Nathan Muz
Atlanta transit system map produced by the H.W. Lochner Company, 1946 (Image courtesy of H.W. Lochner and Company, Keizers, and Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlanta_transit_1946.jpg).
Charles F. Palmer never commuted by streetcar. He cherished the scenery on his daily drive into Atlanta, first passing Piedmont Park on the left then Georgia Tech on the right. However, as he continued southbound—paralleling both a streetcar line and a diesel jitney bus route—he eventually reached an area that was much less aesthetically pleasing. According to Palmer, there was “ugliness packed close on either side: crowded, dilapidated dwellings, ragged, dirty children, reeking outhouses—a human garbage dump—a slum” [Figure 1].[1] Palmer felt something needed to be done about this so-called slum. He also saw this situation as a business opportunity.[2] The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt had just allocated over $100 million in funds toward limited-dividend slum-clearance projects, and Palmer speculated that by assembling parcels and applying for federal slum-clearance funds, he could acquire additional wealth from this initiative. Through this plan, Techwood Homes—America’s first federally funded housing project for white residents—was eventually opened.
Figure 1: Map showing Palmer’s daily commute and the future location of Techwood Homes, which he described as a “slum” (Lawrence Vale, Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities [University of Chicago Press, 2013], 47).
Around the same time, the Georgia Railway and Power Company—the sole operator of Atlanta’s buses and streetcars since 1902—sought a similar transformation for its aging network. The carrier proposed a wide-ranging package of infrastructure modernization and service realignment accompanied by a major fare increase to cover the costs.[3] The effects of this transportation modernization effort were wide-ranging and continue to be felt today. While many of these changes were positive overall, the outcomes were deeply unequal by race. Through examining the evolution of Atlanta’s public transit system in the New Deal era, one can see its important role in the built environment and how its planning, implementation, and impact reinforced notions of racism and racial segregation throughout the city.
Before I can examine how the evolution of these public transit projects perpetuated racism, I must pose a definition of the term “evolution” for this context and discuss the often incorrect or misleading uses of this term. At a basic level, evolution is the change in characteristics over successive generations. In terms of Georgia Railway and Power’s network, this means studying the changes across the planning, implementation, and impact of the company’s projects rather than within each of these phases alone. Furthermore, evolution is not progressive or goal-oriented: a later generation is not necessarily more advanced than a previous one beyond its simple ability to survive. To be clear, when I note that certain phases of the project are “more evolved,” I do not mean to imply that they are necessarily better.
Planning
Atlanta’s transit planning in the New Deal era produced racial segregation at multiple levels. In 1924, the city commissioned the Beeler Organization—a New York consulting firm—to recommend ways to “maintain the street railroad’s role in ensuring the success of the city.”[4] The authors of the 1924 Beeler Report discuss declining ridership and waning “popularity and success” of the system overall. The consultants derived these conclusions from taking passenger counts on 150 assorted trips on the city’s 24 streetcar lines.[5] On the surface, those conclusions appear reasonable and the sample size of six to seven passenger counts per line is small but acceptable. What is deeply concerning, however, is how heavily the report relies on this data without other sources. During their field work, the Beeler consultants must have had numerous opportunities to interact with passengers, streetcar operators, and company managers. Their failure to solicit input from these invaluable people—many of whom had decades of experience in the system—all but guaranteed that the reporting would result in some combination of unfeasible and systematically biased recommendations. This methodology also implies an arrogance amongst the consultants: they believed that merely riding the streetcar a handful of times would allow them to surpass the expertise of people who devoted their entire careers to transportation in Atlanta. From the earliest stages of planning, the city’s public transit transformation in the New Deal era was prone to producing (or reproducing) inequality.
While the conclusions of the report are vague, the recommendations are more specific. The Beeler Report calls for the modernization of certain infrastructure, the elimination of unpopular routes, and the implementation of “feeder” bus routes to funnel passengers into larger streetcar lines.[6] Furthermore, the recommendations attempt to group “communities of mutual interest” into common streetcar routes.[7] These measures are logical but nonetheless installed segregation into the very foundation of the planning concepts for three primary reasons. First, the Beeler Organization’s crusade against “unpopular” routes failed to consider the importance of these routes for the passengers. In these circumstances where overall ridership was low, remaining passengers nonetheless likely relied on the service and thus would have been disproportionately harmed by its elimination.[8] Second, the “feeder” style of service is far more efficient for outer suburban areas than it is for the inner city. This is because the transfer time from “feeder” routes to main routes constitutes a far higher proportion of overall journey duration if the distance is short. Riders in the outer suburbs of Atlanta—who in the 1930s were already whiter than the city as a whole—thus saw far higher efficiency increases than riders close to the downtown area. Finally, the grouping of “communities of mutual interest” together strongly implies that there were regions of Atlanta not “of mutual interest” that had shared the streetcar routes. This at least opened the door to increased racial segregation of the streetcars and, at most, means that the entire service plan was conceptualized to keep the races apart while providing superior service to white areas.
