GA: Atlanta Mayor Dickens pulls support for starting Beltline rail on Eastside trail

Mayor Andre Dickens said Thursday he no longer wants the first phase of Beltline light rail to go alongside the Eastside Trail, backing off plans he supported during his campaign.

The surprise announcement was made at a meeting of MARTA’s board of directors during a broad conversation about the mayor’s vision for transit in the city.

Courtney English, the mayor’s chief adviser, said Dickens now wants to pursue connecting the city’s streetcar to a future infill station at Murphy’s Crossing rather than the longtime plan of starting along the bustling Eastside Trail.

“We are committed to building rail on the Beltline, however, not in the form that has been previously discussed,” English told the MARTA board.

The change in plans came as a surprise to many city leaders, including Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman. He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the mayor’s Beltline announcement was “news to me today,” declining to comment further. A MARTA spokesperson said the board similarly “learned about the Beltline proposal today,” declining to comment until the agency is able “to take it all in and process.”

The shift in focus to other projects over the Eastside Trail mirrors other large transportation announcements Dickens has made as mayor.

A year ago, Dickens surprised the city by announcing four new MARTA infill stations within its heavy rail network, including the planned station at Murphy’s Crossing. Little progress has been made on those stations since then, and the original mixed-use development at Murphy’s Crossing meant to coincide with its station fell apart.

Dickens, who launched his reelection campaign Tuesday, had repeatedly reaffirmed his support for extending the Atlanta Streetcar alongside the Eastside Beltline trail, a project backed by voters in 2016. The initiative, however, has fallen behind schedule, seen its cost estimates balloon and sparked debate over whether the plan should be scrapped.

“Because it takes so long to build out 22 miles and certain parts of (the Beltline) is already extremely dense with a lot of activity, a lot of walking, a lot of commercial nodes, a lot of restaurants, there’s a lot of disruption that will happen to try to do it all at once,” Dickens said to the MARTA board. He said Murphy’s Crossing along the Southside trail would allow fewer disruptions and better align with “areas that have more rider dependence and more need for public transport.”

English said the mayor’s preference is to concentrate on the existing streetcar.

“We want to concentrate those resources on fixing the existing streetcar, extending it to the Beltline, but not necessarily on the Beltline,” English said.

There was no discussion of timelines for any of the projects the mayor is proposing. The only one currently in the works are the plans to extend the streetcar onto the Eastside trail. Construction on that project is currently scheduled to start in 2026 and finish in 2028. Initial design work for the Streetcar East Extension project started in 2019.

A map from the city’s presentation to MARTA shows the mayor’s light rail priorities. His proposed phase one would be to extend the streetcar to the Eastside trail. In phase two, he proposes extending light rail to the Eastside and Southside segments.

Phase two also calls for extending the streetcar west to the edge of the Beltline. This route would connect downtown to the Atlanta University Center.

The goal is a “15-minute city,” English said.

“It is what it sounds like: everything’s 15 minutes away, or every resident lives within 15 minutes of amenities, of grocery, of transit, so on and so forth,” he said. “If you live on the Beltline, there’s enough activity already existing where we can create that 15-minute reality.”

Advocates for the current plans have for months worried the mayor was walking back from his past support for first extending the Streetcar onto the Eastside trail. A day before Dickens’ announcement, Beltline Rail Now Chairman Matthew Rao said he was worried Dickens would “kick the can down the road.”

“We’ve been foreshadowing this,” Rao said.

Last month, Dickens reaffirmed his support for the Eastside Beltline Trail rail plan in a meeting with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial board.

“We’ve already started toward that,” Dickens said in the February meeting. “I think we don’t want to waste those dollars, so we should continue to move forward with that.”

Rail has been part of the plan for the Beltline since it was envisioned by Ryan Gravel in a 1999 master’s thesis at Georgia Tech. Gravel sketched plans for converting abandoned rail lines into a loop of trails, parks and transit around central Atlanta.

Gravel, now an urban planner, declined to comment Thursday, adding that he’ll “have plenty to say when it’s time.”

Developed Eastside Trail

The Eastside Trail, especially the stretch between Old Fourth Ward and Piedmont Park, has rapidly changed since the 22-mile trail loop effort began.

Many of the Beltline’s most popular — and vertical — developments have taken place in that corridor. As investment flocked to the area, developers started to voice concerns that adding rail would be too disruptive to an area successful without it.

Portman Holdings, a developer whose leaders have been critical of the Eastside Trail rail plan, declined to comment. Jamestown LP, the developer of Ponce City Market, did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did New City Properties, which developer the Fourth Ward district.

Walter Brown, president of Better Atlanta Transit, a group opposed to the light rail plan, said it makes sense to shift focus to less-developed corridors along the Beltline.

“The original idea of rail on the Beltline was to spur real estate development,” he told the AJC. “Well, we’ve had $9 billion in real estate development without any rail, so clearly it doesn’t make sense to then double down and put an expensive rail program in an area that doesn’t demand it for a variety of reasons.”

His organization is pushing a “wheels and heels” proposal, which involves splitting well-traveled sections of the Beltline into parallel trails that separate bikes and scooters from food traffic.

Dickens told the AJC editorial board last month that nearly every type of transit — he floated the idea of self-driving pods, gondolas, rapid bus routes, shuttles, streetcars and light rail — is under consideration for parts of the 22-mile trail that will wrap around the city once complete.

On Wednesday, Dickens said the latest iteration of the plan will soon be rolled out to gauge public opinion. He’s expecting a lot of feedback.

“You know, it’s the Beltline,” he told the MARTA board. “So literally everybody has got an opinion about it.”

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