Will Gwinnett County join MARTA? Not likely, officials say (Atlanta: sales, 2014)

[ATLTJL]

Gwinnett officials: Joining MARTA ‘an uphill battle’ | Spinning our Wheels

This infuriates me.

I'm going to write every member of the county council a strongly worded letter. I mean, seriously, Gwinnett county is chocking to death on traffic, and buses can not solve it.

I really thought some form of rail would come to the county in the next ten years or so. But with this complete standstill, my wife and I are seriously thinking about looking at homes in places like Chamblee, because we can't take it anymore. I mean, we both love the area...but if it's going to drag its feet and just not do anything while things keep getting worse and the NCRs of Gwinnett county keep leaving, what's going to be left? Certainly not people who share our values.

And I should say that we would be a tremendous loss to the area. Not because we're so great, but because we are a dual income, no kids family. We pay taxes into the school system and take absolutely nothing out. Whoever buys our house, if we decide to sell it, will most likely also take out of the system.

Gwinnett needs to get its act together. I'm really getting tired of it.

[fieldm]

No surprise.

[Iconographer]

Your aggravation is completely understandable.
In case you missed this:

Amazon faces big disconnect with Gwinnett, Cobb and north Fulton

[ATLTJL]

And what makes me by far the angriest....

If it's true, that people fear rail brings in riff-raff and crime....what exactly do they think the Buford Highway corridor of Gwinnett county is? What do they think Gwinnett Place mall has become? Would MARTA really make these areas any WORSE? How could it, they're already in the toilet!

But the truth is that MARTA wouldn't make the area worse just as it didn't harm North Springs or Perimeter Mall. If you've got a nice area and you keep the transit node attractive and secure, it's not going to harm the area.

I believe that residents know this and the county council is made up of people who have become so diassociated with their constituents that they don't really know what they want. How could they, all they have to do is commute to Lawrenceville. At least, this is what I like to think. Or maybe Gwinnett just really does have a high number of imbeciles living within its borders?

[Iconographer]

Access to alternative transit is not the death of a community. Irresponsible zoning and infrastructure planning is. Gwinnettians to a great degree are still learning this lesson.

[AtlantaMove]

I have no reference for this claim, but believe it has to be about the money, the income generated from the Gwinnett County Transit. I'm on the I-85 parking lot often, and those buses appear to be pretty full. Again, I don't know. But that service wouldn't continue if the system was losing money IMHO.

[primaltech]

Simply asinine leadership in Cobb and Gwinnett counties, frustratingly always trying to block democracy from happening. Sniveling little weasels keeping us from ever having just simply a vote on this, a binding public referendum, a voice one way or the other on the question of joining MARTA or not, after first giving a chance for MARTA to campaign on it and show what kind of services we could get for our 1% sales tax.

Instead it's always just a couple old conservative type folks speaking for everyone, always putting words in our mouth like this. Inaccurate words. I live in Cobb, and I hugely support MARTA and want the opportunity to vote YES on a ballot for joining MARTA. And I felt that way years ago when I lived in Gwinnett.

The results of such a public vote should guide the way on this question, not a couple of people's ignorant opinions in some article. Nothing else should guide Cobb and Gwinnett counties on whether to join MARTA except a binding public referendum on whether we should join MARTA. Period!

It's been 27 dang years since Gwinnett last put this question to a public vote, in 1990. I was a 7-year old. We lived in Lilburn. It's an old vague memory but I do remember reading all about it in the AJC sunday papers, and I remember being unhappy about it, because the train was so cool to me.

But it's not even the same county, anymore. It's like 3x the population! And huge demographic shifts, too. And the freeways are maxed out of any more space for more lanes, the commute has become just horrendous. And it's only going to get worse, not better. I just don't understand it. I mean obviously you can't keep holding a referendum every year, but the 1990 referendum is simply no longer valid at this point. There is no way that old vote reflects on the wishes of a completely transformed county over a quarter century later that's now at almost 1,000,000 population. Hold a new vote.

And then Cobb, have we even EVER had a vote on whether to join MARTA? Like, EVER? It's like, um, hello, we have 750,000+ residents here, it's the year 2017, we have a major league sports stadium, our county extends ITP, we have high rises here and a major business district, we're extremely diverse, we're majority Democratic voting, we're simply a major core/inner suburban county that is eligible to join MARTA, so why can't we have that choice?

Besides that 1990 Gwinnett failed referendum and the 2014 Clayton successful referendum, the only other MARTA referendum I've ever heard of was the original 1971,where Cobb did not participate in the vote, Fulton and DeKalb barely approved (51% and 52%), and Clayton and Gwinnett soundly rejected it. (But they can't really be blamed, because at the time their counties were rural and tiny in population, and would only have gotten a little bit of service, especially Gwinnett.) The 1990 Gwinnett rejection of MARTA was a mistake, but that was also a completely different Gwinnett than the diverse and heavily built up county that exists today.

