Waiting for the Bus

I've had some time off work recently and have been out and about in the city on MARTA a little more frequently than usual.  There are two bus routes that run on Highland near our street, and between them, you can get to lots of places -- one of them goes to downtown, and another goes to Midtown, and both connect to rail stations so you can get to everywhere the rail system goes, including the airport.  But the buses don't run very frequently -- if it's not rush hour, you're going to wait a long time, and even in rush hour they may still be 25 minutes or longer apart, so for this to not be a complete exercise in frustration, you need to know when the bus is coming so you get there before the bus you want comes, not after.

This is the premise of MARTA Army's Timely Trip project, to post (and keep current) schedules at neighborhood bus stops.  I've signed up for the two closest to my street, and went to the MARTA Army event a couple of weeks ago to get my updated schedules.  We were at the Atlanta City Studio, temporarily located at Ponce City Market.  The Studio is occupied by real city planners from the City of Atlanta, but is open for visitors and hosts events that are open to the public.  This time, the MARTA Army folks proposed that we personalize the schedule, with art or in some other way.

I opted just for a short message in colored pencil, pointing out that if you took MARTA, you wouldn't have to find a place to park:

And here they are, in place:

Now that's all well and good, but for the posted schedules to be helpful, the buses need to run on schedule, and they don't so much. Sometimes there's little traffic and few passengers to stop for, and they run ahead of schedule, or the traffic is terrible and they run late.  Even that wouldn't be a complete deal-breaker if you could find out that your bus is running 10 minutes early or 15 minutes late - you could plan accordingly.  MARTA does have an app with some helpful functions but you still can't really tell from the "real-time map" when your bus is likely to show up.  This is not one of my bus routes (more about that in a minute) but this is what the map looks like:

The map is not continuously updated, and even when the buses appear on the map, sometimes they disappear or just don't move and and it's hard to figure out from this whether it's time to head for the bus stop or not.  That's when they show up on the map in the first place.  This is the current map for Route 16, the bus that goes south on Highland to downtown:

There should be a southbound bus but nothing shows up (it being early Sunday morning as I am writing this, there is not yet a northbound bus running; that's a separate problem.)  Many of the buses don't seem to have location information available, which makes this function not useful.  (I also tried to take a screen shot of the other route on Highland, Route 36, but every time I try to open that map, the app closes, which is another feature which really limits its usefulness.)

I was complaining about this absence of information about when the buses were expected to show up at the very first MARTA Army event I went to, and someone told me that there is an app that provides this information that the MARTA app does not.  One Bus Away takes the location information from MARTA and projects when your bus is expected to show up.  Or at least it used to; more recently it doesn't seem to know where the buses are, and just shows you the scheduled times, which doesn't help:

Advance Atlanta, one of several groups that is working on regional transit issues, is collaborating with Civic Dinners to provide a framework for people who are interested to get together and discuss what are the problems with transit in the Atlanta region and hopefully get more of us to care about the solutions.  You can sign up to host a dinner or find one that someone else has organized and sign up to attend one.  My neighbor Alyssa hosted the first one last week.  This is not quite our entire group -- one person joined us after this was taken -- but we had good representation from the neighborhood, and and there were several people with professional interest in transit issues.  It was a good discussion, and it was interesting for me to hear other perspectives on the issue.

One of the questions we discussed was if we could magically solve one really big, intractable problem, what would it be?  By the time I spoke up, others that already mentioned the big ones -- absence of an integrated regional transit system, fragmented governance across the metro region, and the racism that is so deeply entangled with transit issues in Atlanta -- so I said I just wanted to be able to tell when the bus was going to show up.  Really, I'd take it more often if it wasn't so frustrating.  This should not be so hard.  Just let us know your best estimate of when the bus is going to show up at the bus stop.

In November, we will have a chance to vote on funding for MARTA.  This is a big opportunity, and there are lots of ideas about how those funds should be invested, if the referendum passes.  Citizens for Progressive Transit put together an interactive website where you can put together your own proposal for how to invest the $2.5B or more that the sales tax is expected to raise over the next 40 years.  But before we extend rail or build more streetcar tracks or even buy more buses, we should fix the system we have so that we know when the bus is probably going to show up. Just that one thing.  It should not be that hard.

