Atlanta Magazine asks: Can MARTA be cool?
Of course not. That’s like asking if pigs could fly, or if Battletoads were easy, the answers are very easy, without hesitation nos.
Regardless, the question is brought up, because that is apparently one of the hopes and dreams of the man in charge of MARTA, general manager Keith Parker.
Now I’ll admit that I was one of the first people to doubt that Parker would actually accomplish anything with MARTA, considering the joke of an organization and service that it is, but in all fairness, he has made a little bit of headway with what seemed like pushing Sisyphus’s boulder up the mountain. Supposedly, according to Atlanta Magazine, revenue has gone up, crime has gone down, and service has expanded; albeit to ghetto-ass Clayton County, but baby steps.
So despite the fact that Parker has done a modicum of good with MARTA in his still young-ish tenure as the head cheese of the organization, I do feel that his latest ambition is worthy of some criticism.
Namely, his hopes of “making MARTA cool to ride.”
This is what I would like to call prioritization of something fairly inconsequential. Especially after a morning in which it took me 95 minutes to get to work, because Atlanta obviously suffers from the worst traffic on the face of the planet because Atlanta’s road system was designed by a blind monkey with Down syndrome and literally has less than four viable veins of roads to go between north and south. These problems are compounded by the lack of reliable transit because MARTA is a joke and doesn’t actually go anywhere actually useful, because there are too few stations, and the guy in charge is more concerned with making it cool to ride MARTA instead of the obvious solution of simply expanding service.
Seriously, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that if service were expanded, county lines crossed racial fears be damned, and MARTA actually became somewhat serviceable, then not only would MARTA become useful, through usefulness, it might actually stand a chance at becoming remotely “cool.”
You know what would be cool? Being able to hop on a train and get dropped off within eyesight of Turner Field. It would also be cool to have a train be able to get people to the rapidly developing West End of the city. It would be cool if Cobb County weren’t so full of racists afraid of black people, and allowed MARTA entry into their hallowed county grounds to service, especially when things like ScumTrust Park open up.
Without much question, MARTA automatically becomes cool when it becomes large enough to be serviceable and help alleviate the reliance on cars throughout the entire Metropolitan area. If they had a network of train stations that serviced areas other than ten ghettos, Sandy Springs and Decatur, then maybe people would use it out of necessity and convenience. And when people begin to feel like MARTA is such a vast improvement over sitting in their car 90 minutes a morning, then they’ll find out that it’s pretty cool regardless of what artificial propaganda is trying to tell them.
