prosecutor Barry Morgan, Nelson – who had no car at the time – committed vehicular homicide by attempting to cross a five-lane highway with her three kids to get to her apartment, after being let off the bus.

This photo shows the bus stops (located on both sides) of Austell Road, and the path taken by Raquel Nelson across Austell Road to get from the bus stop to her apartment complex across the street. No marked crossings are visible in the photo.

Nelson, 30 and African-American, was convicted on the charge this week by six jurors who were not her peers: All were middle-class whites, and none had ever taken a bus in metro Atlanta. In other words, none had ever been in Nelson’s shoes:

They had never taken two buses to go grocery shopping at Wal-Mart with three kids in tow. They had never missed a transfer on the way home that caused them to wait a full hour-and-a-half with tired and hungry kids for the next bus. They had never been let off at a bus stop on a five-lane speedway, with their apartment in sight across the road, and been asked to drag those three little ones an additional half-mile-plus down the road to the nearest traffic signal and back in order to get home at last.

And they had never lost control of an over-eager four-year-old as they waited on a three-foot median for a car to pass. Nor had they watched helplessly as a driver who had had “three or four” beers and two painkillers barreled toward their child.

That’s right: Because Nelson did not lug her exhausted little ones three-tenths of a mile from the bus stop to a traffic signal in order to cross five lanes of traffic, she is guilty of vehicular homicide. Because she did as her fellow bus riders, who crossed at the same time and place, and because she did what pedestrians will do every time – take the shortest reasonable path – she is guilty of vehicular homicide.

What about the highway designers, traffic engineers, transit planners and land use regulators who allowed a bus stop to be placed so far from a signal and made no other provision for a safe crossing; who allowed – even encouraged, with wide, straight lanes – prevailing speeds of 50-plus on a road flanked by houses and apartments; who carved a fifth lane out of a wider median that could have provided more of a safe refuge for pedestrians; who designed the entire landscape to be hostile to people trying to get to work and groceries despite having no access to a car?

They are as innocent as the day is long, according to the solicitor general’s office.

Look, accidents happen because people make misjudgments. Raquel Nelson probably made a mistake in following her fellow bus riders and trying to get home sooner. The driver made a series of errors, and was convicted of hit and run. But these are “accidents” waiting to happen, thanks to poor planning and dangerous designs.

If you look at our pedestrian fatalities map for metro Atlanta (or any other metro, for that matter) and zoom in, you see that the dead bodies line up like soldiers along certain corridors – your first clue that the design is not matching up with the use of the street. Austell Road/SR 5 is one of several such corridors in this area of Southeast Cobb County, which was built as auto-only suburbia but now is home to many lower-income families who often don’t have access to a car.

This is a major issue in inner suburbs all across the country. Neither the public transportation nor the highway designs work for the new populations that are living, working and walking in these areas. People are being punished and killed, needlessly, simply for being pedestrians. Incidentally, these are also the areas where millions of older Americans are expecting to “age in place”, so we’ll see more seniors trying to cross the road or catch the bus. Our research in Dangerous by Design showed that thousands of lives could be saved – and millions more lives improved – by retrofitting these dangerous roads, as many communities are trying to do.

Right now some in Congress are attempting to kill the small slice of funding dedicated to these kinds of projects. In truth, communities need many more resources to fix these safety issues and make our neighborhoods safer and more hospitable. As the vast majority of these roads were built under federal programs, this should be a national project.

“The Atlanta region has a plan to spend billions of federal and state dollars on projects that shave one or two minutes off a 30-minute driving commute,” said Sally Flocks, the executive director of a pedestrian safety group in Atlanta, who closely followed the trial. “But we think nothing of expecting transit riders and pedestrians to spend another 20 minutes walking out of their way.”

As a friend said, the prosecutors “stuck a knife in a grieving mother and twisted it.” Now she’s awaiting sentencing of up to 36 months in jail and working desperately to make provisions for her kids, should she be sent away. Prosecuting people like Raquel Nelson, who truly are the victims of poor planning and bad design, is like closing the door of the proverbial barn and then burning it down. One well-marked crosswalk would save more lives, and in all likelihood it would cost less than this malicious prosecution cost the taxpayers of Georgia.

Tip of the hat to Streetsblog Capitol Hill for getting the word out about this story and bringing it to our attention.

Update: This AJC story from 2010 sheds a little more light on exactly what happened. And it appears that Nelson wasn’t initially charged, according to the story:

Nelson said she’s read the blogs and wishes people knew what happened that night.

On April 10, she and her three children — Tyler, 9, A.J., 4, and Lauryn, 3 — went shopping because the next day was Nelson’s birthday. They had pizza, went to Wal-Mart and missed a bus, putting them an hour late getting home. Nelson, a student at Kennesaw State University, said she never expected to be out after dark, especially with the children.

