Cover Story: Mara does MARTA

"Our lives and landscapes have been fashioned to the automobile's dictates for three-quarters of a century. A rescue movement is in order."

-- Jan Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation

From my seat in the middle of the bus, exempt from the exhaust of weary commuters, insulated from the grotesque tangle of traffic, liberated from the four-letter-driven vocabulary I adopt when I drive, it's easy to see. We're obsessed.

Never mind the asthma, the sinus infections, the ground-level ozone, the smog alerts, loss of federal funding, incalculable stress, road rage, accidents, inertia, obesity, hours lost to sitting in gridlock. Never mind that we spend so much time behind the wheel we've lost whatever intimacy other city dwellers feel for their streets. In Atlanta, cars rule.

I'm alone when I come to this conclusion. It's a rush hour in early May, and I'm the only person on the bus.

Like most in the City Too Busy To Hate, my past relationship with the car has crossed from lovesick dependence into hardcore addiction. We prefer to drive — despite the blaring signs that driving is bad for us — because driving is sexy, heady, empowering. To the pimply teenager with the pea-green clunker, to the moneyed twentysomething with the svelte coupe, to the taut tennis mom with the living room on wheels, car equals freedom.

And public transportation, as Marie Antoinette might opine, is for those who don't eat cake.

Also like most Atlantans, I seldom rode MARTA, save the occasional Braves game or trip to the airport. I had no idea where, when, how often, how early or how late public transportation — particularly the buses — ran. I only noticed a bus when I was stuck behind one, driving.

Knowing how bad pollution and sprawl suck in this city (see "Pollution Index" for the grim details), I still suspected MARTA sucked worse. When it came to the pastime of bashing public transit, I joined the fray: The rail doesn't go anywhere, and the buses go there so slowly, they're irrelevant. As for those people who go car-less by choice, they're fanatics, masochists, tree-huggers.

So I joined them. For a week, I didn't drive. I took MARTA everywhere. Or at least as much as I could bear. I tried to determine whether I and the rest of the city's car-crazed inhabitants have resigned to driving because it's the only way — or have been whining about a transportation system of which we know nada. In order to know what I was missing, I embedded with the buses.

Armed with maps, schedules, rubber-soled shoes, MARTA's help number and a cell phone, I approximated my normal routine. Along the way, I hoped to demystify some common confusion: Who rides MARTA? Is it scary? Is it a huge pain in the ass to learn? Will it work equally well for the yuppie suburbanite and the intown hipster? What must one sacrifice to go all public transportation, all the time?

And do the masses snub MARTA because it goes nowhere, or does MARTA go nowhere because the masses snub it?

The sad state of public transportation isn't a dilemma peculiar to Atlanta. Sprawl meccas like L.A. and Houston share our woes. But it's a dilemma of increasing significance given our fattening population (both in pounds and persons), our sickening air and our maddening traffic: Why do so few people ride MARTA?


br>?Friday:
I trudge away from Creative Loafing's parking lot in the Old Fourth Ward feeling some trepidation. I'm forgetting something. My car. It's 6:08 p.m., and I fear my optimism has made off with my better sense. Why am I willingly giving up the cozy confines of my leather-upholstered coupe to expose myself to the harsh environs of travel by bus, train and foot? OK, so it's no journey to Mordor. But given the amount of planning that went into this adventure, you'd think I was traveling to the fiery mountain and back. Twice.

The yield of four hours of research on www.itsmarta.com: 83 downloaded pages encompassing a dozen bus lines; route maps; weekday schedules; weekend schedules; northbound treks and southbound treks. A veritable everything-you-need-to-know guide if you're me, a resident of Grant Park who works five miles from home, has a penchant for power yoga and parties, and is guilty of a decade-long dependence to her car.

