Transporting Atlanta: the Mode of Mobility Under Construction
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Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Sociology Dissertations Department of Sociology 5-26-2006 Transporting Atlanta: The Mode of Mobility under Construction Miriam Fiedler Konrad Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/sociology_diss Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Konrad, Miriam Fiedler, "Transporting Atlanta: The Mode of Mobility under Construction." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2006. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/sociology_diss/26 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Sociology at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sociology Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. TRANSPORTING ATLANTA: THE MODE OF MOBILITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION by MIRIAM KONRAD ABSTRACT The transportation crisis in Atlanta has attained epic proportions. Inconveniences and hardships created by too many automobiles and not enough alternatives for movement, have reached untenable levels. Getting at what lies beneath the asphalt, interrogating what drives the paving of America, along with the seemingly unstoppable space, energy, and money consumption that the current mode of mobility entails will perhaps allow for future decision- making that includes a more nuanced reading of the landscape. In an effort to understand these forces, I interrogate the creation, trajectories, and current positioning of three major Atlanta transportation projects: the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), the bus and rail system that has been the backbone of metropolitan Atlanta’s public transportation system for the past 30 years; the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), which is the super-agency created in 1999 in an effort to address the air quality issues in the region; and the Beltline, an enormously popular current proposal to build a 22- mile loop of greenspace, transit, and other amenities around an inner loop of the city built on existing rail beds. This investigation engages a wide literature on race, space, and place; attendance at various meetings and relevant symposia; archival data; and in-depth interviews with 20 area transportation experts and interested parties. As race and regionalism are so central to understanding power and procedure in metro Atlanta, particular attention is given to racial and spatial practices. This research reveals the contest over issue framing between car- centered growth promoters, environmental (or green) actors, and social justice, or equity proponents and how the outcomes of this triumvirate’s competition results in regional transportation policies and procedures. The examination of the three instances; MARTA, GRTA, and the Beltline, give us an excellent window into the making of mobility in the region. INDEX WORDS: Transportation, Atlanta, Race and Regionalism, Mobility, GRTA, Beltline, MARTA. TRANSPORTING ATLANTA: THE MODE OF MOBILITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION by MIRIAM KONRAD A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2006 Copyright by Miriam Konrad 2006 TRANSPORTING ATLANTA: THE MODE OF MOBILITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION by MIRIAM KONRAD Major Professor: Charles Jaret Committee: Wendy Simonds Charles Gallagher Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2006 iv DEDICATION For my dear ones Leslie, Eric, Ruth, Marilyn, Margaret, and Andrea – who all took the ultimate journey during the writing of this dissertation. v Acknowledgements I wish to express my thanks to Dr. Charles Jaret, without whom this dissertation would not have been written. He, along with Dr. Wendy Simonds and Dr. Charles Gallagher, inspired and instructed me throughout this demanding and rewarding journey. Thanks also to Georgia State University for providing a grant which in part supported my research. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to my enormous support network (what did I do to deserve it?) – friends, family, colleagues, the entire Georgia State Sociology Department – and foremost, always my precious Bob. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ……………………………………………………………………… iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ………………………………………………………….... vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ……………………………………………………… vii CHAPTER 1 BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING ………………………………................ 1 Why Transportation? ................................................................................ 1 Why Atlanta? …………………………………………………................ 3 Research Design ……………………………………………………….. 6 Chapter Overviews …………………………………………………….. 10 2 THE TRANSPORTATION TRIO: RACE, PLACE, AND SPACE…… 18 Race Literature ………………………………………………………….. 18 Place Research ………………………………………………………….. 34 Space Narrative …………………………………………………………. 78 3 MARTA: MUCH ADO REGARDING TOPOGRAPHICAL ARRANGEMENTS ……………………………………………………... 94 A Slow Start for Rapid Transit …………………………………………. 95 How Do You Solve A Problem Like MARTA? ……………………... 102 MARTA’s Future: Revise or Demise? ………………………………... 133 4 GRTA: OLD WHINES IN NEW BOTTLENECKS …………………… 143 GRTA Comes Into Being ………………………………………………. 143 Godzilla or Jolly “Green” Giant? ………………………………………. 146 vii Road Blocks, Stop Signs, and Yielding the right-of-Way ……………… 151 When Is A Bus Not A Bus? ……………………………………………. 175 What Will GRTA Be? ………………………………………………….. 180 5 THE BELTLINE: GREAT GREEN HOPE ……………………………. 184 What Is the Beltline? …………………………………………………… 184 What’s Black and White and Green All Over? ………………………… 188 Power and Politics ……………………………………………………… 194 Honeymoon Over Before It Began? …………………………………… 203 Where Will the Beltline Lead? ………………………………………… 217 6 THE CASES IN RELIEF: A THREE-TAILED TALE ………………... 227 Questions Answered in Brief …………………………………………… 228 Two Wild Cards ………………………………………………………… 233 The Cases In Conversation ……………………………………………... 242 7 MEANS OF EGRESS ………………………………………………….. 258 The Third Road …………………………………………………………. 262 Deus Ex Machina ……………………………………………………….. 297 REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………... 308 APPENDICES ……………………………………………………………………… 328 A THE RESPONDENTS …………………………………………………. 328 B SAMPLE INTERVIEW GUIDE ……………………………………….. 331 C THE PRINCIPLES OF NEW URBANISM …………………………… 332 1 Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION: BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING WHY TRANSPORTATION? It is astonishing how many of the world’s great struggles may be framed in terms of mobility issues, from forty years in the desert, to the middle passage, the Trail of Tears, diaspora, dislocation, expatriation, repatriation, immigration, emigration, access to work, school, play, home and so much more. Transportation options serve as both a barrier and a bridge, literally and figuratively and may truncate or elongate both time and space for all denizens of the planet. The wherewithal to move about is increasingly packaged as an item that may be bought and sold whose exchange value buys more than simple arrival at destinations. The cultural cachet of being able to traverse a great deal of space and consume time at a rapid rate affords one a favored position in society, smoothing the road for a successful life. This commodification of movement and the consequent privileging and punishing, mobilizing and miring, conferring and crippling, produced and reproduced by the systematized transportation complex, evident globally, fine-tuned in the United States, and well illustrated in the Atlanta case, is what I refer to as the mode of mobility. Both preference for and access to transportation options are created through overt and subtle processes that include: creating spaces that only lend themselves to certain forms of mobility (namely, the automobile) and preclude in many instances any alternatives; fetishizing high-speed, privatized forms of mobility; and privileging those forms that have been accommodated and fetishized, and also those persons who advocate them. The built environment both proscribes and describes where and how we are going and the discourse that both reflects and creates that environment too often goes unexamined. This reflexivity is manifest in all aspects of our movement as well as in our immobility. We learn what we “need” in part from reading the landscape that we are given (which was created by people’s choices or lack thereof at some point), which in turn gives those very needs life. Ever more roads call for ever more cars and we become increasingly less able to distinguish what we created from what is a “natural” and “obvious” trajectory of progress. The human hand becomes invisible as creator and director of transportation options, in such a way as to allow us to believe, often, that we are merely following the road as it stretches before us, rather than shaping its twists and turns as we go. In this vein, then, the mode of mobility not only determines where we go and how we get there, (as if that were not enough) but further confers value added to (or subtracted from) the means that we choose or are forced to employ, and simultaneously obscures from us our power in the production of those means. Deciphering the hieroglyph of the mode of mobility and its ability to conflate physical movement and social position is the aim of my dissertation. Mine is fundamentally a neo-Marxian perspective: “Marxian” in that I take relations of power as central to all social processes, and “neo” in that I conceive these relations as situated