At a MARTA Board meeting held a few days ago, Georgia Lord urged Board members to get serious about remedying performance problems in the system’s paratransit service, MARTA Mobility. Simply privatizing parts of the system will not solve the current performance problems, she argued. Ms. Lord and attorneys Bill Nabors and David Ates represent a group of MARTA patrons with disabilities. They are pressing for MARTA to come into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and with a federal district court injunction previously entered against the system.
MARTA Mobility provides transit service for riders whose disabilities make it impractical for them to use the fixed route system. The MARTA Board of Directors is considering outsourcing (privatizing) portions of the paratransit service.
An Atlanta Journal Constitution article describing the meeting reported that Lord told the MARTA Board, “We want to help you bring the system into compliance,” and, “I urge you to tackle the responsibility of genuinely improving compliance rather than hand off this obligation to a for-profit vendor.”
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