I caught a ride to work this morning, vowing to begin my weeklong pledge to MARTA with an evening commute. As I near the bus stop, however, self-doubt creeps up from my gut. I don't trust for a second that MARTA will get me home. I dial the telephone number listed on the bus stop. It's the only bit of information on the sign. No maps or schedules are posted there — not even the route number of the bus or buses that might pass.

But all's not lost. According to the MARTA operator, I do need to take bus No. 16 downtown, where I will catch either the No. 10 or the No. 31 to Grant Park. Just as I suspected! The No. 16, the operator says, should arrive any minute.

Nine minutes later, the bus lumbers toward me. I drop a dollar and three quarters into the fare slot, ask the driver for a transfer and take a seat — among a mere two passengers.

I hop off 10 minutes later at the end of the line, the chaotic, fume-infested corner between the Five Points MARTA rail station and Underground Atlanta. Ten more minutes pass before the No. 31 slides into the spot vacated by the No. 16. This bus, like the other, is quiet and clean — but it holds about a half-dozen occupants.

In less than 10 minutes, it's over.

I surge with Europeanism, tingle with civil disobedience. I, who have forsaken my late-model Camry, have made it home on my wits and public transportation alone.

In all, this particular commute takes 54 minutes, 21 of which I spent riding. Eighteen I spent waiting, 15 walking. Door to door, by car, it typically takes 12.


br>?Saturday:
I leave the house just after noon — too late to even think of getting from Grant Park to the 1 p.m. yoga class at the Decatur YMCA.

To make the class, I had to catch the 11:50 a.m. bus that drives by Oakland Cemetery (or drove by, 12 minutes ago) in order to catch the 12:40 p.m. bus that leaves downtown Decatur and passes the Y. Twenty minutes into my walk, I realize I'm way off.

My next thought isn't bad: I'll walk a few more minutes to the MARTA rail station at the northwest corner of the cemetery. That way, I can hop the train and take it straight to the Decatur station, where the connecting bus will be waiting. Yoga, after all, doesn't begin for another 35 minutes.

I'm nearly to the rail station, when an eastbound train rattles over my head. That's the one I needed to be on. I figure another will arrive soon enough. I'm wrong.

Fifteen minutes later, a train lurches to a stop in front of me. It's 12:45 — five minutes after my connecting bus was due to depart Decatur.

Not thinking, I ride to Decatur and wander toward the buses before I realize my mistake.

So I skip yoga and go to a party at a friend's Inman Park apartment. Inman Park has a rail stop of its own. And the party will practically be within sight of the station.

A seven-minute train ride and I'm there. I prop a six-pack of beer and bag of chips on my hip and weave up Hurt Street.

Hours later, I return to the station in just enough time to catch the eastbound train to Candler Park, where I wait 30 minutes for the No. 28 bus. It's destined for East Lake.

The bus takes me to the corner of Howard Street and Memorial Drive just as the sun sinks out of sight. I wouldn't linger in this neighborhood after dark. But it's just a short jaunt to another party, a going-away bash for a friend bound for Manhattan.

The rest of the night, which involves too much champagne and a third party, mercifully outlasts the 12:30 a.m. hour at which MARTA shuts down. I therefore have no qualms about catching rides from party to party to home, in cars that were heading in my general direction. I think.


br>?Sunday:
I wake up post-noon and commit myself to the couch for a few hours. Roused by my boyfriend, who has little sympathy for my hangover, I walk two blocks to lie in the grass with him at Grant Park — an endeavor that obviously doesn't necessitate MARTA.

Yet there's a challenge: I'm due at a 7 p.m. baby shower in Vinings — quite nearly, shudder, outside the Perimeter.

Although it's just 13 miles away, Vinings is in another world — namely, Cobb County. The trip without a doubt is going to involve a minimum of three buses, a train ride and a lengthy walk. And since MARTA runs even more infrequently on Sunday than it does on Saturday — and since it doesn't cross into Cobb County at all — I bend the rules. I accept a ride to the shower from my boyfriend.

