Georgia Shifts Gears On Public Transportation

But it’s beyond congestion, that inscrutable hex. As with counterparts across the country, Georgia’s local and regional transit agencies have found themselves navigating unexplored terrain, dodging new potholes scattered among the old ones. The pandemic helped rewrite the rules of the road. For good.

“COVID merely sharpened the notion that it was time for public transportation to reimagine itself,” says long-time transit leader Faye DiMassimo, former executive director and CEO of the coastal region’s Chatham Area Transit Authority, now chief of planning and economic development for the city of Savannah.

Faye DiMassimo, is chief of planning and economic development for the City of Savannah. Photo credit: Contributed

“We’re always looking for customization in our lives,” DiMassimo says. “Transit systems need to be able to offer a stronger range of options that get people to the places they need to go and when they want to go there.”

Remote work – having overturned commuting models – is here to stay. A study released over the summer by Georgia Commute Options, a program managed by the Atlanta Regional Commission and funded by the Georgia Department of Transportation, found that eight in 10 employers in the Atlanta region support flexible work schedules. That’s compared to 67% of U.S. firms overall. Respondents cited improvements to employee morale and a reduction in churn.

At least partly as a result, public ridership – especially during the increasingly nebulous “peak hours” – has declined and continues to lag behind high points established pre-pandemic. As is widely noted in local and social media, Atlanta’s MARTA ridership has not rebounded at the same rate as its national counterparts.

Statewide, the evolving transportation landscape is affected by factors like Georgia’s ever-expanding population and shifting densities; the vagaries of taxpayer and political support for long-term, costly investments; inflation; the challenge of leveraging emerging technologies (witness Atlanta’s sudden surge of driverless Waymos); e-commerce and the strains it places on strategic infrastructure.

And not to be ignored is that the state’s longtime residents are getting older, while data shows that retirees like to move here.

“That’s a piece that people tend to overlook,” says Chris Clark, president and CEO of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. “You’re looking at almost a doubling of the number of men and women over 65 in the next five years. They don’t drive as much. They’re going to need those [public] services.”

MARTA: Trust on the Line

Transit Advocate: Douglas Nagy, a former Atlanta Department of Transportation deputy commissioner for transportation strategy, is a supporter and critic of MARTA. Photo credit: David Parks

Having made news over the summer for all the wrong reasons – a Fourth of July breakdown that caused delays in getting runners to the Peachtree Road Race; the dramatic failure, after a Beyoncé concert, of a crowded escalator that led to nearly two dozen injuries; the sudden resignation of embattled leader Collie Greenwood due to his immigration status – MARTA is trying to win back a skeptical public while facing a crucial test in 2026 as hundreds of thousands of World Cup fans are expected downtown.

“I think the state of Georgia has four key transportation infrastructure nodes,” says transit advocate Douglas Nagy, a former Atlanta Department of Transportation deputy commissioner for transportation strategy, who is both a supporter and critic of MARTA. He ticks them off: the sprawling road and highway system with three federal interstates that converge upon Atlanta, the ever-expanding Port of Savannah and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, still the world’s busiest. “And then,” Nagy says, “there’s MARTA. It’s an incredible infrastructure that has not been fully deployed for the impact it could deliver. MARTA is critical to the Atlanta region’s well-being.”

Massive Realignment: MARTA’s NextGen Bus Service will restructure bus routes and add on-demand service zones. Photo credit: MARTA

Consistent throughout MARTA’s emerging strategic campaign are efforts to engage ridership more directly and perhaps more gently. The latter includes $1 billion from the agency’s overall budget to improve all 38 MARTA rail stations through friendlier lighting, better displays and better upkeep. Better security. Gates that work. And maybe most responsive of all, the impending rollout of easier fare payments, a major improvement over the clunky Breeze system.

“MARTA is making some really big commitments to improving its service,” says Rob Kelly, senior program manager of transportation for Atlanta’s Midtown Alliance. “These are generational changes that give reason for being optimistic about our future transit.”