When the Cobb County Transit bus finally stopped directly across from Somerpoint Apartments, night had fallen. She and the children crossed two lanes and waited with other passengers on the raised median for a break in traffic. The nearest crosswalks were three-tenths of a mile in either direction, and Nelson wanted to get her children inside as soon as possible. A.J. carried a plastic bag holding a goldfish they’d purchased.

“One girl ran across the street,” Nelson said. “For some odd reason, I guess he saw the girl and decided to run out behind her. I said, ‘Stop, A.J.,’ and he was in the middle of the street so I said keep going. That’s when we all got hit.”

There’s a great post on the story from Sarah Goodyear at Grist worth reading, and there’s a petition circulating if you’d like to get involved further.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/669/545/347/

The overall package is about “disappearmarks” — earmarks totaling millions in the last federal transportation bill that have never been allocated or spent, according to the Sunlight Foundation. But this story from Atlanta focuses much more specifically on how unsafe, incomplete streets that don’t adequately meet the needs of all users in Atlanta results in pedestrians that have little choice but to take their lives into their own hands each and every day, just to get to work, school, or the closest bus stop.

They used the numbers from Dangerous by Design, our report on pedestrian safety nationally, to help give some broader national context to the situation in Atlanta.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Clayton County, one of metro Atlanta’s five core counties — Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport is partially in Clayton — will terminate all transit service in 14 days. The transit service, which provides over 2 million rides each year on buses “full to bursting” with riders, according to MARTA CEO Beverly Scott, will shut down service entirely, leaving the 50% or more of C-Tran riders with no regular access to a car stranded.

Public transportation (or anything that provides people with mobility) is really about access. It gives people access to opportunity, access to daily needs, access to a job, access to life — and maybe even the means to improve the quality of that life.

One story highlighted in October in this piece from the Atlanta Journal Constitution shows the vital connection that C-Tran makes for one Clayton County resident:

Twenty-year-old Bridget Milam takes Clayton County’s bus system, C-Tran, wherever she goes. She takes it to Brown Mackie College in Atlanta, where she’s getting an associate’s degree in early childhood education. She rides it to her job at a day care center. She has never had a car and can’t afford one now. C-Tran is her lifesaver. Not for long.

…[she] may have to put school and her day care job on hold. “It means I have to find a job closer to home, in walking distance,” she said. “It would probably be fast food.” …Milam expressed frustration that she will “have to settle rather than doing something that could further my career.”

Access to the opportunity that public transit provides can mean the difference between becoming a teacher one day — or a future of asking customers if “they’d like fries with that?”

Despite a proposal to raise fares dramatically, the deficit was still at $1.3 million, and the 5 county commissioners voted 4-1 last year to shut the service down completely, asserting in a statement that “paving roads is a primary duty of the county. Public transit isn’t.”

The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority disagreed strongly with that view. “In Georgia, local roads are a local responsibility, and local transit is a local responsibility,” GRTA Deputy Director Jim Ritchey told the AJC.

Unfortunately for Bridget Milam and thousands of others in Clayton County who depend on C-Tran each day to get to work, class, the doctor or pretty much anything else, Clayton County leaders don’t see it that way — leaving them stranded at the station come April 1.

If you’ve been affected by cuts in transit service or fare increases — especially if you’re in Clayton County, Georgia — tell us your story and we’ll help share it with Congress.

UPDATED: Like this touching story that Carmen, a now former C-Tran rider, shared with us on that page:

Hello. My name is Carmen and I’ve been a passenger on CTRAN’s paratransit service for as long as they have been in service. I work for Delta Air Lines and use the service to get back and forth to work. At this time, I have to move closer to my job in the Fulton County area. This is a hardship because now I have to cancel my lease agreement with my current apartment complex in order to move. They have been very helpful but I really did not want to move because of the negligence of Clayton County managing the taxpayers’ funds. Not everyone can afford to move at the last minute. I truly hope that Clayton County uses the funds they do have in reserve, as mentioned by Eldrin Bell, to keep CTRAN running. If the Commisioners or their family members were in our position maybe they would look at the situation differently. But of course those that are not affected are not concerned at all and that is a shame they are not here for the people.

Update 2: Read this superb and touching story from the LA Times on the last day of service.

Transit riders in Metro Atlanta will soon require a new system map to find their way because the current map is about to be ancient history, a document fit for use only by archivists and history buffs. Of course, this would only apply to those who still have a bus or train to wait for after MARTA goes through with massive cuts this year. This story from the Atlanta Journal Constitution was included in a few headline posts from the usual suspects earlier this week, including one of ours, but the desperate situation in Atlanta is worth a closer look.

Wrap your head around this number: MARTA is facing a budget deficit of $120 million, on an operating budget of $399.1 million, making their deficit nearly a full third of the operating budget.

