MARTA seeks community input for new Bankhead Station Master Plan

Caption

Community members engage during the interactive input session during a Tuesday, April 11, 2023 meeting on MARTA's upcoming Bankhead Station Master Plan.

Credit: Isaiah Singleton / The Atlanta Voice

The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) held an in-person session for their upcoming Bankhead Station Master Plan on Tuesday, April 11.

MARTA’s Bankhead Station Master Plan is a community-driven master plan intended to allow for safer access, routes and connectivity to the Bankhead MARTA Station and its surrounding community.

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A rendering of the MARTA Bankhead Platform Extension project.

Credit: Courtesy of MARTA

With the anticipated transit-oriented development at the station site, the Quarry Yards site development, and Westside Park, the plan seeks to guide the accompanying growth in a way that supports transit ridership, improves walkability, connections, and maximizes access to jobs and housing for a broad, diverse population.

During the in-person session, the project team identified emerging opportunities, and leveraged forums to engage stakeholders and the public throughout the master plan process. The team also outlined the following public involvement goals to maximize opportunities for community accessibility, input, and feedback:

• Maximize public awareness and support for the project
• Provide regular updates on project progress
• Facilitate stakeholder engagement opportunities

Gensler Transportation Planning team member David Zaidain said the whole purpose of the public input meetings is to hear from the community.

“We’re at the beginning of the process, everything you will see is just ideas and the real point is to understand your perspective and listen,” he said.

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A part of the interactive session where community members and residents were able to provide feedback on what they want to see in and around the Bankhead MARTA Station.

Credit: Isaiah Singleton / The Atlanta Voice

The tentative schedule, he said, is to bring a plan to the community in May and wrap up everything by June 30.

“This is the first public community meeting where we really start to get your perspective on the initial ideas and thoughts,” Zaidain said. “After this, we will be working on focus groups with some specialized stakeholders developing more of the master plan and coming back with some more specific ideas. In May, we will have a second community meeting to show the community even more specific ideas and gauge your interest and support for those ideas. Overall, our expectation is to wrap up the master plan by the end of June.”

Additionally, this effort will be undertaken in collaboration with the MARTA Bankhead Platform Extension project. The MARTA Bankhead Platform Extension project is an extension of the elevated platform from the existing two-car train consist capacity to an eight-train consist.

Planned development in the area will increase the reliance and need for optimized capacity.

In addition to the platform extension, the project will also incorporate a new canopy, a new elevator, new escalator, the conversion of the existing “berm” (a small hill of dirt and grass) to an open public community plaza with amenities, and a new station entrance providing access to the station platform above to serve the current commuters and meet the demands of the anticipated increase in ridership due to local development in the area and planned transit-oriented development at the station.

There was also an interactive session where the community was able to give feedback on what kind of community services are missing from the neighborhood. Community members wrote what kind of services they would like to see at the station and surrounding areas on sticky notes such as banks, grocery stores such as Aldi, pharmacies, restaurants, health care, gym, dance/theatre, healthier food options.

Another question was, “what type of businesses would you like to see at the Bankhead MARTA Station?”, residents and members replied with most of the above options as well.

Regarding the MARTA station, Bankhead residents also had ideas and concerns about more parking, wider bike lanes, affordable housing, and traffic flow.

A few residents also brought up feelings of isolation when it comes to the Bankhead MARTA Station. Members of the community said they want “better MARTA connections for routes” and “to feel connected to other stations”.

There will be an online zoom meeting if anyone missed the in-person session at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 13. To register for the online zoom meeting session, visit https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZctcOyqpjwiEt2fMD3UcyL2lACTUQj4SZF2#/registration.

For additional information, visit https://bankheadmasterplan.com/

This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with The Atlanta Voice.