While heavy rail gets the most attention, nearly as many MARTA riders travel by bus, and bus anchors MARTA’s “generational” change. Conceived during COVID-19 and fine-tuned through a process that has taken four years, MARTA’s NextGen Bus Service, to launch in late 2025, is the biggest realignment of the agency’s surface strategy since its inception in the early 1970s. Underused routes are being pared down, while new on-demand service zones are being added. When the transfer models sync up, Atlantans will step off one priority route and glide straight onto another, seamlessly. That’s the plan.

“It’s a big step towards a more ridership-focused system with a lot more frequency,” says Ryan VanSickle, MARTA’s director of technical services and service planning. “Fifteen minutes is the mark where people don’t need a timetable but can travel spontaneously. We just want to make MARTA easier and more convenient, both for our dedicated riders and for people who haven’t realized how useful this system can be.”

Microtransit Rises

MARTA is among a handful of Georgia transit systems rolling out microtransit, typically a van-based service deployed as both a response to fixed-service cutbacks and to the riding public’s plea to be met where it is and taken where it wants to go and then back. Popular destinations, identified through pilot programs, have included healthcare facilities and pharmacies, grocery stores, big box stores, daycare and senior centers.

“We’re giving the community an opportunity to have curb-to-curb, door-to-door type service at a fraction of the cost of Uber or Lyft,” says Morgan Simmons, deputy director of Intermodal Services for the Cobb County Department of Transportation, which piloted the CobbLinc Go microtransit program last year. “And that’s giving them the independence they so deserve.”

Glimpse of the Future: The Cumberland Community Improvement District piloted the Cumberland Hopper, an autonomous shuttle service to and from The Battery. Photo credit: Contributed

Georgia Tech is a national leader in microtransit research and development. Led by Pascal Van Hentenryck, director of Tech-AI, the AI hub at Georgia Tech, a team of Tech researchers partnered with MARTA on an app-based system to pair riders with a network of circulating vans. MARTA Reach, the ground-breaking pilot that ran during 2022, consistently added customers throughout its six-month run. With MARTA set to relaunch the service as a permanent pillar of NextGen, the Tech team is working on a similar project with Savannah’s CAT. In Columbus, the regional METRA system is looking to expand its “Dial-a-Ride” service.

As a further sign of the widespread interest in on-demand transit platforms, Cobb officials envisioned an expansion of microtransit options to the tune of some $2 billion over 30 years, a plan that was halted with the 2024 rejection of an ambitious, countywide transit referendum. It was a similar story in Gwinnett, which also voted down a 30-year, 1% sales tax that would have paid for transit projects, microtransit included. Leaders in both counties now speak of seeking out alternative funding sources.

“It’s delayed, not denied,” says Cobb DOT’s Simmons. “It only prompts us to get more creative in our funding strategy. We’re going to continue to pursue what we can and to activate as much as we can. But it’ll be at a slower rate.”

With driverless cars now prowling the streets, it’s easy to imagine microtransit emerging as a multi-rider mobility service driven not by humans but AI. Beep, an Orlando-based mobility company, delivered a glimpse of that future through its Cumberland Hopper pilot. It partnered with the Cumberland Community Improvement District in Cobb County on an autonomous shuttle service to and from The Battery during the 2023 and 2024 Atlanta Braves baseball seasons.

With the larger, on-demand Cumberland Sweep now moving through planning stages, Beep is partnering also with the Atlanta Beltline to run autonomous shuttles along a two-mile stretch of the Westside Trail (which will soon be called the Southwest Trail) throughout 2026. Beep’s Atlanta foothold could truly amount to something – as it has in Jacksonville, Florida, where it launched NAVI, the first fully autonomous public transportation system in the U.S.

“As this industry scales, one of the single biggest value-adds is the flexibility, adaptability and cost effectiveness of serving a variety of different use cases with the same set of vehicles,” says Alex Poirot, Beep’s vice president for public policy. “It adds a new tool, that’s never been seen in the history of mobility.”

New Lanes, New Options

The money Georgia spends on roads easily dwarfs the combined budgets of its public transit systems. So it’s instructive to consider the more enterprising thoughts of Russell McMurry, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Transportation, who’s open to a wide range of emerging transit options.

