‘Infill Stations’ Bring Transit Closer to Residents

Despite living near — or, in some cases, directly below — rapid transit lines, some residents of cities like Atlanta and Washington, D.C.  still lack access to transit. As Benjamin Schneider explains in Bloomberg CityLab, this is largely because planners of the past purposely skipped certain neighborhoods when planning transit stops or planned transit as just a way to shuttle commuters between suburbs and downtowns. “It’s a pattern that can be seen in the Bay Area, where BART trains skip over much of East Oakland, a low-income area with one of the highest population densities in the region. Activists there have launched a campaign to construct a new station in the San Antonio neighborhood, in the middle of a 2.7-mile stretch of tracks without access to the system.”

On the other side of the country, “Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens wants to match the city’s infill development with infill train stops. In April, Dickens signed an executive order pledging to build four new MARTA stations on existing stretches of track. The stations, one in each of the city’s four quadrants, will all be on or near the BeltLine.” This transit infill could help expand transit access without building new lines by bringing existing services closer to residents. “At a time when laying new tracks can be prohibitively expensive, they’re an affordable way to make the most of infrastructure that’s already in place.”