As a result, the cuts the agency is forced to consider are downright shocking. More than half of Atlanta’s 131 bus routes could be cut entirely, and rail service will be cut severely. Wait times for a train could be as much as 30 minutes on weekends before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m., and even rush-hour train intervals could be as much as 12 minutes. The AJC pegs the cuts as approximately 25-30 percent of all service.

While the loss of routes or the inconvenience of long waits and increased transfers will result in some riders going back to their cars or finding other options, what about the thousands who depend on MARTA as their transportation lifeline to reach work, get to the doctor or pick up their kids at school? The “lucky” ones might have an alternative, a longer wait or less convenience. But too many riders will be left completely stranded, unable to get to important destinations as routes disappear entirely in the South’s biggest metro and the economic core of the state.

The popular refrain among some Atlantans is that MARTA is a bloated bureaucracy that wastes money. The truth is far different. MARTA enjoys the lowest cost per-mile of passenger rail service for any heavy rail system in the United States, and survives on a penny sales tax from two counties, with no dedicated funding stream from the State of Georgia. They are the largest transit agency with no such dedicated funding source in the country.

This year’s situation was narrowly avoided last year when the Atlanta Regional Commission, the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the region, found a way to transfer $25 million in last year’s stimulus funds to MARTA. In return the agency spent $25 million of capital funds on infrastructure improvements around their stations like better sidewalks, crosswalks, and other vital bike and pedestrian improvements to improve access.

The creative deal with the ARC was necessary because by a curious — and old — piece of state law, MARTA has to evenly split their tax revenues between operations and capital funds (they have a capital budget of $388 million this year), meaning they aren’t even able to set their own operating budget.

The Georgia State Senate passed a bill that would have removed that rule, allowing MARTA the flexibility to set their own operations and capital budgets. This would have enabled the agencyto basically plug budget holes with a share of (formerly) capital funds — never an ideal situation, but one that would have staved off dramatic fare increases and wholesale cancellation of service. Unfortunately for Atlantans, that bill died in the Georgia State House on the last day of the legislative session, leaving many upset and frustrated at the State’s failure to act.

Even with the funds from the ARC, MARTA had to raise their base fare $0.25, and weren’t able to restore all of the service that had been proposed for cuts, though they did avoid the drastic step of closing down service entirely one day a week.

MARTA Board Chairman Michael Walls pointed out that this was no permanent solution to the crisis, noting “this is a one-time infusion of funds” in a MARTA press release. “We are facing increasing deficits in the coming fiscal years. It is imperative that we identify a permanent, dedicated source of funding for transit as soon as possible in order to avoid more drastic cuts in the future,” he said.

That future has become the present, so what will the State do this time? Will they remove the barrier that prevents MARTA from making their own budget? At a broader level, what help will the federal government provide for the hundreds of other transit agencies facing this same crisis? Will they turn their back on the millions who depend on public transportation each day?

Want to do something? Here are three things you can do:

1. Tell Senator Harry Reid to include funding for keeping transit systems running in the next round of jobs-creation legislation he’s planning to bring to Congress.
2. Tell us your story! How are these cuts going to affect you in your daily life? Will you be going back to your car? Will you be stuck with no way to get to work? We want to know.
3. If you’re in Atlanta, join up with the Citizens for Progressive Transit or the Area Coalition for Transit Now Facebook page calling for Gov. Perdue to call a special legislative session. These groups are also joining with others in Atlanta to organize a “Ride MARTA” day in late March to drum up support statewide.

At a moment when mass transit is taking center stage as a solution to transportation problems nationwide, a federal report has concluded that the Georgia Department of Transportation’s transit program is riddled with financial management problems, according to a report obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The problems were so severe that the federal government has frozen DOT’s transit grants, which average about $28 million a year, including some from the federal stimulus program. The report cast doubt on whether DOT could manage grants for the commuter rail line proposed to go south through Lovejoy.

But the most alarming nugget in the story was completely buried in the closing paragraphs of the story.

Meyer said he didn’t know whether the problems were only due to sparse resources — DOT’s Intermodal Division has 23 employees handling rail, transit, aviation and waterways, in an agency of 5,400 — or if there was a culture of sloppiness. [emphasis ours]

Only 23 people out of 5,400 employees at Georgia’s DOT? It’s hard to imagine that the state could plan and implement a large-scale model railroad with only 23 people — much less their first true commuter rail line in decades.

Transportation advocates in Georgia have been working for decades to bring commuter rail to the capital city of Atlanta. It would seem like a no-brainer in a congested metro region with multiple existing railroad lines into the city — a city with deep roots as a railroad town — but it has taken decades to get a planned commuter rail line into Atlanta anywhere close to reality. It’s been a long slog, even as other cities have gone back to their past as railroad towns and opened new, successful commuter rail lines

If Georgia is ever going to follow the lead of numerous other states that are investing in commuter rail or other options for getting around their congested region, they’re probably going to need a few more than 23 people to get it done.