Implementation
The implementation the Beeler Report’s recommendations increased racial segregation in Atlanta’s public transit system. While the report was published in 1924, it took until the mid-1930s to gather the requisite funds and political will to carry out its ambitious proposals.[9] The overall expansion and modernization of the network led to a greater number of streetcars serving a larger area of Atlanta with higher frequency than ever before. Somewhat surprisingly, this fact itself produced greater racial segregation. In the prior decades, the logistical realities of the network—more crowded and largely unconcerned with “communities of mutual interest”—meant that it was nearly impossible for streetcar operators to enforce racial segregation amongst passengers once they boarded vehicles.[10] With more available capacity and an ever-expanding network, however, the implementation of the Beeler Report accelerated the end of racial mixing among passengers. With careful supervision from politicians, segregation was nearly total on Georgia Railway and Power’s system by the New Deal era—a complete reversal from two or three decades before. While this likely was not the primary intent of the network expansion, it was nonetheless a major consequence with wide-ranging implications.
In telling the story of the Beeler Report’s implementation, it is as important to examine the upgrades that did not occur as it is to mention the ones that did. The report contains a detailed account of the network’s culverts, which provide drainage to the portions of system that are prone to flooding [Figure 2]. The importance of culverts cannot be overstated: it is simply impossible to operate streetcars in flooding conditions. The report describes the state-of-the-art concrete arch culverts that were previously installed in low-lying areas of the Decatur line.[11] There is currently no evidence to suggest that any culverts were installed or upgraded as part of the New Deal modernization project.[12] By choosing not to improve this vital piece of infrastructure systematically, the Georgia Railway and Power Company disproportionately harmed areas with lower elevation. Many predominantly Black neighborhoods, such as Bankhead, sit hundreds of feet closer to sea level than the lowest point of the Decatur line.[13] As a result, the carrier’s probable decision not to upgrade any additional culverts further perpetuated racial inequality in Atlanta’s public transit system.
Figure 2: Illustration of a concrete arch culvert with a six-foot width like those installed on the Decatur line (Mary Beth Reed, Historic Streetcar Systems in Georgia [Georgia Department of Transportation, 2012], 128, http://www.dot.ga.gov/BuildSmart/research/Documents/GAStreetcar.pdf).
Impact
The wide-ranging impact of the service changes in New Deal Atlanta can be seen in two maps of the bus and streetcar system that were produced in 1924 and 1946, respectively [Figures 3, 4]. The 1924 map is contained in the Beeler Report, while the second was made by H.W. Lochner and Company, a different consulting firm, twenty-two years later. The differences between the maps can be seen in three main categories: service area, service density, and mode of transport.
Figure 3: Atlanta transit map from the Beeler Report, 1924 (Image courtesy of the Beeler Organization and Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atlanta_streetcars_1924.jpg).
Figure 4: Atlanta transit system map produced by the H.W. Lochner Company, 1946 (Image courtesy of H.W. Lochner and Company, Keizers, and Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlanta_transit_1946.jpg).
The service area of public transit expanded drastically between 1924 and 1946. While the 1924 routes barely travel beyond Atlanta proper, coverage of the city’s outermost suburbs in 1946 is far higher. The 1946 map demonstrates this cartographically through the usage of heavy arrows that point to the west, north and east, which give the impression that the service area has become far too large to fit on a single map. Simultaneously, much of the details present in the 1924 map’s depiction of the downtown area is gone in the 1946 edition. These changes likely attempt to tell a story of transformation—that the boundaries of Atlanta expanded so greatly that it had shifted from a dense city core to a more diffuse metropolitan area. This observation raises the specter of privilege, as the areas that received this expanded service were disproportionately white.[14] While possibly unrelated, the expansion to a larger service area by 1946 seems to foreshadow the decision to name the current transit system MARTA—Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority.
The service density also significantly shifted between 1924 and 1946. In the 1946 map, there appear to be fewer routes serving the areas immediately east and northwest of Downtown, with more of the streetcar service concentrated on the major thoroughfares. This is likely a result of the Beeler Report’s recommendation to reduce redundant services across the network.[15] While this consolidation has its benefits such as lower operating costs and creating the potential for more frequent service, it also has its drawbacks. Namely, far more passengers would have been affected in the event of a disruption as much of the system would have been susceptible to a small number of infrastructure choke points. Furthermore, this consolidation would have increased the average walking distance to streetcar stops, potentially making the system less user-friendly. This thinning of service would, of course, only be felt relatively close to the city center and thus would have continued the pattern of neglecting portions of the transit system where ridership was largely African American.