Jane's Walk in Downtown Atlanta

I can't even remember how I found out about it; it might have been an email from the local Congress for the New Urbanism chapter, or maybe I saw it on Facebook.  CNU Atlanta, along with PEDS, was hosting a Jane's Walk on May 7.  I had never heard of Jane's Walk, but I had heard of Jane Jacobs, the influential author and advocate for livable cities.  (Just before I sat down to write this, I looked for my copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but I couldn't find it; it is probably at the bottom of one of the large piles of books next to my bed.)  Jane Jacobs identified the things about cities and neighborhoods that makes them good places to be -- things like diversity of use, older buildings, small blocks, and population density.  The group behind Jane's Walks (more about them in a minute) have a nice overview of her life and her work on their website, or you can look at the graphic version from artist James Gulliver Hancock -- it's pretty much all there.

Jane Jacobs lived in New York City and later in Toronto.  After her death in 2006, friends and colleagues in Toronto started Jane's Walks to honor her ideas and her legacy.  What is a Jane's Walk?  Here's what is on the Jane's Walk website:

Jane’s Walks are free, locally organized walking tours, in which people get together to explore, talk about and celebrate their neighbourhoods. Where more traditional tours are a bit like walking lectures, a Jane’s Walk is more of a walking conversation. Leaders share their knowledge, but also encourage discussion and participation among the walkers.

Iain and I rode MARTA to Woodruff Park, where we met up with the group.  The walk's leader, Candler Vinson, was late (he was stuck on MARTA, someone announced) so there was some waiting around before we got started.  One woman had brought her copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  It was worn with many Post-It notes marking pages.  Someone handed out a sheet with the Jane Jacobs graphic printed on it,  While we waited we checked out the concrete ping-pong table in the park.

Once Candler Vinson got there, we headed east on Auburn Avenue, and our first stop was across the street from the Atlanta Daily World Building.  One of our several enthusiastic narrators told the story of how the building -- damaged in the 2008 tornado -- was proposed for demolition by a developer.  That didn't happen and another developer purchased the building and renovated it for commercial use on the first floor and apartments above.  Somehow I did not take picture of it (I think it was in the shade) but there are photos at the link above.  There's now a coffee shop and a juice place on the first floor.  What I did take a picture of at this stop was the person with the microphone who I think is Darin Givens while Terry Kearns took a picture of the crowd.

We continued on to Piedmont where we stopped and talked about what we'd seen.  The thing that had struck me the most was how much of the area was taken up with parking decks.  There were more places to park, I think, than things to do once you got there.  Sally Flocks from PEDS talked about how all the four lane one way streets created more road capacity than almost any city needed.  At one point along our route the sidewalk was nearly completely blocked by a large sign for motorists telling them a lane was closed ahead.  And there was discussion about how Georgia State had been really good for downtown, by putting lots of students there (not so much for all the parking decks, though.)

On Ellis Street we stopped across the street from the newly renovated Atlanta Legal Aid building, now named for our neighbor Steve Gottlieb.  It's a beautiful building, but it's nearly completely surrounded by parking.

After that we crossed Peachtree and continued on Carnegie Way.  I think that is where I got this photo of the iconic Portman-style skybridges that sucked people off the street in a very non-Jane Jacobs kind of way.  On the Jane's Walk website, that's Jane Jacobs' Big Idea number 1, "eyes on the street."  The difference between a street that feels safe and a street that doesn't feel safe is people -- people going to and from work or school, out for a bite to eat, or out to shop, or to visit friends, and anything that diverts people from the street makes the street feel less safe, and if it feels less safe, people are even more likely to avoid it.

Our next stop was Walton Spring Park.  On Google Maps, the park is green, and there is some green there, with trees creating a pleasant shaded area on the sidewalks surrounding the park.  

The park itself, not so much.  It is a bare, unshaded granite plaza with benches that appeared to be used only by homeless people.

Looking at these pictures and remembering what it was like to be there that afternoon, one does have to wonder who thought this was a good idea.  Central Atlanta Progress and the City of Atlanta and some other people did this on purpose in 2008, to honor Andrew Young.  It seems like it might have been even more of an honor if they had designed a park that people actually wanted to be in.  

