 23 years ago, Atlanta native and architecture and urban planning student Ryan Gravel had an experience that opened his mind to what urban living could be. My senior year I spent abroad in Paris and lived without a car for a year. Traveled by train everywhere and within a month of arriving I had lost 15 pounds. I was in the best shape of my life because I was walking everywhere. Paris fundamentally changed the way that I understood the construction of the world around me. When I got obsessed with the role of infrastructure it's the foundation for our economy. It's the foundation for our social life and for our culture. For his master's thesis, Gravel sketched out a plan to make Atlanta more like Paris. He proposed redeveloping the land along the city's historic rail lines to create a 22-mile loop called the Atlanta Belt Line. He proposed turning the city's abandoned industrial areas and single-family neighborhoods into business districts and walking trails. And he proposed connecting downtown to the rest of the city all with a new train running along the entire Atlanta Belt Line. Never imagined we would actually do it, but I just wanted to graduate. But they did for the most part. Kathy Woolard, who was president of the Atlanta City Council, read Gravel's thesis and decided to use it as a blueprint to remake much of the city. Today, the Atlanta Belt Line is a walking and biking trail, parts of which are bordered by retail and condos. But one piece of Gravel's grand vision didn't get built. The train. Today, Gravel runs a co-working and event space along the Belt Line, which also serves as a gathering place for urbanists interested in making Atlanta less dependent on cars. He says that the train line is essential for improving city life. Those early days when we built the movement behind the project, it was around transit. The three COVID relief bills set aside $69 billion in federal funding for local transit agencies to operate and add to their transportation systems, meaning that Atlanta might finally get its train. With many American taxpayers who will never step foot on it, picking up much of the tab, many American cities have used federal money to build rail transit lines that suffer from dismal ridership that are expensive to maintain and that are a major drain on their budgets. Buses don't have the aesthetic appeal of trains, and don't evoke the dense, pre-automobile 19th century aesthetic that many urbanists romanticize. But they're far less costly and more convenient, and commuters generally prioritize modes of transit that get them from point A to point B with the least amount of hassle. The sharp decline in the number of workers showing up at an office every day post-pandemic makes building commuter rail and even worse use of public funds, says Baruch Weigenbaum, senior managing director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, the non-profit that publishes Reason TV and Reason Magazine. You do need a quality transit network, that's absolutely true, but it's the quality of the network and not the actual mode that matters. So there's been a major change that we've really not seen since pre-World War II days, and that change is overwhelmingly negative for transit, especially rail transit. We're seeing rail ridership at about 40%, maybe 50% of pre-pandemic levels, and bus ridership at 60 to 70%, and I think most people would tell you if transit ridership overall gets back to 80% of pre-pandemic levels, that would be a wild success. Most people do not think that's going to happen. 11 years ago, Feigenbaum wrote that the proposed Beltline train was possibly the worst transit project of all time. I think it's amazingly still true, and the reason I say that is because it's very expensive and it doesn't connect people from point A to point B. People don't go on transit from one's house to another one's house, and that's basically the only places that this rail line served, and so there was no clear ridership for this train, so they came up with these kind of east-west side lines that they said, well, you're right, there's not any destinations on this Beltline, but we're going to build these other lines, and then people are going to take them. And so the two problems with that are, one, more expensive in order to build these lines, and they had not identified funding for the first big circle, not to mention these other. Two, every time people have to make a connection or have to change lines, you lose ridership. A lot of politicians like rail because they say it's permanent and we can't change it, and okay that's true, but sometimes you want to change it. Gravel says that the emergence of restaurants and the thriving Ponce City market along the Beltline demonstrates that when you build new infrastructure, commerce gravitates to it. Ponce City market is a major destination. All these buildings being built across the way, some of the best architecture in the city, some of the coolest places to build some of the best companies to work for. You know why that's there? Because of Beltline. They're there for other reasons, but also Beltline. We're building a future city and look at it proven by the last 22 years it's getting built in front of our eyes. The best time to start transit is 10 years ago. The second best time is now. Matthew Rowe is the chair of Beltline Rail Now, a group of activists pushing for the completion of Gravel's vision. Because it's never getting less expensive, we're talking about one-time investments in the life of the city. And because they're more expensive means we need to go and figure out how to get more money. But rail isn't really a one-time investment. While Rowe's coalition wants the federal government to foot much of the bill for rail construction, local taxpayers are usually responsible for the majority of operating costs for all forms of transit. In 2020, transit fares for light rail and street cars covered about 14 percent of operating costs nationwide. Getting federal dollars to build rail is kind of like being gifted a swimming pool that you barely use and then being left to cover the maintenance costs. It might have sounded like a good idea. There is some local enthusiasm for the rail project. Atlanta voters approved a half-cent sales tax in 2016 that in part was supposed to fund the construction of the Beltline train. But the city's public transit agency known as MARTA has been using that funding instead to improve current operations, especially bus service. The