Transportation Limits Opportunity in North Fulton

Suburban poverty has grown in Metro Atlanta by a staggering 129% in five years. At the same time, given the nature of our metro transit systems, suburban residents are less likely to have access to sufficient public transit than their urban counterparts, so they are more dependent are owning/maintaining a car.

On national average, suburban neighborhoods that have access to transit can reach just 25% of metro area jobs in a 90-minute commute. These jobs are just 4% accessible for 45-minute commute.

A Brookings Institute study demonstrates the challenge of addressing transportation deficiencies in the suburbs, “it is unrealistic to expect these communities to replicate from whole cloth everything cities or rural communities have done over multiple decades to address poverty. Not only would that take too long given the pressing need, there simply are not enough public or private resources to do so (and even if there were, creating duplicative services and systems in every community would not be an efficient use of them). Nor is the recognition of poverty’s broader reach today meant to trigger an “us-versus-them,” zero-sum resource competition with urban and rural communities that have long struggled with poverty and continue to do so. Instead, today’s geography of poverty calls for more crosscutting and responsive approaches that work at a more effective scale to address poverty in the context of place.”