From there we headed southwest on Ted Turner Drive and then back southeast, but I am not sure what street this was on but I stopped to take a picture of it.

Our next stop was the Fairlie-Poplar District, which I have heard of for years but don't think I had ever visited.  It was very pleasant, with narrow shady streets, small buildings from the 19th and early 20th century, and several appealing-looking restaurants and bars at street level, with what appeared to be residential floors above.  Big Idea number 3 is "the generators of diversity" that help make the city "diverse, safe, social, convenient, and economically vibrant" -- mixed uses, aged buildings, small blocks, and population density.

From there we headed back southwest on Forsyth Street.  I think this is where I took this picture, where clearly the city is trying to do something about the overly wide streets.

We continued on Forsyth and went by the Atlanta Journal Constitution building at the corner of Forsyth and Marietta.  I am sorry that the picture is better of the fence than it is of the building.  It is a weirdly compelling sight, with trees growing from various surfaces; this photograph does not do it justice.  The building is definitely ruin porn material; I just didn't take a good picture of it.

We stopped at the Federal office complex, where there was a pleasant shady green space.  Thousands of Federal workers have their offices there, but apparently they park their cars in their parking deck, go to work, have lunch at the cafeteria in the building, work some more and then go home, and the nearby commercial areas don't benefit particularly by their presence.

We headed back southeast on Martin Luther King Jr Drive, and stopped at Broad Street, which the Goat Farm team has been trying to catalyze as a downtown arts district.  I would have liked to walk around and explore but we kept moving; I guess I will have to come back.

From there we headed past the Fulton County Government Center and then back to the northeast.  We ended up at Underground Atlanta, where one of our speakers made the point about the hazards of having the place in the hands of a single owner, where whatever you do it's a really big investment, and if it fails (as has happened several times at Underground) it fails big, instead of one-building-at-a-time investment and experimentation.  That's Big Idea number 7, "make many little plans" and Big Idea number 8, "gradual money."  

The diversity of a good neighborhood can only be achieved when we allow many different people to pursue their own little plans, individually and collectively.

Both diverse little plans and new kinds of work require diverse little sources of money available on an ongoing basis.  Unfortunately, both public and private sources often only provide money floods and droughts instead.

Iain and I agreed that it was an interesting way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  So many neighborhoods with great old buildings that could be special, if we renovated them instead of knocking them down to build parking decks.  I found the thing I always find when I travel by foot or by bike through parts of town I knew only by car, that things are much closer together than I thought.  From the point of view of distance, it was definitely walkable, even if the walking wasn't necessarily pleasant with obstructions on sidewalks and so little interesting to look at in some places.  And finally, the overwhelming sense that for downtown to be radically better, we have to have more people there without their cars.

On the way home we (well, make that "I" - this was more me than Iain) got impatient and frustrated with MARTA -- a bus was supposed to be coming, but it didn't, and then we were going to take the train but none were showing up on the electronic board, and then the next bus didn't show up on One Bus Away and wasn't moving on MARTA's real time map.  So we booked an Uber ride home.  As soon as we did that, of course our bus appeared.  

Getting There from Here

I hadn't heard of the MARTA Army until September, when they sat their recruiting station up across Boulevard from where I was working at Atlanta Streets Alive, back in September.  I was working at the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition table in front of Blueprint Church and between the Love to Ride group, that was loaning out bikes, and the new Atlanta bike share project, that had examples of some of the bikes that might be available in Atlanta next year.

Across the street were a couple of guys with a table and a tent and a sign that said MARTA Army.  I was working by myself at the ABC tent for quite a while so it wasn't until mid-afternoon that I was able to walk over and talk to them.  The two guys at the table told me that the MARTA Army was working to improve the rider experience on MARTA and their first project is an adopt-a-bus-stop project.  I didn't know that I wanted necessarily to adopt a bus stop, but I did sign up for their mailing list.

