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.

Civic Life in Atlanta: Grading on a Curve

Earlier this month The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta released a report on the state of civic life in Atlanta.  This report was based on an analysis the 2011 Current Population Survey for the Atlanta metropolitan region (there is a separate report that looks at the state of Georgia as a whole).

In the Atlanta area, 28% of respondants reported that they do formal volunteer work and 10% said that they work with neighbors to fix community problems.  Both of these proportions are higher than in most cities in the U.S., with Atlanta ranking 6th for formal volunteerism among the country's 51 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and 12th for working with neighbor to fix a community problem.  If 10% working with neighbors gets you 12th ranking overall, it must be really bad in a lot of places -- 10% seems quite low to me.  The volunteering that we do is most commonly done for (or perhaps through) religious and educational organizations.

41% of us participate in some kind of an organization.  Our participation is high, relative to other metropolitan areas, for participation in school groups (5th overall) and sports and recreation programs (11th).  This sounds right to me, given what I remember about when our kids were younger, with an expectation for a high degree of parental involvement in both school and extracurricular sports activities.  We may participate, but it's not necessarily because we want to.  According to the report, "there is less willingness among individuals to assume leadership responsibilities by holding an office or serving on a committee," with the Atlanta region ranking 35th in this category.

In the Atlanta area, we rank a dismal 34th for seeing or hearing regularly from family and 36th for eating regularly with others in the household.  The authors speculate that "this may reflect the region's long-standing status as an in-migration hub for job-seekers, especially young adults."  Maybe.  It also may reflect that so many people spend so much time driving (or at soccer practice).

In terms of electoral participation, 65% of us are registered to vote but only 47% of us voted in the previous mid-term election (27th and 22nd, respectively, compared to other metropolitan areas).  For local election voting, we are 34th, with only 31% of us voting.  But we are high for online political expression (9th), contacting public officials (13%), and making purchasing decisions for certain products (either to buy or not buy them) based on our personal values (12%).  I interpret this that we like to complain about things but we aren't very good at actually showing up at the ballot box.

What do they recommend we do about this?  The report ends with recommendations for increasing civic engagement, with lists of things individuals, nonprofits, funders, public officials, the media, and the private sector can do.  Most of this is totally in the non-rocket-science category.  "Invite your neighbors to dinner; introduce your neighbors to one another.  Begin a neighborhood project like a community garden or neighborhood watch...Begin a neighborhood listserv."  Show up.  Pay attention.  Say hello.  Put your neighbor's newspaper on their porch when they're out of town.

And don't just complain, but figure out which candidate you think is best for the job and vote.