Design Your Own MARTA Expansion (Atlanta, Columbus: rain, town, downtown)

[NY2ATL2NY]

1. East Side BLUE LINE: Extended to Route 138 In Rockdale County

2. East Side GREEN LINE : Extended NE To Stone Mtn-Downtown

3. West Side BLUE LINE : Extended to HWY 92 Downtown Douglasville

4. North Side RED LINE: Extended to Winward Parkway

5. Northeast Side GOLD LINE : Extended to Sugarloaf Parkway

6. Northwest Side : From Arts Center to Barrett Parkway

7. Southeast Side : From College Park to Palmetto

8. South Side : From College Park to Jonesboro.....

Clearly I got carried away with this but lets say we had an extra 2-5 Billion..This is what we could possibly accomplish!!!

[bryantm3]

Originally Posted by NY2ATL2NY

1. East Side BLUE LINE: Extended to Route 138 In Rockdale County

2. East Side GREEN LINE : Extended NE To Stone Mtn-Downtown

3. West Side BLUE LINE : Extended to HWY 92 Downtown Douglasville

4. North Side RED LINE: Extended to Winward Parkway

5. Northeast Side GOLD LINE : Extended to Sugarloaf Parkway

6. Northwest Side : From Arts Center to Barrett Parkway

7. Southeast Side : From College Park to Palmetto

8. South Side : From College Park to Jonesboro.....

Clearly I got carried away with this but lets say we had an extra 2-5 Billion..This is what we could possibly accomplish!!!

you're talking in the hundred billion dollar range. even one of those expansions would run 2 billion on the low end.

[Born 2 Roll]

Originally Posted by NY2ATL2NY

1. East Side BLUE LINE: Extended to Route 138 In Rockdale County

2. East Side GREEN LINE : Extended NE To Stone Mtn-Downtown

3. West Side BLUE LINE : Extended to HWY 92 Downtown Douglasville

4. North Side RED LINE: Extended to Winward Parkway

5. Northeast Side GOLD LINE : Extended to Sugarloaf Parkway

6. Northwest Side : From Arts Center to Barrett Parkway

7. Southeast Side : From College Park to Palmetto

8. South Side : From College Park to Jonesboro.....

Clearly I got carried away with this but lets say we had an extra 2-5 Billion..This is what we could possibly accomplish!!!

Originally Posted by bryantm3

you're talking in the hundred billion dollar range. even one of those expansions would run 2 billion on the low end.

I agree with bryant that the type of heavy rail expansion that NY2ATL2NY proposes would be very expensive.

I don't know if it would be in the hundred billion dollar range that Bryant referenced, but it would probably be somewhere in the $10-20 billion range.

The probable cost of $10-20 billion does not mean that such a large-scale expansion should not be pursued. It just means that we need to come up with a much more robust way of funding important transportation infrastructure projects so that such important rail transit expansions can be pursued and executed like they should be in a very large major metro region of international importance.

[fourthwarden]

Here's a Map of what the overlapping transit services in the metro would look like with current plans built out. Everything shown is either already here, or in some stage of planning. Some projects may be more in the works than others (ex. Beltline vs. South Fulton Pkwy).

Not show are the MARTA, CCT, or GCT bus lines. I figured the map was busy enough to look at.

Map

For comparison, here's the Concept 3 Map.

Systems Included:
Xpress Comuter Bus
MARTA
ATL Streetcar

Expansions:
Streetcar
Beltline Light Rail
Clifton Light Rail
Cobb Light Rail/BRT
Beltline Light Rail

West I-20
East I-20
Connect 400
South Fulton Parkway

MMPT
Commuter Rail

[sumitsu]

There hasn't been much movement since last summer on the Connect 400 initiative (at least publicly), but as a thought exercise, I decided to create a Google Map of what the realized project design might look like:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer...Y.kF-dzCQ2WEBM

(For those who are not aware, Connect 400 is a MARTA expansion project which would (most likely) extend the Red Line from North Springs Station north into Alpharetta. The team has conducted a number of information gathering/presenting sessions in North Fulton over the last 3 years or so, but otherwise progress has been pretty slow.)

A quick caveat: I don't have a background in urban or transit planning, and I haven't conducted an environmental review. Thus, all of the placements are based on nothing more than my personal familiarity with north Fulton, plus some time spent pouring over Google Maps satellite view. Undoubtedly, there will be much in this design that's questionable, impractical, or outright impossible. Please post replies to point out such areas -- I'm interested to know, and in fact finding out things like that is a big part of why I spent the time to make this map.

Some assumptions:

• The Red Line rail extension is all above-ground. I'd guess that MARTA will prefer building either elevated or ground-level rails for cost reasons, and in any case, I have no idea how or where tunnels could be constructed, or at what cost. I'm not opposed to modifying the design to make some sections subterranean if someone can point out a good reason to do so, but I thought I'd start with an above-ground design.
• The short spur of rail heading north from North Springs which I've used as the starting point for my Red Line extension appears (on satellite view) to be about 40ft wide. Therefore, I've tried to make the Google Maps polygon I've created to represent the Red Line rail structure about 40ft - 45ft wide.
• All rail platforms are island-style, and have adjacent parking structures and/or parking lots, potentially with additional structures on top, if MARTA can entice developers into investing in some transit-oriented developments (TOD).
• I tried to avoid demolition / eminent domain seizure. I'm not sure whether all of what I designed could be constructed without doing so, but I tried to work around existing structures as much as I could.