Later, I checked out their website ("Hey there, Metro Atlanta LET'S BUILD A WORLD CLASS TRANSIT SYSTEM")  Here's their vision:

The Atlanta region has been diagnosed with a bad case of urban sprawl and traffic congestion by urban planners and transportation experts. Out city needs better public transportation to become more accessible, equitable, and competitive. The Atlanta region's fragmented governmental institutions still lack the support to build the transit system we need. The initiative for world class transit system must come from citizens. Together, we can show that the Atlanta Region is ready for a world class transit system.

This sounded pretty good to me, so I made a small contribution and showed up for bootcamp at Across the Street in the Old Fourth Ward in mid-October.  I think I was the oldest person there (Georgia Tech graduate students seemed to be the major demographic group), but I signed up to get a schedule for the bus stop nearest me.  I didn't stick around long enough to pick it up -- printing and laminating the signs was taking a long time -- but an Emory graduate student offered to drop it by my house later, and I took her up on that offer.

The bus stop closest to my house, at Wessyngton and North Highland, is a stop at which I'd never actually caught a bus, although I did get off there at least once during that week that I was a MARTA commuter, earlier this fall.  But Hannah dropped the sign off at the house, and later Tom and I put it up.  I didn't do it quite right -- the plastic ties were just a bit too tight -- but now the schedule is posted, and riders who don't have a phone or who don't want to use up their data (an issue I heard at bootcamp) can at least know when the bus is supposed to come.  More importantly, maybe, non-riders will take a look and think, you know, maybe I could take the bus.

When Atlanta Streets Alive came to Peachtree Street in late October, I had expected to be out of town, so I didn't volunteer to work.  Then the trip got cancelled and I thought maybe Tom would join me, so I still didn't volunteer.  But he didn't want to or couldn't (I don't remember the details) and ABC really needed help that day so I ended up saying I'd work and ended up assigned to a tent near the Midtown MARTA station.  I didn't have any idea where I could park -- and I am not brave enough to ride my bike there, even on a Sunday -- so I checked the schedules and One Bus Away and got there and back on the bus, from my very own bus stop.

I'm still a big supporter of bike infrastructure in Atlanta, and think it is part of the picture for what Atlanta needs, but what our city needs more than anything is a real transit system, so there is a real alternative to driving for most of us much of the time.  Younger people are driving less; maybe when they are older they'll move to the suburbs but somehow I don't think so.  Atlanta needs transit, and it needs citizens who will advocate for it and who will use it, now, to get to the places they can get to on it.

Last night we went to the symphony. The surface parking lot where we used to park is closed now so we had to park in the deck on 15th Street.  There's a MARTA station, right there, but no easy way to get there from here.  We paid $10 to park.  That's MARTA fares for two people, round trip.

So when you see a schedule on a bus stopm like this one at Highland and Amsterdam, check it out.  Maybe you can get somewhere you need to go, at least sometimes.  Maybe you too will join the army.  And there are a couple of bus stops on the other side of Highland that still need schedules.

Carless in Atlanta

I haven't written anything here for months.  At least part of the reason is that Tom and I have been riding our bikes on weekend mornings pretty routinely.  We go through Piedmont Park to the Eastside Trail on the Beltline and then to Krog Street Market for breakfast.  It's a good length of ride for us -- just under 8 miles, I think -- and except for the hills at the very end on the way back, a pretty easy ride.

Sometime last month, Caroline's car (a very old Honda Accord that was old when Kathy and Steve gave it to us years ago) ended up in the shop for almost two weeks.  So Tom gave her the van to use while her car was in the shop, and he was going to rent a car.  I told him I didn't think that was necessary, that he could use mine, that I could walk to work, or whatever.  It's around 2 1/2 miles -- a little far to walk every day, even though I do like to walk, but I certainly could do it and have done it.  It's a perfect distance for a bike ride, except for (1) the hills, and more importantly (2) several stretches of road that are too dangerous for biking.  So that was out.  I did walk to work several days.  Some afternoons Tom picked me up, sometimes I walked home.

