By Maria Saporta

As a lover of transit — especially rail — my heart has been broken repeatedly by the unrealized opportunities metro Atlanta has had over several decades.

The reasons are many. Lack of state and regional funding for the capital expansion of transit in metro Atlanta. Anemic efforts to secure federal dollars for capital expansion. And having our major transit system, MARTA, being out of the capital expansion business for more than two decades.

A major problem is that in addition to MARTA, we have multiple agencies – Atlanta Regional Commission, The ATL (Atlanta-Region Transit Link Authority), the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and the State Road and Tollway Authority competing for limited federal dollars and minimal state funding. Plus, the Georgia Department of Transportation has pretty much-ignored transit spending in metro Atlanta.

This regional ineptness will be addressed in a future column, but my latest heartbreak has come from the scaling back of plans to be funded by the More MARTA half-penny sales tax passed in 2016.

Atlanta City Council’s Transportation Committee hears from MARTA at its March 1 meeting (Photo by Maria Saporta.)

According to a schedule MARTA released at the March 1 Atlanta City Council Transportation Committee meeting, there’s now a list of nine projects expected to be completed by 2028. And only one project is slated to be rail – the extension of the Atlanta Streetcar connecting to the Atlanta BeltLine and continuing on to Ponce City Market.

That list has been pared down from 17 projects in 2018 and from as many as 70 in 2016.

Several transit lines once promised to be light rail (LRT) – namely Campbellton Road and Clifton Corridor – have now been scaled down to bus rapid transit (BRT) because of costs and expediency. (See charts at the end of this column).

That’s not all.

Of the $394.8 million collected thus far from the More MARTA sales tax, $180.7 million, or about 46 percent, has…