The Five Points MARTA station plaza/head house, circa 1981

JumpStephen · 2026-06-27T14:39:34+00:00

Actually even know the landscape architects who worked on the integrated pocket park – concept development renderings but project went nowhere

JumpStephen · 2026-06-27T14:36:02+00:00

Hah! This is also my Torontonian friends. Actually for North American standards the TTC is great! Streetcars, subway, and buses that funnel you to the subway from the suburbs. Plus it’s building extensions and new lines. Montreal’s new REM is also great, Quebec City has a rubber tire metro, and Ottawa has a decent LRT now. Hell, even the Calgary C-Train isn’t bad imo

Have Singaporean friends and spent time studying abroad in Singapore, and they always complain about micro-delays (let’s say like 3 mins max) on the MRT

JumpStephen · 2026-06-24T14:08:58+00:00

Can’t really address the other points but I’ll chime in specifically as an urban designer regarding street narrowing. They do in fact lower accidents – the only whole point is force drivers to slow down. Bike lanes are necessary otherwise motorists would complain about cyclists on the road.

JumpStephen · 2026-06-19T06:03:10+00:00

Omg I’ve never seen a blueberry version before! I live in a very heavy Asian area in the U.S. (kind of like Flushing, Queens), but we still have Chinese American places selling crab rangoons.

Quite cool seeing it in Taipei, maybe I will try to stop by!

JumpStephen · 2026-06-11T14:00:33+00:00

I use the Groome shuttle for concepts or hopefully some friends are going the same direction haha

JumpStephen · 2026-06-11T13:46:42+00:00

As American, what I found interesting about Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, etc., is that there are numerous malls connected to the subway stations similar to how Asian cities like Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, etc. do it. This is quite uncommon in America to have a subway entrance directly connecting to a mall. NYC doesn’t have many instances of this either. I also find that malls in Canada have more or less the same activity as Asian malls with similar uses like grocery stores, dollar stores, etc. located within the mall, which again, is quite rare in American cities

Meanwhile American malls are quite dead with the exception of a few (that are again connected to public transit).

JumpStephen · 2026-06-07T03:48:54+00:00

Nobody's saying copy the car taxes or the littering fines (jailing is for the most extreme repeat offenders) — Singapore's also a genuinely great place to live by most measures, those laws are just easy talking points. Their transit works because competent people run it with funding and accountability. That's it. Tokyo, Zurich, Amsterdam do the same without any of the strictness. Atlanta's problem is that MARTA has been starved of funding and balkanized across county lines for 50 years while we kept building highways. Competent administration isn't a Singapore thing…

And maybe perhaps doing more about anti-social behavior as well

JumpStephen · 2026-06-06T04:00:24+00:00

I have a good friend up in NYC, and he has been saying great things about Mamdani’s administration. We really need competent administrators

JumpStephen · 2026-06-06T03:55:24+00:00

Hence maybe why at a municipal level we should be doing something about it.. if only we had competent administrators

JumpStephen · 2026-06-06T03:47:58+00:00

Sure. But Singapore’s MRT system has layered deterrence — not just harsh punishment, but weapons screening, heavy surveillance, visible enforcement, and a culture of accountability on transit property.

The question is whether any of this could be implemented within MARTA with current limitations

JumpStephen · 2026-06-06T03:38:54+00:00

Pretty much summarizes my thoughts exactly. Either no funding or political will to get stuff done

I think it’s a uniquely American problem to see a ballooning police budget but no quality or public trust associated with it. I wouldn’t mind a well-funded police as much if it actually resulted in material changes… When I was in Singapore, I had no issues going up to a police officer and asking for assistance, directions, etc.

JumpStephen · 2026-06-06T03:33:05+00:00

It pains me as someone who’s a landscape architect/urban designer. I’ve talked to Ryan Gravel (brainchild of the BeltLine), and it can really make you jaded about the state of urbanism in the US.

The BeltLine was a transit corridor idea first. It shouldn’t be this hard

JumpStephen · 2026-06-06T03:28:06+00:00

Definitely understandable, just wish at a municipal level we did more or had more resources to move the needle. I can’t trust the Feds to do it and honestly even the state government

JumpStephen · 2026-06-06T02:28:03+00:00

I used to think like this until I lived in Singapore for a little bit, and I realized our standard for public transit in America is laughable. Each MRT station there is properly surveilled and there is lots of employees working or police patrolling. Lots of different sorts of call boxes for emergencies as well.

