Why would mass transit across Coweta & Fayette counties require on-board officers? After all, both counties have companies offering 24-hour taxi service, and people still throw beer in their faces, then drive around our roads, despite plentiful police presence.

What are you so afraid of?

I hope we don’t end up with “regular” bus service. (road side pick-up/drop-off)

I would like to see the GRTA service established in PTC.

If it takes an armed guard to ride the bus, then we don’t need it.

”Lack of public transportation is a great limit on how much we can grow”

What rock have you been hiding under the last few weeks?

There is NO limit to how much we can grow.

The latest I’ve been able to find predicts some 65,000 trips/day on 74.

The folks that work at Wal-Mart and Home Depot aren’t the ones who pay the mortgages here. The price of housing in PTC is above what most public servants can afford to pay. Don’t believe me, ask a cop or a fireman where they live.

Like I’ve said before, the people that work in the bubble aren’t the ones who pay for the bubble. The money that pays the bulk of the taxes in and around PTC comes from people that commute to either the airport or downtown Atlanta. There are no ‘high’ paying jobs to be had in PTC other than a very select few.

Do you honestly think that Coweta County has the worst commute in the nation because everybody that lives there works there?

By the way, Fayette County ranks 84 out of 3,141, for the worst county to commute from in the nation.

I wonder how that happened.

and for about the 100th time!!

I am so sick of the bubble mentality. Are these people still watching black and white tv? Are they caught in a 60’s time warp? Wake up bubble dwellers that never leave the bubble. It is going to get much worse.

I commute to Atlanta five days a week. I am honestly getting sick and tired of bringing my hard earned money back to PTC and spending it. I used to take pride in thinking I was helping my city’s economy by shopping and spending within a five mile radius of my home. If the people that are against public transportation own businesses in PTC, they won't be getting my revenue any longer.

Coweta County stores – here I come.

SUPPORT GRTA!!!

So if you have to commute, everyone else does, too? That'll show us!

There is lots of local work that pays pretty well - flip through the Rotary Yellow Pages and take a look. There's more to local business than buying and selling houses to each other, I promise.

I didn't mean that there should be no growth, and FYI I think that 'bubble' expression ranks right up there with 'bling' or 'thinking outside the box' on things I won't say. I don't think this area is untouchably special. However, can't we try for growth that's positive? Jobs that do pay more than Mart/Depot?

I used to live in Atlanta, and I would just hate to hear a bus going down my street constantly - quiet is one of the things I love about this town. Maybe the GRTA thing that's mentioned would be ok, I just know that for the time I lived in Atlanta, my vehicle was my MARTA card and I'll tell you there were some really sketchy characters riding. Fine for college students, not fine for little kids which is why I moved here.

Putting in a regular MARTA (or similar) line to fuel crummy cheap retail growth just seems like a way for taxpayers to subsidize paychecks - let big retail businesses who locate here pay enough in wages to make the trip worthwhile and we won't see check cashing stores up and down 74. And that's why I will always vote against it in this area.

If you really hate the commute, and you hate spending money here, and you love your Atlanta job, why not move to Atlanta? Or anywhere north that does have MARTA already? I'm not asking to be funny, I truly don't understand why you don't. There are some really nice subdivisions in the Roswell area.

The idea of mass transit is to stop burning gas, stop building too many roads, and get some polluting cars off the highway---not to bring box workers in and out. I know that some people have a hard time commuting with people. Maybe you are one. It also helps not to build such things as the road extension into Coweta county where none of us want to go.

I have no commuters in my family. So on a personal daily level, I don't care yet how long the commute is. I am just worried about how quickly things are changing here. I am also against the TDK, it will funnel cars onto non-highway roads past houses and a school (Crosstown/Ebenezer).

I was thinking, no buses would theoretically mean a smaller pool of potential workers for box stores - and maybe the stores wouldn't be built as a result. Because really, how many of these stores can this area support? Especially now with Coweta building another Avenue and another Pavilion, seems like if we build any more stores like that they'll go out of business and sit empty.

That's the angle I was viewing this from: how can we stop more shopping centers like the mess over by Walmart, and wouldn't buses be a way to help more of them come to Fayette? Let Coweta build another road to access I85, and tons more retail, and they can get buses over there. I would love for TDK to not even go through, I think too many roads are absolutely a problem since history shows that more roads mean more traffic. At some point, too much traffic and retail will drive out a lot of the people who moved here to avoid those things, myself included. I don't think buses are the answer. I think stopping or at least drastically slowing down a lot of this growth is the answer, and I will even go so far as to say that I wouldn't mind paying more taxes in exchange for less of that sort of growth.

There is a distinct difference between a GRTA commuter bus and a METRO bus.

GRTA only stops at “Park & Ride” lots and usually have the same commuters sitting in the same seats every day. They only operate about 4 to 5 busses from around 6:00 AM every half hour and then return around starting at around 4:30 PM every half hour. They do NOT stop for road side pick up or drop off.

Depending on the “load” factors the numbers can change as demand goes up or down.

They are exclusively for commuting, not errand running When they start the day they come here empty. They don’t bring people into the community in the morning. They are solely for getting the commuters out of their cars during the rush hours.

Just a little more info. In 1999, when PTC did its last traffic survey, there were approx. 12,500 trips on Hwy. 74. As of this year there are over 25,500 trips. So in less than six years the amount of traffic on Hwy. 74 has doubled. Now remember, that doesn’t take into consideration that there are approx. 8 new traffic lights on 74 between 54 and the interstate. The PTC city planner, David Rast, told us at the TDK meeting that the TDK development alone will double the trips to over 50,000/day. The new avenue in Coweta accounts for an additional 8,200 – 9,500 trips/day. There is just no way to move that kind of traffic on roads that were designed and built over 15 years ago. The intersection of 54/74, that just got completed, wasn’t designed for that kind of volume.

I moved to PTC over 18 years ago because of the schools. When my kids graduate, believe me, I’ll be leaving and taking my disposable income with me. From speaking with several of the people that I know that live here in the bubble, most of them plan on doing the same.

I figure that PTC has about 5 more good years left in it before it starts to decline into just another Atlanta suburb. Then again, I might be stretching it a bit.