I can rationalize this because (a) he lives with me, thus does not have to drive out of his way to pick me up, and (b) he's going to the same baby shower anyway.

Any other MARTA rider would do the same.

It's not really MARTA's fault. When lawmakers birthed the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transportation Authority in 1965, the plan was to build a truly regional rail system. That didn't happen. Only two of the five counties proposed for rail and bus service actually wanted anything to do with rail and bus service. Clayton, Cobb and Gwinnett counties, populated by poster families for white flight, said "no way" to a portal between their manicured lawns and brick-fronted McMansions and the blue-collar, dark-skinned grittiness of the inner city.

So MARTA was exiled to Fulton and DeKalb — intentionally making it terribly inconvenient to travel from, say, Grant Park in south Fulton to a suburb like Vinings, in Cobb.


br>?Monday:
I'm late.

I crawl out of bed at 8:15 a.m. hoping to catch the No. 31 bus, which passes six blocks from my front door. When I hit the sidewalk at 8:31, I realize the No. 31 — due to arrive at 8:32 — is not an option.

I have to wait a full half-hour for the next No. 31. I swipe my MARTA card — a bargain at $13 a week for unlimited Monday-to-Monday rides — and hop on. The bus drops me at Five Points, where I'm supposed to catch my connecting bus. Walking down Broad Street, where my map says the connecting bus is supposed to be, I see no bus. I glance over my shoulder. There it is, two blocks behind me and ready to roll. I run.

"You're late," the driver says as I swipe my card.

I know.

It's 9:20 a.m. In 20 more minutes, I'm at my desk — a total hour-plus commute. I vow to leave my house earlier tomorrow.

Come lunchtime, I call a friend to see if she'll meet me for a bite. "I'm car-less," she says. Hers in the shop. "Me too," I say. I explain. "Do you want to brave MARTA?" I ask her. Ooh, I think. A test subject.

She accepts.

I give her detailed instructions on how to get from her loft at the Mattress Factory (next to the MLK rail station, conveniently) to a restaurant four miles away in the Highlands. I then leave work to catch the No. 16, an eight-minute ride to the Virginia-Highland intersection.

My friend breezes into the restaurant 20 minutes after I take a seat. "It wasn't bad," she says, "except that one of the buses ahead of mine broke down." She says her bus had to pick up the dozen stranded passengers. Said the driver of the defunct bus: "It just overheated."

She reports that it took her about 50 minutes to get from her loft, just north of Grant Park, to the Highlands.

"I'd use it again," she says, "to go drink margaritas during the day or something."

After lunch, we miss our bus by about 30 seconds. We wait 25 minutes for the next one, which takes me to work and my friend to the Five Points station, where she'll catch the train home.

Because of my poor morning timing and my lunch hour delay, I stay late at work, leaving just after 7 p.m. I reach the stop just as the bus does. It's totally empty — and stays that way until it drops me off eight minutes later at the end of the line.

You have to wonder how MARTA stays afloat when a bus traveling from the massive Lindbergh rail station (smack in the middle of the business and shopping district of Buckhead), past countless high rises in Midtown, on through the shops, residences and restaurants of Virginia-Highland, past the Atlanta Medical Center in Old Fourth Ward and, finally, straight through downtown to the hub of the rail system at Five Points can reach the end of the line completely empty, excluding me.

The money MARTA earns from fares covers but a fourth of its budget (that's compared to fares covering roughly two-thirds in places like New York). And yet MARTA's head honcho is hoping to fund almost $600 million in high-tech upgrades and repairs over the next five years. He's hoping that will attract more technology savvy riders.

But if it doesn't, the $600 million won't address one of the biggest complaints about MARTA: That many buses run only once every 45 minutes — some once an hour. So if you miss one of those you're screwed.

Then again, why should buses run more frequently if they're shuttling just a few people around — or worse, sit empty?

