Teaching the ARC "Reverse Urbanization"

A great article in tomorrow's AJC by Maria Saporta describes the Atlanta Regional Council's recent visit to Vancouver. They were blown away by the city's success in what I call "reverse urbanization". They want density and traffic jams. They refuse to expand any road in downtown by even a single lane, and they are the only city in the northeast to not have a major highway running through the center of town.

I've always thought the downtown connector was Hartsfield's greatest blunder. If anything, he could have at least broken them up and put the downtown strip in between them. The way they see it, gridlock is good. Bad traffic convinces people to get out of their cars and onto transit. They've also made all their roads extremely pedestrian-friendly, with "wide sidewalks bordered by trees, and crosswalks are well defined."

Vancouver has designed their city as a "cradle-to-the-grave" city rather than a "where-ya-from? (...before moving here)" city like Atlanta has always been. Here in Atlanta the reality of building more roads to solve our problems has resulted in the development phenomena "if you build it: they will fill it" meaning that in a city as spread out as we are, any new lanes will encourage more driving rather than ease traffic congestion. This idea of taking away roads from drivers would seem the logical opposite to our 'city of dreams' , and it sounds crazy without any explanations to back it up, but I think this is genius.

Imagine how different downtown would be right now if we never had highways going through the center of Atlanta. It would be one big sanctuary of a city! Here's downside to Vancouver though. "The lack of affordable housing, the number of homeless people, the prevalence of drug addicts and the growing number of immigrants have strained the urban area." We do not have most of these problems right now. However, if we follow the 4 rules that Vancouver follows, maybe reverse urbanization can succeed where the highways have failed.

Vancouver's 4 rules for a Successful City:

1) Protect Green Space
2) Develop in Compact Areas
3) Increase Transportation Choices
4) Build Complete Communities

Source: AJC - Maria Saporta

Cubix expanding Breeze Cards to Park 'n Rides

Speaking of Breeze Cards.... Cubic Transportation Systems, the company MARTA hired to develop their new fare system, is showcasing their plans for the next phase of the Breeze Card network. Today at the International Parking Institute's annual conference in Tampa, Cubic presented current plans to incorporate the park and ride lots throughout the system beginning June 1st. As far as specifics go:

There are no parking fees for patrons who enter the lot, ride on the MARTA system, and exit the lot on the same day. For those who park and ride for more than one day or for those who park in the lot but do not ride the system, the fees can be paid via stored value debits at the exit controller or at either ticket vending machines or cashier terminals upon exit.

Not only do they work with current Breeze cards, but they will incorporate VoIP technology for instant customer service from all parking gates. MARTA is the first network in the country to utilize an "all-contactless public transport smart card fare system", but not to be outdone by any other system in the near future, Cubic has awarded $5.78 Million in contracts to integrate all 4 of the major regional bus systems into the Breeze Card system. This includes Gwinnett County Transit, Cobb Community Transit, Clayton County C-Tran and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority. Getting Gwinnett, Cobb, Clayton, and GRTA in on the system is a huge step in consolidating Atlanta's transit systems and it's good to see these ideas actually becoming reality.

Source: MarketWIRE

Breeze Card System Crashes

MARTA's Breeze Card fare system crashed this morning and is still down this afternoon. The crash is attributed to a software upgrade and anyone with a breeze card, plastic or paper, is being allowed on by customer service representatives in all the stations. "Things are running smoothly, despite the technology snafu," reports Mike Morris of the AJC. This incident, while temporary, highlights a major problem facing transit systems "upgrading" to all-electronic fare systems.

These systems, while being robust in the sense that fees can be changed across the system fairly quickly to reflect a move toward distance based fares, these same systems are still sensitive enough that a glitch in the central server will crash the entire system. MARTA must be very careful as they go through their debugging process to make sure they have the resources available to make the all-electronic fare system work.

MARTA has a great way they can get out of this mess though. They can turn these potential bad-media days into free days to help their image. Anyone who can scrounge up a fare card can basically get in for free today, so why not just call it a free day? Other transit systems have free-ride days, and it does wonders to bolster their image. With MARTA's image hurting right now, they could use these problematic days for good public relations by making these free-ride days. Otherwise, these outages will make the $190 Million MARTA spent on the Breeze system look more like a liability than an asset.

Source: Mike Morris - AJC