The second week it occurred to me that I should at least try MARTA.  While walking up North Highland, I'd see the buses roaring past me, almost empty.  Clearly I would have gotten their faster if I'd taken the bus, even if the buses don't run quite frequently enough.  But taking the bus from home to work requires transfer from one bus to another, and it's not that far in the first place, and the transfer on the way home requires crossing two very busy streets, and the buses don't run that frequently, and I didn't really know how to do it anyway.  I take MARTA to the airport, sometimes, but I haven't taken a MARTA bus in probably 30 years or more.  (I am pretty sure I did take them many years ago when visiting my cousin Reaunell when she lived in Atlanta, but that was a really long time ago.)

When buses don't run so frequently, it matters a lot, having an idea how long it will be before your bus shows up.  In Chicago this summer, we used the text feature at the transit stops, where you texted one number to another number, and got right a reply back right away, how long it would be before the next buses or trains were expected.  It didn't make them come faster, but you did know (or at least had a pretty good idea) when the bus was going to show up.  I found the MARTA app and it had what they called a "real time map" which was helpful but still didn't really tell me whether or not I needed to leave the house now or I could wait five minutes.  I wasn't even completely sure where the nearest bus stops were.

But I found the bus stop and used my Breeze card (which I'd bought to ride the train to the airport) and did take the bus to work several times and home or partway home a time or two less.  The first bus never had many people on it, but the second one was crowded, and sometimes I ended up standing.  The ride wasn't long on either one and once I missed my stop because I was reading something on my phone.  Especially in the morning on the nearly empty bus the drivers seemed delighted to see me.  Standing by a bus stop sign at the curb with no shelter, no trees, nothing, is really uncomfortable, even if the weather is fine. And the "real time map" was helpful but I still ended up getting confused about where the bus was, and once I decided I'd missed it and headed off on foot, but I hadn't, and a few minutes later it drove past without me.

Then a week or two later I volunteered at one of the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition's information tents at Atlanta Streets Alive.  A couple guys showed up and set up a tent for the MARTA Army nearby.  I asked what the MARTA Army was, and learned it was a group that was working to improve MARTA through citizen-led efforts.  MARTA does need to be better  but to be fair about it many of the problems they have are not ones that MARTA can solve on their own.  But I'm all for citizen-led efforts, so I enlisted on the spot and agreed to adopt a bus stop, now that I know where they are.  I went to their meeting Thursday night and learned that there is in fact an app that will tell you when the next bus should come.

But as soon as Caroline's car got out of the shop, and Tom got the van back, I was back to driving to work.

The True Cost of Parking

I was in Boston in July and went to an event at Fenway Park.  The Red Sox weren't in town, so we had the ballpark to ourselves.  We got a tour; I got to sit in the press box as well as in one of the coveted seats that were added above the left field wall 10 years ago.  The Red Sox have played in Fenway Park since 1912; in 2012 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.  But here is what was most notable to me about Fenway Park (even though the picture does not capture it very well):

Look on the righthand side of the photo.  On the other side of Yawkey Way, there are bars and restaurants, and I bet it's fun being there on game night even if you don't have tickets to the game.

On the other hand, let's look at the area around Turner Field.

All there is, almost as far as the eye can see, is asphalt.  And yet, it wasn't enough.  The businessmen who run the Atlanta Braves who announced yesterday that the team is moving to Cobb County cited not enough parking along with traffic and "the fan experience" as the reasons for the move.

So they are moving outside the Perimeter, to an area near the junction of I-75 and I-285, and building a brand new stadium with multi-use development around it with bars and restaurants.  And parking -- lots of parking.

Yesterday, when I heard the news that the Braves were abandoning a city that supported them through the bad years for a county that refuses to allow MARTA to be extended there, I went pretty much straight to anger and I'm still there.  I'm angry at Liberty Media, the owner of the Braves, and think they should be honest about it and change the name of the team to the Cobb County Braves.  I'm also angry at multiple city leaders and the Atlanta Fulton County Recreation Authority for not doing more to mitigate the impact of the stadium on the neighborhood, which would have had the additional benefit of "improving the fan experience."

Let's be really clear about this.  Developers can build malls and theme parks, but it's pretty hard to build a neighborhood from scratch.  And they don't want MARTA in Cobb County, so they are going to have to have spaces for 40,000 people and then some to park their cars.  Look at that photo of Fenway Park.  It's not just different from Turner Field because it's a hundred years old and on the National Register of Historic Places; there is almost no where nearby to park, and that's just fine because it's close to the Kenmore Square stop on the Green Line.

