Are Self-Driving Pods And Bus Rapid Transit The Best Ways To Expand Transit Across Metro Atlanta?
In August, the AJC reported that self-driving pods were coming to Atlanta for a pilot program.
“The self-driving pods will connect the airport SkyTrain to the Georgia International Convention Center in College Park — not the Atlanta Convention Center 10 miles away in downtown Atlanta. A national media outlet confused the two event spaces in a report this month, prompting Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman to clarify at a council meeting last week that the vehicles aren’t coming downtown.
Such a route would duplicate MARTA’s red and gold lines, which already take riders from downtown to the airport. Instead, this pilot program is designed to fill in gaps in the transportation network that exist around the airport and in the south metro area as a whole.”
Check out this video of how the pods work.
Last March, The Center Square had this story about MARTA ditching rail along the Clifton Corridor in favor of bus-rapid transit(BRT).
“BRT makes sense for this corridor, providing fast, efficient transit in dedicated bus lanes,” MARTA Assistant General Manager of Planning Shelley Peart said in an announcement.
“More and more transit expansion projects across the country are considering BRT due to its ability to provide rail-like service more quickly, with less impact, and at a lower capital cost,” Peart added. “Those features improve the project’s overall rating and therefore its competitiveness for federal funding, which we’ve known since this project’s inception would be critical to its completion.”
Bus rapid transit(BRT), according to the Institute for Transit and Development Policy, is
“…a high-capacity bus-based transit system that delivers fast, reliable, high quality, safe, and cost-effective services at relatively low cost, metro-level capacities. It achieves that through dedicated bus lanes that are median aligned, off-board fare collection, level boarding, bus priority at intersections, and fast and frequent operations.“
The popularity of BRT vs rail will be tested in Gwinnett this fall as a third transit referendum since 2019 is on the ballot. However, the 2024 referendum does not feature MARTA rail. Instead, the TSPLOST, if passed, would promote 75 projects but no rail. The projects are almost all bus-related.
Rail is extremely expensive and takes a long time to build. I’m happy to see MARTA and other transit agencies considering other modes of transit.
One last thing, the new Hyundai electric vehicle manufacturing plant in Bryan County landed its first big customer, autonomous taxi service company Waymo, which is new to the Atlanta market.