Highway Project: Two new flyover ramps connecting Interstate 285 South to Interstate 20 East and I-20 West to I-285 South are scheduled to be complete early next year. Photo credit: Contributed

McMurry supports Bus Rapid Transit – he prefers to call it express lane transit – and he is laying the groundwork to help deliver the faster bus service to several high-use corridors within Metro Atlanta. He’s open to rapid rail from both Atlanta to Savannah and Atlanta to Charlotte. He’s in on autonomous vehicles. And, peering as he does through a planning lens many years forward, he’ll walk right up to the line of science fiction – mentioning, for example, Covington’s Archer Aviation and its work creating flying taxis. The company is testing flights in Abu Dhabi and has plans for service in New York and California.

“Their being based in Georgia, we could have a leg up as an early adopter,” he says.

Flying Taxis: Archer Aviaton is designing and developing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that can go up to 60 miles on a single charge. Photo credit: Archer

But flush with bonus funding from the Georgia legislature totaling $2.5 billion over the past two sessions (“historic,” according to the governor’s office), the DOT’s immediate task is geared more toward its wheelhouse, namely to engineer a massive expansion of highways, bridges and interchanges around Atlanta and Savannah. The impending widening of I-16 from Savannah back to Statesboro and maybe even as far as Dublin is a DOT priority – but with heavy lifts elsewhere, freight roads are also a priority, to improve the movement of cargo in and out of the Port of Savannah. There’s the widening of State Route 5 from Blue Ridge to McCaysville; the expansion of State Route 133, a key agricultural corridor in South Georgia; planned trucks-only lanes along I-75 from Macon to McDonough, just south of Atlanta. Those are coming, as is the widening of State Route 20 from Cumming to Canton, soon to total three lanes in each direction.

With lengthy reconstructions completed at two major Atlanta interchanges and two more in the works, GDOT can now focus on managed express lanes, two in each direction, along Georgia 400 from North Fulton into Forsyth. There, MARTA is to operate Bus Rapid Transit beginning in the early 2030s. Through an agreement inked over the summer, a three-party private consortium will design, construct and maintain the Georgia 400 expansion in exchange for toll fees, a public-private partnership model to be adopted for the widening of the top end of Interstate 285, soon to begin as well.

“Basically, the tolls pay for the project,” says McMurry.

Growing Up, Not Out

Atlanta commuters may get some relief. But here’s the hard truth from the mouth of McMurry, a realist: “We can’t build enough lanes to solve congestion in Metro Atlanta.”

Back on Track: In addition to more than 400 residential units, MARTA’s transit-oriented community at the Edgewood/Candler Park station includes parks, retail space and a performing arts center. Photo credit: Contributed

Everyone will tell you that. And they’ll say, almost in unison, that when it comes to congestion, “there’s no magic bullet.” But among the more intriguing and perhaps attainable options is one advanced by Nagy, the transit advocate, who’s convinced there’s something sitting right before our eyes. Baked into MARTA’s charter, he believes, is “the idea that we would build walkable town centers, cities within a city, each around a rail station. And these stations would absorb a third of Metro Atlanta’s population growth.”

Rail Centers: John Benton, MARTA’s assistant general manager for real estate development and asset management. Photo credit: Contributed

MARTA’s John Benton, the agency’s new assistant general manager for real estate development and asset management, acknowledges a recent lull in efforts to multiply transit-oriented developments, but he insists that MARTA is back on track. As evidence, he cites the recent rollout of RFPs for mixed-use projects that will create in the range of 1,000 residential units – about half of them priced as affordable housing – at various MARTA rail stations. In addition to projects already completed, such as the vibrant residential spaces at Edgewood/Candler Park, Benton says that some 400 acres of MARTA property could be available for future development.

“We’ll keep going back to the board to ask for more,” Benton says. “I just want to keep rolling out these projects, keep moving on.”

For Nagy, that’s not enough.

“MARTA needs an explicit goal of the development it wants to attract to its stations,” he says. “Those 2 million newcomers coming here in the next 20 years, if they all move to Forsyth County, we’ll all be crippled in traffic. They need to leave their cars in Texas and live near MARTA. We should pull every lever to convince these newcomers to live next to MARTA and stay off our roads.”