The problem is cars.  As long as we drive them every where we go, we *can't* create great places, because we have to have places to park.

Good luck with that theme park.

Ride or Die

When I got home from work on Monday, I saw one of my neighbors out walking his dog.  We chatted for just a moment and he commented that he'd been enjoying being in the city over the holiday with so little traffic.  We've noticed that too, how empty the roads are, with schools not in session and so many people off work and out of town.  Even those of us who are here are not driving so much.  For me it's been trips to the grocery store and driving kids to movie theaters.

I guess it was last Saturday when I took Sarah to Phipps Plaza, where she was meeting a friend to see a movie.  Even with the city in reduced-driving mode, Lenox Road was still a slog and I had some time to look around at the sights of Buckhead while sitting at red lights.  So much new construction there (albeit all of it initiated and most of it completed before the real estate/fiscal collapse in 2008) -- with all those tall, gleaming buildings, it almost looks like a city.  But even on a day when many people were not going to work, the streets were clogged with cars and all I could think, looking at those buildings, was what on earth were they thinking, building them there.  Even though there are two -- two! -- MARTA stops in walking distance from the intersection of Lenox and Peachtree, almost everyone who works in or visits any of those buildings is going to come in their own automobile.  How are all those cars supposed to get there and back?  They can build the buildings but the cars still degrade the quality of the experience in very substantial ways.  (And I wasn't even thinking about parking.)

For Christmas, Caroline gave me a copy of Jeff Speck's new book, Walkable City:  How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.  The book includes many references to Atlanta, mostly as a bad example.  One of Speck's points is that traffic congestion isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as it isn't an excuse to build more roads (which only leads to more sprawl and more congestion on down the line); there's a lot of elasticity in the amount people drive and if the cost in time and aggravation is high enough, many trips just aren't made.  It also can -- in cities that have the political will to do it -- drive investment in transportation alternatives.  "The cities with the most congestion are often the cities that provide the best alternatives to being stuck in congestion.  Of the ten cities ranked worst for traffic in the 2010 Urban Mobility Report, all but three -- Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta -- have excellent public transit and a vast collection of walkable neighborhoods."

A couple of months ago I saw part of a presentation from the ProWalk/ProBike ProPlace conference in Long Beach in September -- I can't remember who the presenter was and I can't find it now -- in which the speaker made the point that the absence of transportation alternatives keeps poor people poor.  If the jobs aren't in your neighborhood and there isn't public transportation, you can't get a job if you're poor, because you can't afford a car.  This is not a rocket science kind of observation, but I had never thought about it that way before.

And I'm not very optimistic that Atlanta will be anything but a cautionary tale for the foreseeable future.  The road builders and the developers are too tight with the people who make the policies (and maybe are the people who make the policies) so there will continue to be strong pressure to build road capacity to support the unsustainable sprawl that makes up the Atlanta metropolitan area.  MARTA will continue to be hemmed in by counties that don't want transit (or at least don't want anyone from Atlanta to come into their county) and starved for resources by a state legislature that doesn't like Atlanta and likes public transportation even less.

We found this sticker on one of the Park Atlanta parking payment machines off Edgewood last month, and Iain got Sarah the T-shirt that goes with it for Christmas.  On the way back from the movie at Phipps I asked Sarah about her experience with MARTA.  It doesn't feel safe, she said.  Not enough people.  Right, because all the people who have cars are driving them, and even people who can't really afford cars have to have them because this is Atlanta and that's what we do in Atlanta.  

As long as cars come first, we'll continue to make what in the long term are the wrong decisions for the city.  That "Ride or Die" slogan might be for the metro area, not for its citizens.  Maybe we won't die, but we won't flourish, either, sitting in our cars looking at the tail lights of the car in front of us.

Mass Transit

I was in Geneva this week attending a meeting. In the baggage claim area at the Geneva airport, there is a machine that - when you press the button - will give you a free ticket for public transportation into the city. You can use it on the train - the train station is next door - or the bus. There are many trains an hour. They all stop at the Geneva station so you just get on one with your free ticket and go. Usually no one asks to see your ticket during the ten minute ride into the city.

