Utterly disagree. You hit my hot button here.
If mass transit were conveniently available, more people here would use it. I most certainly would. In fact, I took the train to pick up my Smart, and walked the mile to the dealer.
Problem is here in Atlanta, as in many other cities, the rapid transit money is not used efficiently.
When I go to Europe, stations are generally basic and functional and are all over the place. The ones out in the 'burbs are essentially open platforms with a roof. That's
all you need. And in some areas, you'll find five or more stations within a half mile radius.
MARTA, in it's great wisdom, put the stations
miles apart from one another, generally not in residential areas, and primarily in inner city neighborhoods. Fat chance of walking to one. You have to drive to them, and
if you are lucky enough to score a parking space, you have to be there by 7 am to do so.
The MARTA station directly acrost the street from my office could easily have been a platform/roof setup, been inexpensive to build, inexpensive to maintain, and they could have used the money saved to put additional stations in the three miles away in either direction til you reach the next.
But instead, I look out my window at a MASSIVE edifice which sits on either side of the street and a RR track, has two huge usually non-operative escalators and a urine soaked elevator to get up to the HUGE pedestrian bridge.
Then once you get to the other side, the ticket machines are so difficult to use, they have an employee who does nothing but help people put their money in and get a card. Oh, and should you lose the cheap paper card, or it wear out in your wallet, it costs you another $.50 cents to get a new one. Simple tokens, or coin machines were deemed inefficient. And let's not forget, the employee who shows you how to get your ticket also has to show you how to
use it. YOu have to press it against a circle on the turnstile, and half the time, the circle doesn't recognize the ticket, and the employee ends up opening the handicapped gate to let you get through, since they know you PAID for the ticket, by virtue on the fact that they had to show you how to buy one! I kid you not!
Then you have to go back down to the platform level to catch the train, using either another pair of staircases, or yet another smelly elevator.
There is yet a second pedestrian bridge over the RR tracks on the other side of the station.
It makes no sense they spent millions and millions of dollars on each of these rail stations, when a simple platform and crosswalk would have accomplished the same thing.
Don't believe me? Everything with a red roof in this picture is a MARTA station. Note the extra parking lot, which has been closed off, btw. The location chosen for this station is at the main gate to a military base (the base personnell do NOT ride the train, it's too far to walk to anywhere in the base), and at an expressway. There are maybe 200 homes within any kind of walking distance, and only 2 businesses, mine, the small red roof in the middle bottom of the photo, and a liquor store a block down.
This is the kind of logic American transit people use when deciding where to set up rail stations.
OK, rant over.
2008 Smart 
2008 Smart 
"the car", "la voiture"
Today
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