Four in five Clayton commuters work somewhere other than Atlanta at the same time, four in five people who work in Clayton County don't live there. Now more than ever, Atlantans need to go from suburb to suburb more than they need to go downtown. To thrive in its new expanded form, MARTA must embrace this reality. Instead, a sprawling city needs a sprawling transit agency. Thanks to the region's sprawl, commuting patterns in Metro Atlanta are much less typical than in other cities, making it harder for MARTA to serve people's needs with traditional hub-and-spoke trips. Tuesday's referendum won't necessarily be a silver bullet for MARTA, or for Clayton County. Its population is largely working class (median income is $7,000 below the state average) and could stand to benefit from good mass transit. Clayton, almost totally white 40 years ago, is now a far more populous and diverse county, with a majority-black population and significant numbers of Asians and Latinos. Today, though, Atlanta's city-suburb divide is far less clear-cut. When MARTA was conceived in the late 1960s, it was originally intended to serve Clayton County, along with the other four core counties that comprise Metro Atlanta.īut in a 1971 referendum, all but two of the counties rejected the idea, in a vote that was propelled by white fears that MARTA would make it easier for blacks to come to the suburbs. In doing so, they voted to fix a transportation mistake four decades in the making. Seventy-four percent of voters approved the county's contract with the agency and the new sales tax that will accompany it. In Clayton County, which is just south of Atlanta and home to the city's enormous airport, residents on Tuesday overwhelmingly chose to join MARTA.

Marta bus hits car