agency's most recent analysis projected that it would cost an estimated $287 million to $448 million to build just the first three miles of track. That's up from $172 million, which was the estimated cost just three years ago. We're here in LA to look at bus rapid transit to see how we can transfer the best practices back to Atlanta. MARTA wants Atlanta to emulate the bus service in cities like Los Angeles that have dedicated bus lanes and synchronized stop lights to minimize traffic. Bus lanes cost far less to maintain than rail and their routes are modified if demand rises or falls. Several studies have found that people who can't afford cars rely on buses more than trains and MARTA recently abandoned the light rail project in favor of bus rapid transit, saying it would provide greater mobility for far less money. People rely on what they have and that's what we have. But there's nothing wrong with buses. Buses are the core of any city's mass transit system. What we're talking about here is a different kind of project that is higher in capacity and creates also a beautiful place for everyone in the city to access. Atlanta residents don't have to look far for an example of a streetcar like the one the coalition wants to build on the belt line. They already have one that stretches 2.7 miles through the downtown area and this is what it looks like on a weekday afternoon at about 3 p.m. Its average speed is about five miles per hour about the same speed as the horse-drawn railways that crisscross cities including Atlanta in the 19th century. The streetcar stops every quarter mile. Less than a thousand people ride the streetcar daily in a city 500 times that size. It costs more than 52 million dollars per mile to build in 2013. The ridership on that is pretty low so it's dismal. Yeah so what what makes you think that this is going to be different? I think the success of any transit project is taking people from where they are to where they want to go or need to go. It will be the first city and only city in the world to have this. This multi-purpose trail, this greenway and the transit within it and connecting to our existing heavy rail system. Even if ground broke tomorrow, MARTA estimates it could take five years to complete just the first mile and a half of track. There's a good chance that transit ridership will never fully come back post-pandemic because so many fewer people are commuting to jobs. Even in New York City, paid bus and subway ridership is at 55 percent of its pre-pandemic levels. Nationwide, transit ridership is at about 69 percent of what it was before COVID. Rail transit nationwide has taken a particularly bad hit with ridership decreasing by almost 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while non-rail transit decreased by about 30 percent. That trend applies in Atlanta where MARTA's bus ridership decreased by 39 percent post-COVID while rail decreased by about 62 percent. Before COVID, only five percent of Americans working days were spent at home. Researchers at Stanford analyzed poll data and concluded that now about half of Americans work at home at least once a week and about a quarter are fully remote. The pandemic also accelerated the decade-long trend of Americans moving from cities to lower-density suburbs, including the area surrounding the city of Atlanta, which saw a population loss in its urban core for the first time in a decade between 2020 and 2021. Rao says it's just a blip. This corridor, which is half a mile wide, will contain between 23 and 25 percent of the population of this whole city by mid-century. And that kind of density will only work sustainably if we provide the transit. Downtown Atlanta is booming. You have more freedom if you can tell a work. So people, they go where they want to go. I know it's surprising for a lot of people, but people do want to be downtown. They want to be on the Belt Line. They want to be here. There's so much to do. You can walk. You can ride the scooters. You can ride your bike. I walk the Belt Line practically four times a week. It's pretty integral in my life. I like the skateboard and just have fun and be drunk. While Pot City Market is a popular destination, much of the loop is still a nature trail with nothing but single-family homes around it. Gravel's Master Thesis opens with a history of Atlanta transportation, pointing out that street cars were profitable in many American cities before they were displaced by roads and cars. Is that something that you think we can ever get back to where there could be an actual profitable street car? That's a good question. From my personal viewpoint, I think there's a shared good that comes with public investment in transit, and so I'm fully supportive of public transit. But like the military, like highways, like all kinds of things, there are things that are good for all of us that we should be investing in collectively. This wasn't always the case. In the 19th century, urban transit systems were privately owned and operated. Companies would sometimes lose money at the fare box to encourage ridership, but make it back by speculating in land the increased in value because of the new train station. When local governments did build infrastructure, they would sometimes pay for it by levying special assessments on landowners who benefited. ROW's Coalition is proposing just such a special levy along the belt line, but it would cover just 10% of the projected $2.5 billion construction cost. Federal taxpayers would foot 40% of the bill. If the local stakeholders who stand to benefit from increased property values had to fit more of the bill, maybe they would think twice. While rail and city buses consistently lose money, buses that move people between cities are still privately owned and operated to profit. Amtrak, on the other hand, loses close to $1 billion annually and relies on federal subsidies. The bill I'm about to sign along is proof that despite the cynics, Democrats and Republicans can come together and deliver results. It makes the most significant investment in passenger rail into the past 50 years and in public transit ever. Fligenbaum says many politicians seem to care less about whether transportation projects are best serving their constituents and much more about the spectacle. If I'm a politician and I'm running for reelection, I get to go to a ribbon cutting ceremony and say I did this and I get to send out a postcard to all of the voters in my district and say I did