Time for a vote in Cobb and Gwinnett in November 2018, preceded by a MARTA campaign (and an opposition idiot tea party campaign or whatever), then we can go from there, respecting the results of it, whatever the results. If it fails, consider that the public's wishes and not revisiting the issue for a long time. But we need to hold the vote. It's simply not fair that we don't have a voice in Cobb and Gwinnett counties.

[PKCorey]

Nash is just pandering to certain % of her constituents. You would think with her last election being much closer(52 vs 48) since she had no competition in '12, she would see the light but she still refuses to do it.

The areas of the county that have already declined will stay the same, bus service or not.

Originally Posted by AtlantaMove

I have no reference for this claim, but believe it has to be about the money, the income generated from the Gwinnett County Transit. I'm on the I-85 parking lot often, and those buses appear to be pretty full. Again, I don't know. But that service wouldn't continue if the system was losing money IMHO.

The county contributes about $12 million a year for GCT. I don't know current their fare recovery % (2011 was 34%) but the county is heavily subsidizing the service. Expected revenue for 2017 is only $2.8 MILLION.

I know, I live off Route 30 and 95% of the time, the bus never has more than 5 people on it when it goes pass me. I have no idea why they use 40ft buses instead of 30 or 35ft on some of their routes.

[Born 2 Roll]

Originally Posted by PKCorey

Nash is just pandering to certain % of her constituents. You would think with her last election being much closer(52 vs 48) since she had no competition in '12, she would see the light but she still refuses to do it.

The areas of the county that have already declined will stay the same, bus service or not.

That is an excellent point that Gwinnett County Commission chairwoman Charlotte Nash is likely pandering to her political base of largely older and deeply conservative highly transit-averse/transit-resistant voters with her continued refusal to embrace a countywide voter referendum on making Gwinnett a member county of MARTA.

Nash's deeply-conservative, transit-averse, MARTA-despising base has been in a particularly cantankerous mood since the election of Donald Trump as president, so Nash (whom along with the other four Republicans on the five-seat Gwinnett County Commission likely continues to be personally extremely skeptical about the effectiveness and need for improved and expanded transit service, even with Gwinnett County's population approaching 1 million residents) along with the rest of the Gwinnett County Commission, likely is in no hurry to push for a vote on MARTA expansion into the county that their most conservative and transit-averse, transit-skeptical, transit-resistant constituents would be extremely displeased about.

In addition to not wanting to upset and rile-up a very cantankerous base of anti-transit GOP voters, Nash and the rest of the Republican-dominated Gwinnett Commission (along with the Cobb County Commission in suburban Northwest metro Atlanta and many Republican figures in North Fulton County) are probably waiting for the completion of a 2018 Georgia governor's race in which an extremely business-friendly and pro-regional transit consolidation candidate in sitting Georgia Republican Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle is currently the frontrunner for governor.

GOP political figures in Republican-dominated outlying suburban areas like Gwinnett, Cobb and North Fulton are probably most likely willing to wait until the completion of the 2018 governor's race because they figure that if a pro-regional transit consolidation candidate like Cagle wins the race, they may likely be in position to be part of a regional or sub-regional transit setup in which Republican-dominated areas like Gwinnett, Cobb and North Fulton possess the political power.

Though with the rapidly changing demographics in a county like Gwinnett (where non-Hispanic whites now only make up about 38% of the county's population, down from 1980 when non-Hispanic whites made up 96% of the county's population), the political conditions for a vote on MARTA membership and expansion could be possible within a decade or so if (or when) the Democrats were ever to take over Gwinnett County government on said continuing demographic wave.

Originally Posted by AtlantaMove

I have no reference for this claim, but believe it has to be about the money, the income generated from the Gwinnett County Transit. I'm on the I-85 parking lot often, and those buses appear to be pretty full. Again, I don't know. But that service wouldn't continue if the system was losing money IMHO.

Originally Posted by PKCorey

The county contributes about $12 million a year for GCT. I don't know current their fare recovery % (2011 was 34%) but the county is heavily subsidizing the service. Expected revenue for 2017 is only $2.8 MILLION.

I know, I live off Route 30 and 95% of the time, the bus never has more than 5 people on it when it goes pass me. I have no idea why they use 40ft buses instead of 30 or 35ft on some of their routes.

AtlantaMove makes a really good point about the frequently usage of buses at locations like a parking lot on Interstate 85 while PKCorey makes some excellent points about the very limited farebox recovery rate and the sparing public usage of buses on other routes.

The routes with the full buses that AtlantaMove probably is referring to are the commuter buses (the five 100-series routes) that provide express bus service into and out of Atlanta during morning and afternoon/evening rush hours. Those commuter-oriented express routes are fairly popular and often receive maximized or near-maximized public usage.

The routes with the near-empty buses that PKCorey is referring to (the five two-digit series routes like Route 30) are the local routes which seem to receive such sparing use at times to the point that many observers often wonder why governments for counties like Gwinnett even bother to continue funding them.

[fieldm]

And y'all actually thought they were serious when they ran to the gov office talking about wanting mass transit in Cobb/etc.