143
Despite Atlanta being choked with cars, many Georgia politicians hate public transit
(saportareport.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
143 points (98.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
15409 readers
335 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Georgia public transport is shaped by racism and class politics. When Atlanta first started building MARTA, Cobb county didn’t want it so they established a 300 foot wide township that ran along the border of Cobb and Fulton counties. The only law this township had was that no public transit could be constructed in it. The township effectively blocked MARTA from reaching into Cobb county.
Why did this happen? Because when civil liberties came to be Atlanta experienced a “white flight” where white people moved in large numbers out of the city. Most of the white flight landed in Cobb county and wanted to keep black people out.
That’s one of the major hurdles that mass transport has had in Atlanta, there are plenty of others.
"If MARTA came to Cobb County"
Brilliant
It was even wilder than that -- Chattahoochee Plantation, established in 1968, was only 10ft wide by 30 miles long, the entire length of the border between the two counties. It had no city government so it didn't have any laws.
But, GA law doesn't allow annexation across city borders (Atlanta would have to annex the unincorporated parts of southern Cobb to build MARTA at the time), so this 10ft wide "city" stopped the expansion.
The charter for the "city" was quietly revoked in 1995.
Thank you, I was working from memory, should have said so in the post.