Over the years, there was talk of creating a multimodal facility a bus ride away from the airport to serve trains from around the state.īut those plans have been just as stagnant as the state’s plans to invest in commuter rail, an intra-state passenger rail network (connecting major cities such as Macon, Savannah, Columbus, Augusta and Athens) and a high speed rail network that would connect Atlanta with Charlotte and Chattanooga. Planning for transit, however, tends to be an afterthought. Given the auto-dependent nature of our society, it’s a given that planners never even question their focus on roads and cars. In planning for the new terminal, airport officials never gave a second thought to building two parking decks for 3,500 cars as well as a whole new road network to serve the new facility.Īnd that doesn’t take into account all the effort that’s being put into interstate signage to make sure drivers don’t go to the wrong terminal. Would the need for a second airport go away if a good portion of Atlanta’s connecting passengers were able to travel by rail? Common sense would say yes. Building a second airport would require billions upon billions of dollars of investment for a facility that no community wants. Not only does that kind of transportation flexibility serve the Europe of today, it positions the continent to be more globally competitive when the skies become overcrowded and when the cost of fuel becomes even more expensive.Īnd most importantly, it encourages the kind of sustainable urban development that make for livable, walkable cities.įor decades, there’s been talk of building a second airport to accommodate the anticipated growth in air traffic. People can easily segway from nearly any airport in the world to any major city in Europe without ever having to get into an automobile. So true multi-modalism exists at the Charles de Gaulle. Europeans have figured out that it makes more sense for passengers to travel on high speed trains than to take an airplane between cities that are only a few hours apart. In fact, when one buys an airline ticket from Atlanta to Lyon, France, chances are it will be a plane-train ticket. At the Charles de Gaulle train station, one can catch high speed trains that can take you to numerous destinations throughout Europe. It has direct rail service from central Paris to two stations at the airport serving both sides of the airport. Take the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Long term, people interviewed agree that in the best of all worlds, extending MARTA to the international terminal would be an asset for Atlanta. Would that be our priority? Personally, I would prefer to spend those dollars elsewhere.” “If all things were perfect and we had the money, of course we would have wanted to have a connection into the international terminal,” Cheryl King, MARTA’s assistant general manager for planning. That sentiment was a common refrain - among MARTA officials, airport planners and political leaders. “It was too expensive for the projected users,” said DeCosta, who then asked a rhetorical question. “They couldn’t afford to do it.”īen DeCosta, who had been the airport general manager for more than a decade, said the airport studied how many international passengers actually use MARTA to get to Atlanta. “It would have been very, very expensive,” said Louis Miller, Hartsfield-Jackson’s general manager, who said that decision was made before he came to Atlanta. The new terminal is a $1.4 billion project. There was great pressure to cut the projected costs of the new terminal, and the MARTA extension didn’t make economic sense. So why was the MARTA rail line not extended to the international terminal?Ītlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who in an ideal world would have loved to have MARTA serve the international terminal, said last week that it would have cost an estimated $300 million or more. Unfortunately that selling point will be diminished when trying to use MARTA to get to or from the international terminal. One of Atlanta’s greatest conveniences has been that Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is one of the few cities in the nation that has its public transit system provide direct rail service to its airport. Jackson International Terminal opens on May 16, arriving passengers will no longer have to recheck their bags before they are able to leave the airport.īut if the passengers decide they want to ride MARTA to get to Atlanta, they will have to board a shuttle that will take them along the Loop Road on a 12 to 14 minute ride from the Jackson International terminal to the domestic terminal where they can board MARTA. New international terminal lacking direct MARTA access future airport master plan should focus on transit, rail - SaportaReport Close
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