Talk of the Town - In the Year 2025 November 18 2000

If suburbanites can survive

I AM FOSSILIZED enough to remember those one-hit wonders of the 1960s, Zager & Evans. They topped the pop charts with “In the Year 2525,” a song which traversed a series of increasingly bleak millennia to conclude:
Now it’s been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man’s reign is through ...
Well, I guess it was kind of silly. Proving yet again that the 1960s are the most overrated decade in human history. But that’s not the point.
The point is, I thought of Zager & Evans recently, and the process did not involve exposure to mind-altering chemicals. (Although carbon monoxide exhaust could be termed a hallucinogen, if you’re stuck in traffic long enough.)
That is where I was, held fast on the two-lane, arteriosclerotic embolism-in-waiting that is Ga. 400. I don’t know much about transportation, but you’d think when road numbers get that high, someone would have mastered the flow of traffic by now.
Far from it. The 400, even on its alleged completion several years ago, was as instantly obsolete as the next home computer you’re going to buy.
But relief is on the way, according to an article I read during the aforementioned traffic jam. One of the great things about Atlanta gridlock (OK, the only great thing about Atlanta gridlock) is that it provides drivers with enough leisure time to perform major acts of personal hygiene, discover a new element or get through the morning paper — all in the time it takes to drive to work.
The headline was “MARTA makes tracks for Alpharetta: due 2025.” And I have to tell you; a thrill of hope cut through the blanket of gloom and auto emissions that normally envelops my rush hour. In a mere quarter-century, mass transit will reach my neighborhood. Since I expect to be commencing the golden years long about 2020, I may come out of retirement just to take that inaugural train.
Then, consider the level of expertise. When it comes to mass transit, MARTA stands alone. Particularly MARTA buses, often seen as smoking, stalled and burnt-out hulks along the highway. MARTA has more disabled vehicles than the Iraqi army after it was bombed into spare parts during the retreat from Kuwait. Let’s hope the trains have a higher rate of survival.
Nevertheless, modern technology has truly transformed the way we live. The MARTA train stop that will be completed in 2025 is some 20 miles from where the system ends now. That means a rate of progress equaling less than a mile of track per year.
Compare that to primitive Wild West days when work gangs of immigrants labored to complete America’s transcontinental railroad. Those guys, using the finest, high-speed technology the year 1869 could buy, at one point laid 10 miles of track in a single day. How far we’ve come since then.
Even though it’s going to take a ridiculous amount of time to get here, the good news about MARTA-ization of the northern ‘burbs is that the project was ever approved at all. Fearful suburbanites (admittedly a redundant concept) in other areas opposed the coming of MARTA, firmly believing that mass transit will bring urban, undesirable elements to our doors.
Do these people have a lot to learn. I come from Westchester County, N.Y., one of the first true suburbs in the United States. Train lines spread north from Manhattan into Westchester a century ago and the county has never been troubled by a gigantic influx of rail-riding felons.
That’s because it costs a bloody fortune to take the commuter train. Stop thinking like pikers, metro Atlantans. You don’t charge some schnook from the city a mere buck-fifty to ride the suburban train. You up the fare to five dollars, 10 dollars and more. That’s how you keep the riff-raff out. Money: It’s the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of class warfare.
But, just for argument’s sake, let’s suppose some brigands ride up here to make a score. They spend the better part of an hour traveling 25 miles by train and get off at the suburban stop nearest where I live. Since all the taxis are taken and the MARTA bus has, inevitably, broken down, they are forced to walk the five miles to my house.
En route, the would-be thieves dodge psychotic soccer moms driving Suburbo-Tankers at 90 miles an hour along winding back roads. They pass, on foot, 23 rent-a-cops blocking traffic on behalf of everything from private day schools to the local Pep Boys franchise.
Having survived this ordeal, the crooks make it to my house, steal the TV and lug it out of the sub-D past five carnivorous canines, four teenagers learning to drive and yet another busted MARTA bus, five miles back to the train station.
Whereupon they will melt into the bowels of the big bad city with their ill-gotten booty, only to discover they’ve heisted a 1989 RCA model that’s on its last legs and isn’t even compatible with most new VCRs.
And the great thing is, they’ve already been punished for the crime.
Cue Zager & Evans.
Glen Slattery is the none-hit wonder of Alpharetta. E-mail: gmslattery@aol.com.