this. I'm here working for you using your taxpayer money in dubious ways. Whereas if you're talking about operations, there's no ribbon cuttings with operations. It's not sexy. It's not something you can sell saying, oh, your bus is coming every five minutes as opposed to every eight minutes gets a real yawn in a political type environment. Atlanta's rail advocates say that Marta's decision to allocate the money from the tax levy on improving bus operations defies the will of voters. What we're about is making sure there's transparency and accountability and what our public officials and public institutions are doing with the money we're giving them to achieve an outcome. And if there isn't enough money to build the projects that Marta said it could build for the money we said we would pay, then I think it's up to agencies like Marta and our leaders at the city to tell us that. And to give us the opportunity to how to react to that. There was a package of things. The belt line was one of the things in the package and there were other things in that package including increased bus service and making sure that there was some better technology on the rail lines. We really don't know and I don't think they know why this passed. And I should also note that there has to be some ability for a transit agency to make some types of minor changes when a major world changing event like COVID-19 happens. You know, Marta didn't know what the COVID-19 was going to happen and they certainly could not have projected what changes were going to happen as a result of that. The two COVID relief bills, one signed by Trump, the other by Biden, sent $69 billion in additional funding to America's transit agencies at a time when ridership is falling. This country for basically as long as you and I have been alive has been under investing in rail. Pete Buttigieg is of course running for president and so he's going to say things that a politician would. If you spend more money on rail projects where they're not needed which is most places in the country you're going to be wasting your money. I think if Pete Buttigieg would go down a couple floors in the DOT building and talk to his transit planners and his folks who have been there for more than five minutes he would realize that this doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. It means you're going to have fewer bus lines that you need because spending money on rail is inherently going to take money from bus. It means you're going to have fewer transportation resources that you need, probably roadways but could be other things such as bike lanes and sidewalks. So you're going to be spending funds that you just don't need in an economy that is already overheated. Buttigieg has been a critic of how cars reshaped the national landscape. He said that the interstate highway system is systemically racist because it cut through historic black and immigrant neighborhoods. If a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white in the black neighborhood or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach or that would have been in New York was designed too low for it to pass by but that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices. You can question whether we should have built the highway system in the exact form that we did. I think those are all fair questions but this idea that somehow we spent a lot of money on highways and so now it's time to spend a lot of money on railways because that's just the right thing to do or that's just going to solve our problems magically doesn't pencil out. Buses replaced rail not because of conspiracy but because they're much more flexible and cost effective. Transit should cater to what customers want which is fast and convenient point-to-point mobility. Reimagining what transit is which is it's not just an agency it's services that are provided to your customers which are people who are paying for and so we're not just talking about fixed rail and bus we're talking about the ubers and lifts we're talking about on-demand transit we're talking about microtransit which is transit that isn't travel on a fixed route it might go based on where it's needed we're talking about vanpool we're talking about sort of a concept of mobility that might not in some cases involve people owning cars which is okay if they don't want to own a car and we have a system that works for them but I think that type of approach is going to be much better than forcing people to give up cars because we make it so difficult to drive Paris's walkability is what first inspired Ryan Gravel to reimagine the Atlanta cityscape in the late 90s Today, Feigenbaum suggests looking to France for a different lesson about mobility France which is not exactly known for being a free market capitalist capital the private sector operates all of their transit services and it's much better you'd also need some type of vouchers to make sure that the lower income folks who are the most dependent on transit can actually access it and can reach the jobs in other places that they need to go but I think this is the time we need to start asking those questions because in the wake of COVID we're not going to get back to the ridership we had in 2019 and the ridership we had in 2019 won that good anyway is there a sense in which the American city is just different from a city like Paris and you can't craft that onto a place like Atlanta do you worry that you are kind of fighting an inevitable growth pattern no no not at all I'm not worried about that at all you know Atlanta's not Paris Atlanta's not New York Atlanta's not Houston you know like Atlanta is Atlanta and Atlanta needs to grow in the way that it grows into the best version of itself Atlanta's history is railroads its future is also railroads Martha still hasn't committed to building rail on the belt line and says the issue still needs two more years of study before the board can vote on it the rail advocates we spoke to worry that by then it will be too late to qualify for federal funding for a project that's taken more than 20 years already Greville is right that rail lines were good for American cities because they were heavily used and often profitable so what are the chances that today a project expected from the outset to operate at loss during a period of declining rail transit use and that depends on over a hundred million dollars in federal subsidies is going to be something that Atlanta commuters actually use