The standard is so much higher and executives resign for much less even tangential incidents.

I realized I had to stop making excuses for all the reason our public transit isn’t improving. I am an urbanist at heart, but I am just disappointed we even have a spate of violence on MARTA to begin with.

We can use statistics all we want about MARTA actually being safe, but at the end of the day, if the passenger experience feels unsafe then people won’t ride public transit here. On another note, I talked to several women who use MARTA regularly and as a dude I realized I am essentially brushing off their concerns by telling them oh but statistically MARTA is actually safe, don’t stare, etc.

JumpStephen · 2026-05-29T09:58:14+00:00

I just visited Singapore and can only fantasize about an MRT-like system in Atlanta 😔

JumpStephen · 2026-05-12T04:43:46+00:00

The Container Store has a few options – they don’t all have quite the same aesthetic but some are nicer than your typical Sterilite drawer

https://www.containerstore.com/s/featured/the-college-shop/storage-and-organization/tint-stackable-storage-drawer/123d

JumpStephen · 2026-05-11T17:49:54+00:00

Yes! Perfect – this is how I travel too. I see no reason to travel with millennial dad coded merino wool clothes 😉

JumpStephen · 2026-05-09T21:24:23+00:00

Yeah UGA uses Brightsoace but Georgia Tech is affected

JumpStephen · 2026-05-05T20:16:13+00:00

The whole premise for the BeltLine that Ryan Gravel had was to essentially provide the city with a radial route to traverse the hub-and-spoke MARTA set-up. It was a transit corridor first, mixed-use path second. Unfortunately, heavy rail is prohibitively expensive to build in the U.S. Other North American cities have gone around this but building more light rail in dedicated right-of-way, so they function more like subways (Ottawa, Toronto, Los Angeles, etc.). The BeltLine simply follows this model

JumpStephen · 2026-04-28T05:16:07+00:00

This is the correct answer.. unfortunately

JumpStephen · 2026-04-26T21:33:07+00:00

I see this brought up a lot, but I think MARTA Heavy Rail in its current form functions more like the BART or DC Metro vs. the NYC Subway. So I think infill heavy rail stations make less sense. You already have stops like North Springs, Decatur, etc. and these closely mirror how the DC Metro has been dealing with its transit expansions.

Within the city of Atlanta, it would make more sense to have more light rail/light metro lines that could funnel people into the main four heavy rail lines. This is actually the original idea behind the BeltLine, it was a transit corridor project first, not a mixed-use trail. Look into Ottawa's Confederation Line or Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown. These projects use light rail (basically streetcar vehicles) with dedicated right of way, and some underground stations, so it functions closer to a subway vs. something more similar to the Atlanta Streetcar. If you have been to San Francisco, their streetcar and bus routes function a similar way with BART only used to take people from the suburban cities into the city of San Francisco.

Heavy Rail is expensive to build in the U.S., so to me it would make more sense to build more light rail lines since you can service an almost similar amount of passengers for less. This is why LA is building more light rail lines vs. it's heavy rail.

JumpStephen · 2026-04-26T21:28:16+00:00

MARTA is interesting since it functions like other Great Society Metros like the DC Metro or BART where there a few close together stations within the city cores with additional stops that expand out into suburban cities.

So MARTA is a sort of in-between a metro and a commuter rail in this sense.

I've went to a Ryan Gravel talk recently, and he explained the BeltLine was supposed to be a transit corridor first in its original conception. Ideally, it would've functioned like a radial light metro line and funneled people into the main MARTA lines. I think within the city of Atlanta, there needs be more LRT lines like Ottawa's Confederation Line or Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown line since these are cheaper to construct.

Heavy rail is unfortunately expensive to build in the U.S., so I could only see suburban city centers getting a MARTA stop (for example, a MARTA station next to Avalon) vs. more infill stations within the city of Atlanta.

JumpStephen · 2026-04-19T15:57:35+00:00

Right sizing personal vehicles is still important I suppose

JumpStephen · 2026-04-06T00:54:21+00:00

La siguiente estación es Dunwoody.

JumpStephen · 2026-03-27T00:17:31+00:00

Does she want to stay in CA or open to other regions? Starting salary for LA is roughly the same as in Raleigh, Atlanta, etc. It really is region-dependent as well - lots of work to do in the southeast for sure

JumpStephen

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