Writer Defends Atlanta's Planning History and Blasts Backwards Georgia (Columbus: appointed, college)

[cqholt]

Originally Posted by Ant131531

Both are uneducated, welfare and racist states. Give me a break. Outside of the Atlanta area and Savannah, Georgia is nothing..it's not exciting and useless.

These southern states love to tout the politics here, but forget to mention how god awful the education is here, how those blue states are paying for the red states and their welfare, and how racist it is.

Like I fail to see why Alabama should exist. It's state capital is a joke and Birmingham, its biggest city outside of downtown is essentially a massive ghetto and redneck haven.

There are some nice intown areas of Birmingham. The Highlands, Lakeview, Avondale are nice.

[Caleb Longstreet]

Originally Posted by JoeTarheel

Douglas, Gwinnett, Cobb, etc. will have to help pay for MARTA before it heads out that way. It's not free to build and operate.

They couldn't even if they had the will and the cash. Why? That power thing....MARTA is corrupt as they get and everyone knows it. It's one of many 800lb Gorillas liberals tiptoe around.

[toll_booth]

Originally Posted by Caleb Longstreet

Paul, the idiot planner is dead wrong about Marta and insiders know it. The main reason Marta won't expand has little to do with agreements and everything to do with power. For years Marta has been under the tight control of a cadre of black leaders who do everything they can to award contracts and deals to mostly, if not entirely, minority firms regardless of abilities and expertise.

GE, AT&T and others were knocked out of the running for new, better systems in favor of incumbents with inferior plans. Every attempt to do the right thing has been thwarted in favor of power and control.
in order for Marta to expand, this same cadre will have to SHARE the reins of power and it is NOT going to happen.

To illustrate the incompetence, Marta had a problem with fare evasion that was mostly due to the timing of the entrance gates. After a few nuisance lawsuits, Marta opened/delayed the timing to avoid nuissance lawsuits but, allowing record number fare jumpers. It's okay though as most are black and well we owe it to them. Their answer? Need more money. For what? To pay for fare jumpers you won't control??

Next, the breeze card. A few years ago technically competent folks advised Marta that the cards they were buying we're open to fraud. What did they do? Doubled down and bought millions of them. When one supervisor was caught stealing cash, he was merely demoted! Caught committing a crime? Allowed to stay on and get that beloved pension.

Bottom line? It's a program to rape and pillage. This rail system should be out to Douglas, south to Newman east to snellville, North to Forsyth and kennesaw.

But again, that means giving up power and that is NEVER going to happen. Want to help traffic, the planners should have been adding I-285/385/485/585 ad nauseum, years ago. 5.5 million and about 4 or 5 highways. A rail system that serves a few, and a cartel that will carve that bird up forever and EVERYONE knows it. Amateur thieves.

Great planning? Please. You are an embarrassment. This took us 30 years to get from 1.7 million to 5.5 and we barely added 675 and 400 extension. What an accomplishment....yawn. What will it take to break up the Marta cartel and get GRTA or some other oversight to EXPAND it so EVERYONE can use it and provide mass transit that works. We are roughly 1/2 the size of NYC with a smidgen of mass transit.

How large do we have to get before real professionals step in and run this elephant properly?

[atler8]

I must have touched a nerve regarding Al & s.c. But at least I'm not resorting to borderline personal attacks here in response.
Apparently it's fine & open season here to bash a group of states if they don't happen to apparently match your own personal political persuasion or mindset but off limits for anything critical to be said about the ones that suit you better, eh?
FYI: the imbalance of the flow of $$$ into & out of the treasury has been a problem for decades & is not a recent creation or a figment of my imagination. It can't simply be shrugged off with a there you go again type of response.
As for example, around 20 years ago a bipartisan coalition of politicians from midwestern & northeastern industrial & farm states formed a loose brain trust coalition to examine the inequity of the flow of $$$ & to do something about it.
Additionally, our largest state by far, California, has been running a negative flow for years as goes the flow in and out of the treasury. It is both an industrial & farming state and is the home of a significant number of military installations. Yet somehow, it is getting screwed in the flow of $$$ too.
Interestingly enough, in a similar vein, the partitioning of highway construction spending within the state of Georgia by the DOT has been out of whack too with an inadequate amount distributed to projects in metro Atlanta given the population & number of vehicles on the the road there.

[residinghere2007]

Just wanted to say, found it interesting that no one said anything about Caleb Longstreet's diatribe on black people holding MARTA back.

It was both racist and funny.

[JoeTarheel]

Originally Posted by Ant131531

Both are uneducated, welfare and racist states. Give me a break. Outside of the Atlanta area and Savannah, Georgia is nothing..it's not exciting and useless.

These southern states love to tout the politics here, but forget to mention how god awful the education is here, how those blue states are paying for the red states and their welfare, and how racist it is.

Like I fail to see why Alabama should exist. It's state capital is a joke and Birmingham, its biggest city outside of downtown is essentially a massive ghetto and redneck haven.

You have a really limited view of what is real...your assessments of Georgia and Alabama are SO cliché and immature it's almost sickening. You should honestly get out of your little corner and experience these places before you pass such sweeping judgements. The "opinions" expressed above couldn't be more misinformed.

