(Photo by Optic Media / Unsplash)
A version of this story was first published by The Xylom, a nonprofit newsroom that covers the communities influencing and being shaped by science.
Organizing Atlanta Pride, America’s largest free Pride festival, is always an uphill battle. But perhaps neither organizers nor Pridegoers expected the biggest hurdle this year to be getting to the venue.
The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) usually runs its trains every 12-20 minutes on weekdays and every 20 minutes on weekends. However, “special schedules” to accommodate “track work, holidays, and/or special events” have become the norm in recent years.
Even on the October weekend when 300,000 people gathered to celebrate LGBTQ pride in Midtown Atlanta, the city’s transit authority ran its trains on a slower, “special” schedule. In one instance, a power outage meant some riders waited as long as 42 minutes for their train to arrive, leaving some Pridegoers scrambling for alternative transportation. With MARTA showing off its Pride-themed buses at the parade, some locals called it a case of “rainbow capitalism.”
“I know a couple of folks who basically decided not to go because they saw the headways,” Atlanta City Council president Doug Shipman told The Xylom. “I heard from several folks who said that they waited a long time, extremely full cars, [who] were frustrated by the whole experience.”
With Atlanta set to host several large sporting events soon — including the College Football Playoff Championship Game on Jan. 20, eight matches in the 2026 World Cup, as well as Super Bowl LXII in 2028 — experts and transit advocates are urging MARTA to restore consistent weekend service and make the investments required to meet visiting riders’ needs, learning from the experiences of former Olympic hosts such as Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.
“I’m wondering to what extent pride weekend was a wake-up call and if MARTA will turn around and provide more ‘normal’ service,” one local transit advocate wrote.
An ‘unusable’ system
MARTA’s weekend rail service is frequently interrupted by service cuts, especially along the Red and Gold lines which make up the north-south leg of the transit route. But the disturbance to the transit system is worse than has previously been reported.
An investigation by The Xylom shows that tracking-related service cuts have slowed down the frequency of trains on the north-south route for almost 80% of weekends since October 2023, according to our weekend service cancellation dashboard created using publicly available data from MARTA.
In total, nearly 5,500 weekend trains were taken out of service last year. These findings align with a detailed repair log documenting single-tracking requests, obtained through a public records request by X user @InTheDaylight14 and exclusively provided to The Xylom.
“As a diehard MARTA rider, I’m frustrated,” former transportation executive Douglas Nagy said. “The system is often unusable when it matters most.”
Presented with The Xylom’s key findings, city council president Doug Shipman acknowledged that while he had been getting reports about MARTA’s service being consistently short on weekends, it was the first time he had been given the total number of train cancellations. Nor was he aware of Atlanta’s status as having one of the worst rail transit systems in the South.
“It’s an astounding number, 5,500 trains not running over the course of the year,” he said. “It’s damaging the overall consistency that riders have come to expect from MARTA.”
Despite being honored by the American Public Transportation Association for its “remarkable leadership, systemwide excellence, and serving as an exemplary role model for other North American transit agencies,” MARTA has fallen behind on the most significant statistic for a transit system: the number of riders that actually use it.
Having only gotten back half of its pre-Covid-19 ridership, MARTA’s recovery statistics were some of the worst in the nation outside major metropolitan areas like New York, Boston and Denver, where major track and station repair projects necessitate frequent system shutdowns. MARTA is down tens of thousands of riders compared to last year, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
On a normal weekend, riders can expect to get on a train in either the north-south or the east-west directions roughly every 10 minutes, given that at least two lines overlap (or “interline”) for the most part in each direction.
Since the pandemic began, MARTA has ramped up single-tracking — which means it runs trains on one track instead of the usual two — and has experienced operator shortages, all of which disrupt rail service and necessitate “special schedules.” This means the trains not only run every 24 minutes instead of every 20, but they also deviate from their intended route: Instead of passing through Downtown Atlanta, the Red Line and Green Line trains end at their intersections with the other lines on their leg, forcing riders from Bankhead to Buckhead to make transfers where they normally wouldn’t need to.
In a televised interview, MARTA board chair Kathryn Powers — who has utilized her public transit card once in the last 18 months, per publicly available data — told Atlanta News First that “when there is an event where we can utilize and access MARTA, we certainly enjoy that.”
In an Oct. 24 board meeting, MARTA’s chief operating officer George Wright acknowledged the existence of an internal list of events during which the rail service would not cut service or switch to single-tracking. This includes Atlanta United soccer games, Atlanta Falcons football games, as well as the SEC Football Championship, all held at Downtown’s 75,000-seat Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Atlanta Pride never made the priority events list because MARTA had only anticipated an increased ridership of 10,000. “We’re still fully trying to flesh out what that real attendance was,” Wright said. At one point, Wright, who had served as the Deputy Chief of Rail Operations for two years before being promoted to COO, had to turn to a colleague to ask how many trains were needed to clear an event of 10,000 attendance. (Three, but they never ran due to the power outage, he was told.)
