We crunched the numbers of metro Atlanta’s weekend rail service cuts. Here’s what we found.
As Georgia’s oldest LGBTQ+ advocacy nonprofit, the Atlanta Pride Committee is likely used to pushback when organizing their annual Atlanta Pride, the largest free Pride festival in the United States.
But perhaps neither the committee nor Pridegoers expected the biggest hurdle to be getting to the venue.
Even on a weekend when 300,000 people get together to celebrate gender and sexual diversity in Midtown Atlanta, the city’s transit authority was running its trains on a slower, “special” schedule. In one instance, it took the train as long as 42 minutes to arrive due to a power outage, while riders scrambled for alternative modes of transportation.
“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. “And then I heard from several folks who said that they waited a long time, extremely full cars, [who] were frustrated by the whole experience.”
The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, colloquially known by its acronym 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.
Atlantans noticed the irony in MARTA’s heavy presence on the streets through Pride-themed buses.
“[Y’all] rolled out an ATL Pride bus but you can’t provide adequate rail service through Pride weekend… interesting,” local public administrator Matthew Todd wrote on X. “What’s that thing again? Oh yeah, it’s called ‘rainbow capitalism.’”
“Had some friends leave the [MARTA] stations they were at and instead drive to Pride [because] the trains just weren’t coming. Idk sounds kinda homophobic to me,” local organizer and economist Susi Durán wrote.
This wasn’t a case of outright defiance against the city’s “Too Busy to Hate” identity. 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.
“I know a couple of folks who basically decided not to go because they saw the headways.” — Atlanta City Council president Doug Shipman
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.
This aligns with an independent analysis conducted by Nick, a Georgia State University student and frequent MARTA rider. It also matches a detailed repair log obtained via the Georgia Open Records Act by X user @InTheDaylight14 that was 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.”
Despite being honored by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) 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. Atlanta’s Pride weekend was no exception, with MARTA down tens of thousands of riders compared to last year, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Tracking-related service cuts have slowed down the frequency of trains on the north-south route for almost 80% of weekends since October 2023. In total, nearly 5,500 weekend trains were taken out of service last year.
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.
MARTA has ramped up single-tracking — which means it runs trains on one track instead of the usual two — since the COVID-19 pandemic began 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.
“Single tracking on Atlanta Pride Sunday! Bad idea!” wrote the Atlanta Downtown Neighborhood Association on X.
In a televised interview, MARTA board chair Kathryn Powers — who has utilized her public transit card only once in the last 18 months, according to 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 October 24th 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.
He did not mention whether that list included events from State Farm Arena, a 20,000-seat indoor venue adjacent to Mercedes-Benz Stadium and home to the Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club; or Midtown’s Bobby Dodd Stadium, home to the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets and 50,000 of their fans. Atlanta Pride never made the priority events list because MARTA had only anticipated an increased ridership of 10,000 beforehand.
“We’re still fully trying to flesh out what that real attendance was,” Wright said.
At one point, Wright, who had been 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.)
October 19th and 20th was only the third non-holiday weekend since the beginning of 2024 when Powers assumed Board Chair duties, where there were no service cuts on MARTA Rail.
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.
MARTA declined to make any directors, including Powers, 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.
The airport did not respond to a request for comment.
After being presented with key findings from The Xylom’s investigation, 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 that he had been given the total number of train cancellations, nor was he aware of Atlanta’s worst-in-the-South rail transit service distinction.
“It’s an astounding number, 5,500 trains not running over the course of the year,” he said, surprised by the total number of train cancellations and Atlanta’s status as having one of the worst rail transit systems in the South. “It’s damaging the overall consistency that riders have come to expect from MARTA.”
Atlanta is set to host several large sporting events, including the College Football Playoff Championship Game on January 20, eight matches in the 2026 World Cup, and Super Bowl LXII in 2028. Shipman recalls that during the 1996 Summer Olympics, which were held in Atlanta, MARTA expanded its train service and dedicated additional lanes for bus shuttles to various venues. As fans from multiple countries will fly in and out of the city for the 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 says 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, on X. “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.
“For transit agencies, overall, a key mechanism to build ridership is to increase the number of people near transit. That can be done by... improving transit service to densely populated areas.” — Yonah Freemark, Research Director, Land Use Lab at Urban
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. Yet, 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 APTA.
Both Los Angeles and Salt Lake City will be hosting the Olympics this decade, which means 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 (BART) in achieving a 100% greenhouse gas-free power supply, MARTA has successfully reduced carbon emissions by 32% between 2008 and 2022.
“We’re never going to reach our climate goals unless we expand our transit capacity and our transit delivery.” — Atlanta City Council president Doug Shipman
Yet, metro Atlanta’s “love affair with cars” — or more accurately a 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.
“We’re never going to reach our climate goals unless we expand our transit capacity and our transit delivery,” Shipman said.
Since it will take time to build out new rail transit infrastructure, 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, or about two and a half times the total attendance of Atlanta Pride.
During the latest board meeting, MARTA COO George Wright vowed that Atlanta Pridegoers would never have to experience service cuts or single tracking again. That said, when MARTA 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.
“I’m wondering to what extent pride weekend was a wake-up call and if MARTA will turn around and provide more ‘normal’ service,” wrote Nick.