The map has 4 layers:

• Red Line Alignment: Consists of the Red Line rail extension and the 6 stations it serves, including platforms and parking structures.
• Red Line Alignment Annotations: Some notes on various aspects of the design. Hidden by default, as the yellow markers tend to clutter the view.
• Bus Routes and Park-and-Ride Locations: With a backbone of rail extending up to Windward, MARTA should be able to realign bus routes to serve North Fulton east and west of the 400 corridor. (In fact, you can see in some of the documents MARTA has posted to the project website that doing so is an explicit goal of the project.) The bus routes are a little hard to distinguish on the map, since they are all the same color (purple) -- sorry. It's easier with edit access, since I can highlight them, so I didn't realize it would be a problem until I saw the map in read-only mode. I may try to adjust this to improve it later.
• Service Area Boundary: The border of Fulton + Dekalb Counties.

You can read my notes in the "Red Line Alignment Annotations" layer, but here are some quick highlights:

• I shifted the Red Line to the west side of 400 almost immediately north of North Springs. Sandy Springs government and residents have been clear (and persistent) in their opinion that any expansion should occur on the west side of the highway through Sandy Springs, and their arguments seem reasonable to me. I did return the Red Line to the east side just south of the Chattahoochee River, largely because it was easier to place Roswell Station that way, and because North Point Mall is on the east side.
• The station near Northridge is called "Morgan Falls Station". I thought that having "Northridge Station" one stop north of "North Springs Station" would create confusion (e.g. during in-train announcements).
• Morgan Falls Station relies on a public-private partnership with whomever owns The Pointe office complex at Northridge and GA-400. I have no idea how practical this is, or whether said owners would be open to such an arrangement.
• Roswell Station was one of the hardest to place, and I have some reservations about how close it is to the neighborhoods south of Old Alabama Road.
• Mansell Station has a pedestrian bridge over GA-400 linking the platform (on the east side of the highway with parking, which sits on what is now the Mansell Park-and-Ride.
• Alpharetta Station is another public-private partnership, this time with the owners of North Point Mall. The assumption is that the business boost from a station with direct access to the mall (plus the prospect of a new parking deck, shared with MARTA) would help sell the deal. But again, I have no relevant experience to inform me here.
• Avalon Station is currently across both GA-400 and Old Milton from Avalon itself; I considered modifying the design to move it west to give it direct access to Avalon, particularly given Avalon developer Mark Toro's open support for MARTA expansion in North Fulton. It is harder to place, that way, though.
• The light-pink swath next to Avalon Station is a new access road which could optionally be constructed, to improve access to the station from North Point Parkway.
• I created 4 new park-and-ride locations in West Roswell, at Spalding Drive, and Medlock Bridge, and at McGinnis Ferry, in order to help support bus routes extending somewhat into Northwest Fulton, but especially into Northeast Fulton, all the way to the Gwinnett border. I'd guess that MARTA could make arrangements with GCT to serve those park-and-ride locations as well. (Hopefully the proximity to MARTA would eventually help spur Gwinnett to join the system as well.)

Feedback is encouraged and appreciated -- it's a topic that interests me, so I'm curious as to what factors into a design like this. Hopefully we'll see the project actually get off the ground in the near future, but until then, we can only speculate...

[Plokivos]

I'm not even going to lie. I will just follow DC metro map, exactly. It's scary how similar their neighborhoods and how everything is laid out. DCA is even similarly position to where Hartford airport is.

[MattCW]

Sumitsu, I think you should probably take a look at the I-20 east plan which has a better developed plan for what will go where. They are largely planning to tunnel under the interchanges with stations right there or just to one side or the other. I believe the reason is that GDOT has made it clear that MARTA is not to construct anything (such as a viaduct support) that will hinder road expansion in the future. An "at-grade" rail line is relatively easy to cover over should the interchange be reconfigured in the future. So for your stations, the only one I see that sticks out as unlikely is your Roswell station at Holcomb Bridge which will very likely be much more closely aligned to the highway.

The only other issue I see is the Windward parkway station. I don't think MARTA would need to take over that plot of trees between the existing Park and Ride and the ATT data center. A reasonably-sized parking deck with bus bays underneath could easily fit on the footprint of the existing parking lot. That whole area though would scream mixed-use development with a MARTA station right there with skybridges providing direct access.

[fourthwarden]

Hotels around MARTA stations.

[toll_booth]

Originally Posted by fourthwarden

Hotels around MARTA stations.

Interesting map.

One oddity on it--it takes more than ten minutes to ride from West Lake to Vine City (two stops apart)??

[MattCW]

Where do you see that? MARTA's schedule online says 4 minutes.