"The whole attitude toward buses in Atlanta, particularly among the Northside residents, was they're for the lower class," says Doug Barlow, an Atlanta anomaly in that he owns a car and has been riding MARTA since the buses and trains began running in 1972 and 1979, respectively. "They were a way for the maids to get to work. And it still prevails."

Barlow, and researchers and professors and talking heads alike, think the buses have grown increasingly unpopular due to the lingering side effects of pre-civil-rights Southern culture. Unlike in New York or D.C., not every Atlantans' parents and grandparents rode public transportation. Atlanta's cultural heritage, marred by segregation and exacerbated by the sprawling influx of outsiders, is a setback to MARTA.

The bus that once took Barlow from his home in the increasingly white Candler Park to his church downtown no longer runs on Sunday, because there were few people left to ride it. But Barlow says he can't complain.

"The system is better than it gets credit for," he says. "Other cities have such good systems, but we're not like those other cities. They have dense urban centers. We have urban sprawl."

After my solo ride, I catch my connecting bus in five minutes. About a dozen people join me this time. The bus drops me four blocks from my house at 7:37 p.m. — a total commute of 36 minutes. Not bad. This I could get used to — if only others could, too.


br>?Tuesday:
I'm incrementally better at leaving the house this morning — 8:25 a.m., versus yesterday's 8:31. That puts me at the bus stop at 8:32, the exact minute the No. 31 bus is supposed to arrive. I'd been watching the bus stop from the moment I began huffing up Cherokee Avenue, coughing and spewing up phlegm, my allergies — or something — in full swing.

So I know the bus wasn't too early. And I'm not late. I wait 20 minutes. No bus.

I walk four blocks south to another bus stop. This bus, the No. 10, should be coming right away. But it doesn't.

There should be another No. 31 arriving any minute at the first stop I tried. What to do? Like a runner caught between first and second, I dart between the stops, trying to give myself enough time to see — then dive — for whichever bus shows.

After fifteen minutes, neither has made an appearance. Zero for three. And the next bus isn't scheduled for another half-hour.

I've now been out here for an hour. Even if I catch the next bus and have no problem catching the connecting one, there's no way I'll get to work any earlier 10:45. That's 15 minutes late for my weekly news meeting. And what if the next bus doesn't come? Plus, I'm thirsty. My nose is running like crazy and I forgot to bring tissues. My cell phone, for which I only have a car charger, is about to shut off. It won't last the four minutes it takes (believe me, I've timed it) to call the MARTA help line.

I break. I dial the only number I'm sure will get me to work. "Hello?" His voice is groggy. "Quick, my phone's about to die. Are you leaving the house soon?" "Uh-huh." "Can you drop me off at work?" "Uh-huh."

I failed this morning's mission. I admit it. I got a ride from my boyfriend. There.

Again, I stay late at work. I leave at 7:40 p.m., thinking I have time to make it to Midtown to meet some friends for dinner. My bus arrives at 7:57. I've only got five minutes to catch my connecting bus. I hop off at 8:02 with seconds to spare, racing from Ralph McGill Avenue up Piedmont Avenue toward the stop. I look over my shoulder for a bus that doesn't come. I missed it.

I reach North Avenue afraid to go further, knowing the intersection of Piedmont and Ponce de Leon avenues is not a place where I want to mingle. I walk instead along North Avenue, in the direction — I think — of a MARTA rail station.

I get turned around. I ask a cop, parked in a patrol car, where the station is. He points east. I head that way, realizing within a few blocks that the officer was wrong and that I'm fast approaching sketchiness.

I turn back, admitting it's time I hailed a cab when I see the officer driving toward me, lights flashing. He pulls a U-turn, halts oncoming traffic and apologizes to me for the bum directions. He drives me to the rail station.

As I pass through the turnstile, the train screeches to a stop below me. I'm down the stairs and on and off the train within two minutes, arriving a mere 10-minute walk from the 10th Street restaurant. I take a seat a full 40 minutes late, sweating profusely, nose chafed from the gazillionth blowing.