[Columbuskidd92]

I disagree with Atlanta making the state more progressive and diverse. Atlanta is nothing but a bubble. In my opinion the military made the state progressive and diverse.

[Mutiny77]

Originally Posted by masonbauknight

I do think Atlanta deserves credit for making Georgia historically more progressive than Alabama and S.C. in many respects. It was always a big city, it attracted all kinds of Yankee transplants (conservative and liberal, not just conservative Yankees, as S.C. and Alabama have). Moreover, Atlanta's politicians have actually intervened more than once in the affairs of Georgia's conservative state legislature to lobby for ideas considered "liberal" in much of the South--e.g., racial integration of schools/colleges ("Please, boys, we don't want those KKK marches and riots on campus, as we saw in Alabama, Mississippi") to legalizing homosexuality ("C'mon boys, let's not embarrass the state--it's not 1910 anymore, and the Olympics are coming"). And Confederate flags on state government buildings, Confederate pride, etc. -- Atlantans had a different take on it.

Savannah and Athens matter, too. Savannah was and is a very un-Baptist second-tier city. It is a city with a real history, several "exotic" ethnic groups since its founding in 1733, and culture and sophistication that most southern cities its size just can't match. Athens and UGA are progressive for the U.S., not backward. UGA was always more progressive/liberal/lefty than University of South Carolina-Columbia or Clemson, and far more so than University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. (And until recently, it was more progressive than many northern college towns, such as State College, PA, home of Penn State.) Academically speaking, UGA was always a bit harder to get into than USC-Columbia or 'Bama-Tuscaloosa -- for incoming freshmen or grad students, and it's probably harder to get into now. UGA and Athens were always closer to the University of N. Carolina and Chapel Hill model in both student culture and outlook.

Back to Atlanta: It is a metropolis with huge corporations and prestigious universities (Emory, Ga. Tech, and Spelman/Morehouse) which added to the city's more modern vision. ATL's fallout has enriched the rest of the state (e.g., a good student from Cordele would attend Emory or Ga. Tech much more often than a good student from Florence, SC, who would most likely go to Clemson or USC, or a student from Dothan, AL, who would probably attend UA-Tuscaloosa or Auburn). There was always more interaction and cross-pollination between so-called backward Georgia and Atlanta. The net difference between ole Jawja on the one hand and S.C./Alabama/Mississippi/Arkansas on the other can be pretty astounding. I'm not knocking certain progressive aspects and corners of S.C. (downtown Charleston, downtown Columbia) or even Alabama (Huntsville, or the University of Alabama-Birmingham campus), but they are exceptions. But Atlanta, Athens, and Savannah? Not exceptions but quite exceptional, and Georgia is a more progressive southern state because of them.

I agreed with pretty much everything you said except that last statement. I'm sorry, but there just no way you can reasonably argue that Savannah and Athens are exceptional while Charleston and Columbia are merely exceptions; history nor the stats bear any of this out. Among all of the cities you mentioned, Atlanta is the undisputed exceptional city in almost every way. Georgia's second-tier cities are lagging when compared to their regional counterparts.

[Mutiny77]

Originally Posted by Columbuskidd92

I disagree with Atlanta making the state more progressive and diverse. Atlanta is nothing but a bubble. In my opinion the military made the state progressive and diverse.

If that's the case, then why isn't Columbus the most diverse and progressive city in GA? Why aren't Norfolk and VA Beach the most progressive and diverse cities in VA? Why isn't Fayetteville the most progressive and diverse city in NC? Why isn't San Diego the most progressive and diverse city in CA?

[masonbauknight]

Originally Posted by Mutiny77

Among all of the cities you mentioned, Atlanta is the undisputed exceptional city in almost every way. Georgia's second-tier cities are lagging when compared to their regional counterparts.

I agree that Atlanta is the exceptional city and leads the way to what in Georgia is "progressive"." And yes, Georgia's second-tier cities are lagging in specific ways compared to counterparts like Columbia and Charleston, which are larger, have more business dynamism, growth, and more successful in attracting new firms (foreign and domestic) -- all that free-market stuff, including getting a Whole Foods five years before Georgia's 2nd-tier cities do.

My point was that Athens and Savannah are progressive poles in Georgia, not just Atlanta by itself. And campus life is also a factor: Georgia's flagship campuses (UGA, Tech, private Emory) were and still more progressive and lefty-liberal places than any of the ones in S.C., where the campus life has always been far more conservative, more conventional and comformist, and late catching up in academics. Whether it's USC, Clemson, or College of Charleston, they are still today not as open and progressive as those three in Georgia. While North Carolina has its UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke, South Carolina has none of the above. It always had a more socially conservative campus life, and the state is more "neo-Confederate" in some ways than either Georgia or North Carolina. To me, that's part and parcel of comparatively "backward," I'm afraid. And South Carolina remains a more conservative state on the whole. Remember the little S.C. girl who found a fossil and wanted to make it the South Carolina state fossil? A S.C. fundamentalist group wanted to amend the proclamation with a creationist message. True, the amendment failed, but I sincerely doubt it ever would have come forward in Georgia at all in 2014. The powers that be in Georgia would have squelched it from the get-go. In S.C. or Alabama it would have had more than a fighting chance. The political culture and social attitudes are more progressive in Georgia.