ATLANTA — Mayor Andre Dickens sounded a note of caution Wednesday about building a new streetcar line on the Atlanta BeltLine.
"Why don’t we sit down and do some calculations?" asked Dickens, who holds a chemical engineering degree from Georgia Tech.
The BeltLine is a popular playground for visitors and in-town residents. City officials have always coveted its mass transit potential. Now, Dickens is among the officials asking if they should shift their planning.
"Nobody’s backing away from anything. The math needs to work, though," Dickens said.
Sarah Lyndale uses her bike on the Beltline for grocery trips and thinks it could be improved by adding a mass transit option.
"On Saturdays, Sundays, there's so many people on it," Lyndale said. "You can barely walk without almost getting hit by a bike, getting hit by another person. So I think it would clear up a lot of space."
Officials have already drawn up plans to connect the Atlanta streetcar to the BeltLine. But some of them, including Mayor Andre Dickens, say they know it would be costly.
"I can tell you that every day, construction cost goes up. Period," Dickens said.
Dickens said he’s all for transit on the BeltLine.
But critics say an Atlanta streetcar line, like the one that has run mostly empty trains for more than a decade through downtown, would consume too much money and too much space.
Adding a streetcar would be "a little convoluted. That’s a little much," said Charmaine Gatewood, a BeltLine user who said she’s ridden the streetcar and is not a fan.
"I don’t like it. It’s in the way. I don’t see the – I don’t personally see the purpose in it," she said.
Dickens noted that adding mass transit would likely be ineligible for federal or state funding.
"Every decision we make is going to be made on the backs of Atlanta taxpayers, and I've got to make sure we make a quality decision of how that’s going to go forward," Dickens said.
Dickens told reporters he wants to be clearheaded about the costs of BeltLine transit – which MARTA is studying now.
"The math needs to work," Dickens said. "Not only the math for construction but the math for operations. We still live in a state that does not fund (MARTA), our rapid transit authority."
If not a streetcar, what?
Dickens suggested battery-powered autonomous vehicles. Some BeltLine users have suggested just creating a separate lane for bikes, scooters, roller skates, hoverboards and other faster-moving wheeled vehicles, leaving another lane for pedestrians.