After the two-and-a-half hour meal, I beg a ride home.


br>?Wednesday:
I'm not even trying. I don't get out of bed until 9 a.m. My throat's shredded. My lungs feel as if they're teetering on collapse. Mad coughing fits woke me countless times in the night.

My boyfriend insists on driving me to the doctor. I don't even feign a mild interest in resisting. Anyway, he's heading to his studio and the clinic's on the way.

When the doctor looks at my throat, he smiles. "I wish some of my research students were here to see this," he says jovially. He calls it a case of classic sinus infection gone awry. He prescribes antibiotics and something to clear the muck until the penicillin kicks in.

It's been a bad pollen week, true. And I've been outside a lot, walking and waiting and waiting and walking. But I've never had allergies like this. Ever.

I have to wonder if it's the air.

My doctor can't say for sure. But smog season does begin the very next day. And this year, Georgia has logged five pre-smog-season bad air days — more than in the seven past years combined.

Bad air days are determined by the concentration of ground-level ozone, which, unlike the ozone layer miles above us, is no friend of humans. It's a half-and-half mix of vehicle emissions and power plant pollution that, when coupled with warm weather, leads to ailments like asthma — and sinus infections. Atlanta, incidentally, has surpassed the feds' ground-level ozone standards every year since Congress introduced the standards in the late 1970s.

I walk for 20 minutes, probably through clouds of ground-level ozone, from my doctor's Peachtree Street office to a bus stop on Ralph McGill. The bus, trusty No. 16, carries me past my office to a grocery store near the intersection of Ponce de Leon and Highland avenues. I fill my prescription and buy soup, timing my errands so that I can catch the bus back to the office. My timing is almost perfect. Twenty seconds sooner and I'd have made it, no problem. As it happens though, the driver either doesn't see me waving for him to stop or doesn't feel like waiting for me to hustle.

I can stand on the corner and wait another 25 minutes for the next bus. Or I can walk to work. I choose the latter. I suppose walking will take the same amount of time as waiting, and I'm right.

My coughing bouts disturb the quiet at the office throughout the day. I decide, however, that despite my sinuses I must attend my grandmother's birthday party this evening in Buckhead.

I catch the No. 16 from work at a quarter 'til six. I exit at the Peachtree Center rail station and descend down an escalator longer and steeper than any in the Southeast. It's a gorgeously Dante-esque tunnel, practically making this whole day worth living.

I step off at Lenox to buy my grandmother a birthday gift. Then it's on to bus No. 23, which circles Buckhead Village and drops me 12 minutes later outside the door of a restaurant on Pharr Road. My family's been waiting inside for a half-hour.

After dinner, my brother invites me to a friend's house, which is near my own. I accept, knowing the offer will include a ride home.

?Thursday:
I just can't get out of my house before 8:20 a.m.

I'm walking up Cherokee Avenue when at 8:32, the very minute the No. 31 is supposed to arrive, arrive it does — right on time for once, barreling toward me and turning right about 100 feet in front of me, failing to stop despite my flailing arms.

Dejected, I continue toward the bus stop. Then I turn back and walk the four blocks to the bus stop for the other Grant Park bus, the No. 10. I'm sure I have plenty of time to catch the 10, which is scheduled to show in 20 minutes, at 8:56. But the No. 10 is a mysterious bus. I haven't managed to catch it in the morning. And I've yet to glimpse it at any time remotely close to the time it's supposed to run.

All of a sudden, I hear a bus approach me from behind. It's the No. 10. And it completely ignores my pleas to stop.

What is it with this bus? It's supposed to run every 40 minutes. But it's 20 minutes off — early or late, who knows? It's 8:36. Is this the 8:56 bus, 20 minutes early, or the 8:16, 20 minutes late?

Screw the No. 10. I'll wait for the next No. 31 to arrive, supposedly at 9:01. Of course, by 9:15 it's nowhere in sight.

