The Alternatives below were presented in 2021 to get public feedback on priorities. The public response to the Concepts informed the MARTA Board policy direction that guided the Draft Plan.

To help the public think about about priorities, we drew the two contrasting images of how the network could look, depending on what is most important to people and what the public’s priorities are. Each concept represented the ends of a spectrum of possibility for what the MARTA Network could look like.

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The Ridership Concept’s goal is to be useful to more people, so that more people ride.  Right now, we have lots of routes, but most of them don’t come often enough to be useful to most people. This concept would run higher frequency where there are the most people and destinations, but with a fixed budget, that would mean it couldn’t go everywhere that service goes now.

The Coverage Concept’s goal is to provide some service to as many as people as possible, including all existing riders.  This requires spreading service out, but spreading it out means spreading it thin.  When we run so many routes, we can’t afford to run the service very often, and because of that, fewer people find the bus system useful.