I have a lot of rubber-hits-the-road experience to share about the bus and train, as I use them frequently while Traveling at the Speed of Bike. Mostly, I’m glad they are options (and I, in fact, rely on the train), but I can think of ways they could be better. If MARTA would ever like my input, I’d be happy to have a sit-down. Chocolate chip cookies, please. That’s all I ask.
By the way, I come from an entrepreneurial business background (New York City, USA Today, Turner Broadcasting, back when they were all swashbuckling) where I was encouraged and rewarded to ask how things could be better, and to create and implement solutions to make it so. In my civic advocacy involvement, however, I’ve noticed that when you want to iterate and improve things (or call out “compromises” that actually make something unusable for the desired goal — hello, Tilly Mill Road), you get branded as “never happy” or “always complaining.”
I see this happening to other people as well. For instance, the largest Whole Foods in the southeastern United States just opened in Midtown, Atlanta (right across the street from a MARTA transit station, by the way), and it apparently has a bike parking area in the parking garage that has some definite problems (I haven’t seen the bike parking yet, but I will check it out in person soon — pictured is when I rode by on a Jump ebike before the store opened). The people who are pointing this out are being told to “just be grateful there’s any bike parking at all” instead of what should happen — it should be fixed and made right. This isn’t brain surgery, people. It’s just smart business.
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 