All right, I'll try the 10 again. The next one's due at 9:38. I've got 20 minutes. I walk to the stop and wait — and there it is, at 9:18, exactly 20 minutes early. Or 20 minutes late.

It actually stops this time, and I step on, exceedingly relieved.

Two minutes later, the bus pulls to the curb and idles for a few moments. Then it shuts down.

"End of the line," the driver says. "We wait here for 20 minutes." He takes a seat and opens a book.

I would be irate, except that what he says makes sense of the seemingly erratic bus behavior. The elusive No. 10 isn't elusive at all. It's been passing me by and pulling to a stop just over the hill and has been sitting there, hiding every morning, practically waiting for me AND I COULDN'T SEE IT.

I sit with the driver, not for 20 but for 26 minutes, not caring how late I am at this point, just happy to know I'll catch the bus tomorrow morning without a hitch, probably.

When the driver finally takes his seat behind the wheel, he calls back, "I finished my book."

"Was it good?" I ask.

"Yeah," he answers. "Perry Mason."

"So you figured out who did it?"

"Yep."

The mystery solved.

Downtown, I catch the No. 16 within 30 seconds and get to work, finally, at 10:15. At almost two hours, a lengthy lesson, but a lesson still.

The evening is cake. Even though I miss the 6:05 bus by seconds, I don't mind the 22-minute wait for the next bus, which promptly deposits me at the Peachtree Center rail station. It would make more sense to take the bus directly to the Five Points station; I could have caught the eastbound train, whereas from the Peachtree Center station, I must catch the southbound train and then switch to the eastbound at Five Points. But I can't help it. I'm a sucker for the Peachtree Center's tunnel. It's like a portal to another city, one where public transportation is gorgeous and thrilling and nothing to fear.

I change trains and step off at the East Lake station, a few blocks from a salon where a friend of mine works. We're going grocery shopping together. I can't buy groceries and ride MARTA.

?Friday:
My cell phone, which I've been charging in the cars of whomever's been offering me rides, finally calls it quits this morning. It's my only way of gauging time. I don't own a watch.

No matter. Today I'm confident I'll catch the No. 10. It's sitting there waiting, even as I brush my teeth. A comforting thought — the first I've entertained on any morning I've ridden, or tried to ride, MARTA.

Another comforting thought: This is my final MARTA commute. I began my journey last Friday afternoon, so it technically ends a few hours from now.

Just as I expected, the No. 10 is there, tucked behind the hill on Cherokee Avenue, idling contentedly. I step on and wait a few minutes. The doors close with a lazy swoosh. I'm downtown before I know it.

Someone on the street asks me if the No. 16 has come by recently. What time is it? I ask her. It's 9:10, she answers.

We're OK, I assure her. The No. 16 comes at 9:20. By now I know.

Sure enough, at 9:20 the No. 16 rolls to the curb. I know it's 9:20 because the woman who gave me the time nods to me, acknowledging my accuracy.

I'm at work at 9:35, an uneventful 45-minute commute and, because it's my last, a somewhat anticlimactic one. That's exactly what I'd been hoping from the beginning.During my weeklong fling with MARTA, I yearned mostly for two things: More people riding the buses and more buses running more often. I also understand that those two things are inextricably linked, that in order for the latter to occur, the former must precede it in a big way.

But how do you convince a culture obsessed with fast food and quick mental fixes and bigger and bigger SUVs to replace a minutes-long drive with an almost hour-long one? With the promise of more buses running more often — as soon as more people start to ride?

I don't think so.

At the very least, I can say the buses and trains I rode were clean and safe. The drivers were friendly. And in one week, I spent less than $20 on transportation. (My car payment, plus insurance, rings up at about $100 per week.) But the real cost comparison was time. I spent four hours riding buses or trains, six hours waiting for them and almost five hours walking. I'd have spent a fraction of that time driving everywhere I needed to go.