Atlantans and visitors who attend what seem to be lower-priority games and concerts, or travel in and out of the city’s airport, have frequently endured long waiting times and dangerous crush loads. For instance, the last time that MARTA offered regular service during a home game of the HBCU Clark Atlanta University Panthers was the opener of their 2022 season.
During the latest board meeting, MARTA COO George Wright vowed that Atlanta Pridegoers would never have to experience service cuts or single tracking again. But when CEO Collie Greenwood pledged on the recently released Annual Customer Charter that MARTA would increase rail frequency on weekdays, he did not promise to restore normal service during other weekends in the calendar year.
MARTA declined to make any directors available for an interview. In a written statement, MARTA’s senior director of communications Stephany Fisher told The Xylom, “We remain focused on continuing to improve weekend service as you may have seen this past weekend, and delivering better connectivity for all our customers.”
However, service cuts and short-turning were brought back just a day after Fisher’s response, taking out 46 trains that would have serviced Midtown and Five Points up to the airport.
How Atlanta can bounce back
Shipman, Atlanta’s city council president, recalls that during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, MARTA expanded its train service and dedicated additional lanes for bus shuttles to various venues.
With fans from around the world expected to fly in and out of the city for the 2026 World Cup, Shipman is concerned about MARTA’s ability to act as the backbone for transit around Atlanta.
“There are a lot of folks that are going to prefer to take transit, and from a climate perspective, we would prefer that they take transit as opposed to an Uber or a private car,” Shipman said.
He said MARTA should consider expanding special services around the areas near Downtown, Midtown and the airport. “If we can’t have MARTA delivering consistent service, we are not going to offer a world-class experience.”
So how could Atlanta rebound from its self-inflicted transit crisis? Consider Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, the two other American cities that hosted the Olympics in the past four decades.
“For transit agencies, overall, a key mechanism to build ridership is to increase the number of people near transit,” wrote Yonah Freemark, the Land Use Lab research director at the Urban Institute. “That can be done by increasing population, job, and destination densities near transit, or improving transit service to densely populated areas.”
After beefing up bus services for the 1984 Summer Olympics, Los Angeles built six subway and light rail lines from scratch, as well as two busways. In Utah, after the first two segments opened ahead of schedule for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, its TRAX light rail system underwent at least seven extensions. Furthermore, both regions significantly increased their post-COVID weekend service frequencies after rider feedback, perhaps inspired by record ridership set by Tampa’s TECO Streetcar that was attributed to a similar move.
However, MARTA’s rapid transit network has barely expanded since the 1996 Olympics: The last rail extension opened in 2000, and only one of the 17 projects proposed after a 2016 tax increase has begun construction. The Atlanta City Council responded with a third-party audit that found MARTA owed about $70 million to these projects, drawing a high-profile spat between MARTA CEO Collie Greenwood and Atlanta City Hall.
Due to budget cuts, MARTA also significantly cut its core weekend service, which ran every five minutes in the mid-aughts, to nominally every 10 minutes — before the single tracking service cancellations started to go into effect.
“Weekends are times in which we’re trying to have activities and when people go into the city,” Shipman said. “And so it’s not only disappointing, but it’s damaging to the overall life of the city.”
An analysis by Freemark found that Atlanta has the highest rail transit ridership in the nation when normalized by the number of people living close to a station, a testament to the Peach State’s latent demand for transit.
But Atlanta has completely squandered that decade-long headstart; LA Metro now has more than double the rail ridership of MARTA. Since the summer, TRAX has completely recovered and at times exceeded its pre-COVID ridership, according to the American Public Transportation Association.
With both Los Angeles and Salt Lake City will be hosting the Olympics this decade, plans for more public transit upgrades are already underway. Even if either city falls short of delivering a “car-free” Olympics, the legacy of these transit projects will shift tens of millions of riders from congested highways into electric trains.
The City of Atlanta’s 2015 Climate Action Plan called for a 40% reduction in pre-2009 emission levels by 2030 partly by investing in public transit and transit-oriented development, building on successful local examples like Atlantic Station. While it hasn’t caught up with its “Great Society Metro” cousin Bay Area Rapid Transit in achieving a 100% greenhouse gas-free power supply, MARTA has successfully reduced carbon emissions by 32% between 2008 and 2022.
Yet metro Atlanta’s lack of viable transit options, particularly on the weekends, has led to a continuous increase in transportation carbon emissions, erasing gains made in the commercial and residential sectors.
While building out new rail transit infrastructure will take time, restoring consistent weekend service is low-hanging fruit for MARTA to bring back more riders. During Labor Day weekend, trains ran at weekday peak frequencies with core service every six minutes, moving over 750,000 people — about two and a half times the total attendance of Atlanta Pride.
“We’re never going to reach our climate goals unless we expand our transit capacity and our transit delivery,” Shipman said.