Build rail for tomorrow’s city, not today’s

There are many logical reasons to cast a critical eye on the streetcar extension to the Eastside Beltline, and we should never spend this much money without arguing.

But folks, please stop acting like we can only build rail for the current conditions in a place — this wrong assumption is the foundation for too many arguments against Beltline rail. We should build rail for the future version of Atlanta.

The Beltline loop, which needs to have rail on it.

Obviously, we’ve screwed up in the past and built rail for “current conditions” and not for walkable growth, and that’s a set of mistakes we should remember…

We built the MARTA heavy-rail system to serve as commuter lines to a Downtown Central Business District as it existed in the 1970s, but the system ended up being dwarfed by both job sprawl and residential sprawl, while too many of our rail stations were ensconced in parking lots and low-density development.

And we built a streetcar for tourists that runs mostly empty throughout the week because we included no walkable-density plan, leaving it surrounded by too many parking lots and empty properties — and saddling it with interstate access points that challenge walkability.

An abandoned building and an empty lot on the Atlanta streetcar route; there are way too many disused properties near the tracks.

So let’s learn from our mistakes and start matching investment in high-capacity transit with transit-supportive density for the future. Is the Beltline a great place for doing that? I think so. It’s a growth corridor, and the route is level for rail with only a few tricky intersections.

I think it’s absolutely a good thing for people to disagree and have healthy debate about this, but the debate needs to be informed by the fact that building rail for current conditions is a mistake, as evidenced by our past, and that remedying that mistake means thinking about high-capacity transit in a new way.

Opposing Beltline rail in terms of what the conditions are on the corridor today is a bad faith argument. It’s unfair to the future of the city to burden it with more of that same problematic planning decisions of the past.