Meet the MARTA Army: A citizens’ corps making the transit rider’s experience better

Have you ever wanted to see changes made to a passenger rail or transit service, even something as small as putting a display of route and schedule information at every stop, that would make riders’ lives easier? Have you tried to get the operator, transit agency or local government to make such improvements, but been stymied by complaints of “not enough money,” bureaucratic finger-pointing, concerns about liability, or other such obstacles? Have you then wished that you and a group of fellow riders could just go out and make improvements yourselves, with the agency or operator’s blessing?

A four-month-old organization of transit riders in Atlanta is taking it upon themselves to do just that. They call themselves “The MARTA Army,” MARTA being the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority and the system of heavy-rail trains and buses it operates. The Army, whose all-volunteer members call themselves “soldiers,” is not a traditional advocacy organization — they don’t lobby elected officials or petition agencies and boards to make certain decisions and fund and implement them. Instead, it is a direct action organization whose soldiers invest their own time and minimal amounts of money to make the MARTA system easier to figure out and use. They practice what has been termed “tactical urbanism” — city planning goals achieved through a series of small steps characterized by their community focus and realistic goals, according to CityLab.

“MARTA is a big, bureaucratic agency that is broke,” MARTA Army co-founder Simon Berrebi told a small audience at one of the sessions at TransportationCamp DC in Arlington, VA on January 9. “We’re young, creative, tech-savvy and can work on things that make or break the rider experience. By reclaiming ownership of the system, we can overcome institutional barriers and build a world-class transit system.”

Berrebi, a PhD student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a native of Paris, France, was quick to point out that not all of the MARTA Army’s soldiers are tech-savvy Millennials, and that the group includes a growing number of Atlantans of the baby boom generation. But its spirit and method of organization are easy to identify with the ideals and tactics of the generation currently in their twenties and thirties. Berrebi and his co-founder Bakari Height (a native Atlantan who holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning, also from Georgia Tech) are both in their twenties.

The MARTA Army’s first project is to produce and distribute laminated, weather-resistant posters that its soldiers can hang on as many MARTA bus stops as possible, targeting particular neighborhoods (those with high numbers of transit-dependent residents and those with large numbers of choice riders), showing maps of the routes that serve them and scheduled departure times at that stop. The group started a volunteer-driven “Adopt a Bus Stop” program, and MARTA granted them unofficial permission to hang the posters and to use the agency’s tricolor logo. The Chief of the MARTA Police Department also worked with the Army and gave them specifications for how to carry out the program. The Army utilized online crowd-funding platform Ioby to purchase the materials, of which it retains ownership, and recruited over 150 volunteers who have each individually adopted at least one bus stop. It is the individual soldier’s responsibility to put up and maintain the poster. 

This was the lowest-risk of the ideas the Army has proposed to MARTA. The Army is still working to gain approval for others that have yet to be made public. Thanks to its targeted outreach to particular neighborhoods, however, the Army’s efforts have yet to be met with any backlash from NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard). The group’s next project is to have volunteers erect and maintain benches and simple shelters at some bus stops, using the cheapest vendors for these materials and paying for them through crowd-funding, but with the hope of engaging more local artists and designers going forward.

In addition to better branding the MARTA system, engaging transit enthusiasts from all parts of the city and socioeconomic backgrounds, and building a network of transit “power users,” the MARTA Army also aims to build a scalable model that can be franchised out to other cities using open-source online tools, such as a poster-generating script based on vehicle-tracking platform OneBusAway, volunteer manuals, and a database tool to allow organizers to keep track of and mobilize volunteers.

Berrebi acknowledged that the MARTA Army is going in a different direction from the area’s established, traditional advocacy group, Citizens for Progressive Transit, but has a good relationship with CFPT and similar groups that it wishes to maintain (Army co-founder Height also serves as co-Vice President of CFPT). Part of the key to the Army’s successful roll-out, Height said, was taking time to find people who were truly dedicated, working within the constraints of each volunteer’s time and interests, sticking with realistic short-term goals, and eventually capitalizing on earned media to spread the word. 

Berrebi added that groups like the Army and transit agencies can form effective two-way partnerships, each working on different parts of the same overall project. But part of the Army’s success lies in being as little reliant on MARTA officials as possible, and not being content simply to ask MARTA for things and await a response.

“Nobody cares about building the transit system of tomorrow,” Berrebi said in closing. “They care about improving transit in ways they can actually see. We started with nerdy Millennials then got baby boomers who were simply trying to fix up their neighborhoods.” The Army invites people to connect with the group on Facebook and Twitter.

Do you think this kind of citizen action would make your local transit system significantly better? What would an “Amtrak Army” or an “[Insert Amtrak Route Name Here] Army” look like, and how would it operate? Your thoughts are welcome in the comments section below.