The final major difference between the maps is mode of transport. In the 1924 map, the service is provided entirely by streetcar, whereas a plethora of other modes became available by 1946. Trolley buses, feeder buses, and traditional buses offered a greater degree of flexibility to the service plan that had not been possible in 1924. Since these new modes operate over the roadway rather than on fixed tracks, they could be easily shifted to different parts of the city to meet changes in demand. However, the increased variety of transportation technologies available also served to further segregate the city. By running streetcars, trolley buses, and traditional buses in geographically distinct areas, the Georgia Railway and Power Company created a system of partitions which further supported its goal of grouping certain areas together while excluding others. This further entrenched the patterns of racial segregation that resulted from the Beeler Report.
Conclusion
The evolution of Atlanta’s public transportation system in the New Deal era perpetuated racism and racial segregation in the city. While my focus here was on the ways in which the Beeler Report implicitly led to greater segregation, it is also important to note how it does so explicitly. Several times, the report mentions that the “positive” side effects of its implementation could include increased racial separation. Since the racist intentions of these claims speak for themselves, I did not feel it was necessary to discuss them at length. I also feel strongly that this history of explicit racism—long since abandoned by planning documents—is consequential for the future of public transportation. It is vital that planners grapple with this history and shift their focus to the implicit and explicit biases that continue to mark urban transit systems today. The opportunity to improve cities comes with the responsibility of doing so fairly.
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Nathan Muz is a third-year undergraduate student studying applied mathematics. During the summer, he works in service delivery innovation at the MBTA commuter rail in Boston.
Keywords: Public Transportation, Streetcar, Planning, Segregation, Infrastructure
Notes
[1] Charles Palmer, Adventures of a Slum Fighter (Atlanta: Tupper and Love, 1955), 7.
[2] Ibid., 4.
[3] James Wright, “The Fare Problem of the Atlanta Street Railways,” The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics 6, no. 3 (1930): 278–95.
[4] Dawn Haynie, “The Atlanta Streetcar: An Analysis of Its Development and Growth as It Relates to the Core Cognitive Structure of the City," (paper presented at the 8th International Space Syntax Symposium Proceedings Santiago, Chile, January 2012).
[5] The Beeler Organization, Report to the City of Atlanta on a Plan for Local Transportation (New York: The Beeler Organization, 1924), 5.
[6] Mary Beth Reed et al., Historic Streetcar Systems in Georgia (Atlanta: Georgia Department of Transportation, 2012), 60.
[7]The Beeler Organization, Report to the City of Atlanta, 9.
[8] Jian Pang, “A Review on The Concept of Transit-Dependency and the Research on the Multidimensional Transit-Dependency Index,” (MA diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019).
[9] Haynie, “The Atlanta Streetcar,” 3.
[10] Reed et al., Historic Streetcar Systems in Georgia, 76.
[11]The Beeler Organization, Report to the City of Atlanta, 132.
[12] Reed et al., Historic Streetcar Systems in Georgia, 120.
[13] “Atlanta Topographic Map, Elevation, Relief,” topographic-map.com, accessed June 14, 2022, https://en-us.topographic-map.com/maps/k68/Atlanta/.
[14] John Ruch, “How Race and Racism Shaped Growth and Cityhood in North Metro Atlanta,” Reporter Newspapers (blog), July 3, 2020, https://reporternewspapers.net/2020/07/03/how-race-and-racism-shaped-growth-and-cityhood-in-north-metro-atlanta/.
[15] The Beeler Organization, Report to the City of Atlanta, 5.
CITATION
If you are citing this story, we recommend the following format using the Chicago Manual of Style:
Nathan Muz, “An Unequal Improvement: The Racial Effects of Public Transit Expansion in New Deal Atlanta,” Atlanta Housing Interplay, ed. Christina E. Crawford, accessed [the date accessed], https://www.atlhousing.org/an-unequal-improvement.
Bibliography
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Palmer, Charles. Adventures of a Slum Fighter. Atlanta: Tupper and Love, 1955.
Pang, Jian. “A Review on The Concept of Transit-Dependency and the Research on the Multidimensional Transit-Dependency Index.” MA diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019.
Reed, Mary Beth, et al. Historic Streetcar Systems in Georgia. Atlanta: Georgia Department of Transportation, 2012.
Ruch, John. “How Race and Racism Shaped Growth and Cityhood in North Metro Atlanta.” Reporter Newspapers (blog), July 3, 2020. https://reporternewspapers.net/2020/07/03/how-race-and-racism-shaped-growth-and-cityhood-in-north-metro-atlanta/.
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