Basically, it comes down to this: If you can budget your time, or if you're not in a terrible hurry, there's no reason not to ride MARTA — except for overcoming age-old stigmas that have no place in modern times, and enduring the tedium required to learn the system.

While MARTA CEO Nathaniel Ford can't mass-lobotomize the public when it comes its to perception of public transportation, he at least is trying to do something about MARTA's foreboding learning curve.

Ford is proposing that within the next five years, all MARTA buses be equipped with "automatic vehicle locators" — tracking devices that feed a bus's exact location and arrival time to MARTA's website, a PDA, a wired bus stop or an operator you can call on your cell phone. That would have made an amazing difference to me, a MARTA newcomer. I could have gone online and checked the bus's status, both when I woke up in the morning and when I was leaving the office at night.

Instead, calling MARTA's help line only got me an operator who was looking at the same schedule I had in my hand, a schedule about as reliable as a Jayson Blair yarn. And far harder to read.

For Atlantans looking for an easier ride sooner than 2008, Ford is planning for the summer arrival of another tool to help demystify the MARTA experience. Like www.mapquest.com, www.itsmarta.com will soon allow you to type in your beginning and ending destinations and will tell you the best way to get there, via MARTA. That will save prospective riders the extraordinary headache of trying to decipher MARTA's maze of maps and schedules, which took me half a day to mastermind.

"We have to find ways to simplify it for folks," says Ford, who says he rides MARTA just about every day to his office adjoining the Lindbergh rail station. The office is outfitted with a tastefully tiled shower and fluffy towels, testament to long hours on the job — or having to sweat it out waiting for the bus and train.

"It's not just about putting a bus and a pole out there, and just running the bus up and down the street and expecting people to use it," he tells me. "People like yourself, they're not going to use it. What I want to be able to do is make it easier for you to use."

So was it easy for me? Not especially. Was it convenient? Not really. Fun? For the most part, yes. Rewarding? Absolutely. Have I ridden MARTA since I stepped off the bus at 9:30 a.m., Friday, May 2? I'm ashamed to say the answer is no. After picking up driving again, my self-righteous brush with MARTA seemed but a distant fling, intoxicating in its newness — but altogether too much trouble to pursue.

mara.shalhoup@creativeloafing.com


Ratio of automobiles to people in metro Atlanta: 1:1%
%%Number of miles driven daily in metro Atlanta: 120,000,000%
%%Number of roundtrip journeys to the moon that number represents: 30%
%%Ratio of metro Atlantans living in the suburbs to those living in the city: 10:1%
%%Percentage of Atlantans who typically drive alone: 78%
%%Percentage of Atlanta commuters who used public transportation to get work in 2000: 3.7%
%%Percent change since 1990: -22.5%
%%U.S. subway systems, besides MARTA, that receive no state funding: 0%
%%Number of smog alerts issued in Georgia this year prior to the May 1 start of smog season: 5%
%%Number of pre-May smog alerts issued in the previous seven years combined: 4%
%%Number of years since metro Atlanta satisfied U.S. EPA ground-level ozone standards: 23%
%%Rank of Atlanta on the American Lung Association's list of 10 smoggiest cities: 6%
%%Atlanta's ranking if the state of California didn't exist: 2%
%%Percentage of Americans who suffer from asthma: 6%
%%Percentage of Georgians who suffer from asthma: 11%
%%Percent by which morning traffic decreased during the 1996 Olympics, when Atlantans were urged to ride MARTA: 23%
%%Percent by which ground-level ozone concentrations decreased during those 17 days: 28%
%%Percent by which children hospitalized for asthma decreased during those days: 42%
%%Number of metro Atlanta deaths attributed per year to air problems: 950%
%%Index sources, among others, include: The Atlanta Regional Commission, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the Clean Air Campaign, the state Department of Natural Resources, the state Environmental Protection Division, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Federal Transit Administration and the Journal of the American Medical Association.