City Haul

MARTA public hearings on FY14 budgets tonight at 7 p.m.

MARTA is hosting a second set of public hearings tonight, May 16, on the topic of the agency’s proposed capital and operating budgets for fiscal year 2014.

The meetings will be held at MARTA’s headquarters on Piedmont Road and at the Adamsville Recreation Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

• The FY14 budget proposes no fare increase for FY2014 but increases of 15 cents in 2015 and 10 cents in 2016 and 2018. (MARTA’s fiscal years begin on July 1, so, for example, FY14 begins July 1, 2013.)
• The budget also aims to maintain current service levels through 2016 and to begin unspecified “service restoration” in 2017
• There are also plans to implement a “secret shopper” program to improve customer service as well as an anti-“knucklehead behavior” campaign in 2014
• Also in in 2014, employees who have gone without raises for eight years would be eligible for a one-time “incentive payment.” Employees would begin receiving merit pay increases in July 2015
• The new budget will also reflect the beginning of the agency’s efforts to rein in the costs of employee healthcare benefits

The meetings begin at 7 p.m., but MARTA staff will be on hand for a “community exchange” between 6 and 7 p.m. with copies of the budgets and display boards of the PowerPoint presentation.

During that short, sudden storm this afternoon, the Red Line train I was on suddenly stopped on the tracks above I-85 just north of Arts Center. After a few seconds the train operator said over the intercom “We’ll be moving momentarily. Stand by.” As if we could do something else.

Brookings: Recession hasn’t slowed down Atlanta’s “job sprawl”

The recent recession slowed down metro Atlanta’s far-flung residential development, but hasn’t had the same effect on the spread of jobs away from the central city, according to a report by the Brookings Institution.

From 2000 to 2010:

• The Atlanta metro areas lost 119,301 of its private-sector jobs. The vast majority of the jobs lost  - 105,071 or 88 percent - were in areas three to 10 miles from the CBD.
• There was an increase of 4.2 percent in the number of private-sector jobs located 10 to 35 miles from the CBD
• The number of private-sector jobs 3 to 10 miles from the CBD fell 3.8 percent.
• The number of private-sector jobs within 3 miles of the CBD fell 0.4 percent

By 2010:

• Only about 10 percent of metro Atlanta’s 1,864,067 jobs were located within 3 miles of the CBD. The average among the 100 metros surveyed was about 23 percent.
• About 25 percent of Atlanta area jobs were located three to 10 miles from the CBD.
• More than 64 percent were located 10 to 35 miles from the CBD. That figure is nearly 50 percent larger than the national average of about 43 percent.

One of the reasons the location of jobs matters, the Brookings researchers said, is that it’s one of the largest determinants of transportation development. If most of the daily flow of commuters is suburb-to-suburb or city-to-suburb, planners and policy makers will prioritize transportation projects that address those patterns.

With only so much money (and an ever-shrinking pot of it) to go around, cities will have to get creative with public-private partnerships and federal grants to make sure they’re not left behind. They’ll also have to do more with less, investing in relatively low-cost solutions like enhancing bicycle infrastructure so that city residents have more transportation options for short trips around town.

Saturday is April 20, and you know what that means. No, not just the Dogwood Festival. It’s the first day the latest round of bus service cuts.

Route 110, which normally manages to dodge the axe, will see some big changes: From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. trips will alternate between running all the way from Lenox to Five Points and running only between Lenox and Arts Center. From 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., the route will no longer run between Arts Center and Five Points at all. Saturday and Sunday service between Arts Center and Five Points will change from every 20 minutes to every 40 minutes.

Cutting the Arts-Center-to-Five-Points leg of the route for so many hours isn’t just a self-contained inconvenience. It also eliminates the only workaround for the 20-minute headways on the Red and Gold lines after 7 p.m.

Similar (and equally confusing) modifications are being made to Route 6. The route currently runs from Lindbergh to Inman Park, but from 6 to 9 a.m. and from 3 to 7 p.m., every other trip will now turn around at the Emory Village traffic circle on weekdays. The route will run as normal at midday and at night on weekdays and all of Saturday and Sunday.

The good news is that the Route 6 rush hour frequency will increase from every 18 minutes to every 15. The bad news is that it doesn’t do you any good if you have to wait half an hour for a bus that’s going all the way to Inman Park.

Details, maps and new schedules for all 21 routes being altered “to improve overall service and on-time performance” are here. Enjoy!