When you check into your hotel, the hotel will give you a transit pass good for the duration of your stay. There are buses and trolleys that go throughout the Geneva area. There may be somewhere you can't get via the public transit system but there's never been anywhere I needed to go that I could figure out how to get to. The buses run frequently and although a valid ticket is required to ride the bus, I've never seen tickets checked. You just get on, your ticket in your pocket. Not having to check tickets makes boarding the bus much faster; you can board through any door, rather than having to file past the driver and present your ticket. But you are required to have a valid ticket, and if asked you have to produce it; if you don't have it, there is a stiff fine. I've never seen anyone be asked to show their ticket on a bus, but people buy tickets at the automated ticket machine at the stop, and I assume that the ones who don't have weekly or monthly transit passes. (I assume also that this is why they make such an effort to provide transit passes to visitors, who could just assume they don't need tickets and get themselves in trouble.) And I've never seen any kind of of disorderly conduct or bad behavior on public transit there. Everyone is quiet and polite.

With the parking problems at my workplace, there's been a big push for us to consider mass transit, and I have thought about riding the bus to work. But I haven't quite figured out how to do it. And how do you buy a transit card on the bus? There aren't vending machines at every bus stop like there are in Geneva. But I did ride MARTA to the airport on Sunday. Tom dropped me off at Lindburgh and I successfully put $20 on a transit card (so maybe I can ride the bus sometime). I had to carry my suitcase down the stairs - there was no "down" escalator that I saw - and I waited on the platform for the train.

A train came quickly but it was being taken out of service, so they made everyone who was on it get off. MARTA employees walked the length of the train to make sure everyone was off. Then the train left the station, empty of passengers, and we waited.

I don't know if he got off the train that was taken out of service, or if he was there when I arrived, or if he came later, but sometime after the train left, I heard him, talking loudly not clearly to anyone in particular (not that I could tell for sure, and I didn't want to look). It seemed threatening enough, this string of random obscenities, that we moved away from him. No one talked. No one wanted to make eye contact. The unstated fear of a deranged person picking someone at random off the platform and tossing them on the tracks. And the MARTA employees, who had so diligently made sure that no one stayed on the train being taken out of service, were no where to be seen.

It seemed like it took a long time for the next train to come. We breathed easier when the doors closed and the man with the loud voice wasn't in our car. There were several of us with suitcases. At some point a guy with a bicycle got on. Then - I think it was at North Avenue - two young women and a young man with numbers like they give you when you participate in a race pinned to their shirts got on the train. I figured they'd been in a 5K earlier in the day, or had walked to support finding a cure for some terrible disease. One had a clipboard, which is unusual for a 5K, and they didn't seem to be dressed for running. I thought one of them was carrying a GPS. Maybe they were geocaching? But with race numbers on their shirts?

Then one of the young women knelt down next to me and said, "I don't want to scare you, but we're on a scavenger hunt, and we need to find someone with an out-of-state driver's license." (Why she thought I would be so easily frightened I don't know, but then I *had* been frightened at the station; maybe that still showed.) I told her I couldn't help, but other passengers with suitcases spoke up, and a young man volunteered that he was from Virginia. Did he have a driver's license? They needed a photo of themselves with him, and they needed a close up of him with his Virginia driver's license. The woman sitting next to me obligingly took the group photo ("get closer together, okay, that's it"). They also needed someone wearing clothing for for a non-Atlanta professional sports team. The request got passed halfway up our car, but no one could help with that. The three of them got off somewhere downtown, but the idea of teams of people wandering around Atlanta on a scavenger hunt left me with a smile.

Monday afternoon after the long plane ride and the short train ride, I got to my hotel and I found the event on line - they were participating in the Atlanta Challenge, part of a national series of events sponsored by Challenge Nation. I'd never heard of it before, but it sounded like fun.

As the week went on, I rode the bus uneventfully to and from my meeting every day, and back to the airport early yesterday morning. On none of those rides did anything interesting happen. Nothing at all.