Atlanta — Mayor Moves Streetcar

Rail Transit Online, December 2005

The nonprofit Atlanta Streetcar Inc. organization has handed over its proposal to build a 12-mi. (19.3 km) line along Peachtree Street from south of downtown to Buckhead to Mayor Shirley Franklin, who reportedly wants to have the system up and running by the end of her second term.  “Obviously, we're not in the business of building streetcars,” businessman Michael Robison, chairman of the streetcar board, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  “That is something that the next level of leaders is going to be taking on.”  The concept has drawn widespread community support, with many business people seeing the trolleys as providing Atlanta with a tourist trademark much like New Orleans.  Initial studies show there would be significant economic development along the 44-stop route, which would provide a link between MARTA’s subway and the proposed Beltline transit loop.  “It will encourage people to get out and see the rest of the city,” Spurgeon Richardson, president of the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, told the Journal-Constitution.  “It makes it easy and accessible.”  A second trolley line has been proposed running through downtown from the Georgia Aquarium to the Martin Luther King Jr. historic district.  Still to be determined is a source of the $335 million needed to build both lines, which would draw an estimated 21,500 daily riders.