Commuter bus service coming into Fayette?

Though Fayette County is the last metro area county without commuter bus services, state officials are hoping to get it started here in coming years as part of a long-range transit plan.

There’s also a move afoot to bring a light rail line to Peachtree City and Senoia, but there’s no way to tell when, or if, that might happen, said Cheryl King of the Georgia Transit Planning Board.

Commuter buses haul up to 80 people at a time into and out of Atlanta “population centers” with one-way trips into Atlanta in the morning and back from Atlanta in the afternoon, officials said.

Several local residents at a meeting Wednesday urged local officials to bring commuter buses to Fayette County to meet demand.

One big hurdle to the TPB’s “Concept 3” plan for the metro Atlanta area is funding, King said. The legislature failed to pass a bill this year that would have allowed communities to band together and use a one-cent local option sales tax to fund transit improvements.

Some $16 billion in today’s dollars, unadjusted for future inflation, are needed to fund the projects proposed by the Concept 3 plan, King said.

Just maintaining Atlanta’s existing commuting options will cost $26 billion by 2030, King said.

One new project that would serve Fayette in the future is a more localized bus service that would have stops in Newnan, Peachtree City, Fayetteville and extend into locations in Clayton County.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, of 301 Fayette residents polled in a survey by the Transit Planning Board, 50 percent of respondents said they’d favor a one-cent regional sales tax to fund rail and bus service. Another 44 percent said they opposed such a plan.

Fayette respondents were also split on whether or not to support raising revenue locally for a circulator bus or shuttle that could connect to other regional public transit systems. On that issue, 47 percent were in favor and 49 percent were against.

Some 19 percent of respondents said their workday commute was an hour or more, while 15 percent said theirs ranged upwards of 45 minutes, according to the survey results.

Though 72 percent of respondents said they hadn’t used any public transportation in the past year, among those who did, some 85 percent reported using MARTA, the downtown bus and rail transit system.

Also, the most heavily traveled-to destination for commuters from Fayette County was Fulton County, making up 27 percent of the trips, according to the survey. Another 8 percent commute to DeKalb, 5 percent go to Cobb and 4 percent go to Clayton.

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