Elijah Megginson spent this summer commuting from the Ashby station in Southwest Atlanta to an internship at the AJC in Midtown, four miles northeast. Like most New Yorkers, he does not own a car. In an opinion column for the paper, the Morehouse College alumnus and NYU graduate student makes an argument downtown readers should sit with: Atlanta's ambition to be a global city runs directly through a transit system the city treats as a last resort.
The stigma is the starting point. When Megginson arrived at Morehouse in 2021, alumni, professors and faculty warned incoming students about riding MARTA at certain hours and about walking through the West End. His freshman-success director organized a class-wide MARTA trip from the West End to Little Five Points specifically to show students the system was not what its reputation suggested. For many of his classmates, he writes, that trip was their first and last ride.
He contrasts that with the MTA, where he grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Nearly 50% of New Yorkers report commuting by transit, and riding the subway carries no class signal — white-collar and blue-collar, rich and poor, all in the same car. He describes taking the A train north out of his neighborhood past Crown Heights, Flatbush, Fort Greene, downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg toward SoHo, and treating each ride as evidence that the city was larger than the blocks he knew. In Atlanta, 5.7% of residents commute by public transit, per 2024 Census figures, in a metro of roughly 6.48 million.
What he lost without a car was not just mobility. He could not easily reach the Golden Krust in Cobb County where a family friend took him when he got homesick for Caribbean food, or the young adults ministry a fraternity brother invited him to, or friends at Emory. \"What I lost was not simply access to places, but access to the communities, cultures and relationships that made those places meaningful,\" he writes. \"Mobility shapes opportunity.\" He also came to read the warnings he received differently — as a discomfort with the West End and neighborhoods like it, reinforced by well-resourced institutions that encourage distance rather than engagement, and folded into the stigma that MARTA is for people with no alternative.
Then came the World Cup, which he covered for the paper, monitoring Fan Fest and the stations nearest Mercedes-Benz Stadium. He describes the July 15 Argentina-England semifinal as the day the whole city felt like a piece of Argentina — thousands in Messi jerseys, drums, face paint, chanting. He watched international visitors turn up in parts of town he did not expect: the West End, Lee + White, the Walmart, BTJ's near the AUC. And for the first time all summer, he saw MARTA operating with urgency — the fastest arrival times he had experienced, officers on platforms, ambassadors helping riders navigate, and people inside the cars socializing and singing.
The numbers back the impression. MARTA reported more than 4.6 million rail trips during the tournament, with 1.7 million tied to World Cup events — about 2 million more than average for that period, per the AJC. His question is the obvious one: what if that energy were not reserved for high-volume events?
The comparison he closes on is structural. London's Tube runs 272 stations across 11 lines, Paris's Metro 308 across 16, Tokyo's 180 across nine, New York's 472 across 28. Atlanta's leaders, he argues, keep locating the city's future in sustainability initiatives and autonomous vehicles while leaving the system already in the ground underused. \"A world-class city can't rely on new technology while its current transportation system remains unused and undervalued,\" he writes. \"Before Atlanta can become the global city it aspires to be, it must build a transportation system that allows everyone to fully participate in the city's future.\"
Elijah Megginson is a Morehouse College alumnus and a graduate student at New York University, and worked as a 2026 summer intern on the AJC's Metro team.
Original reporting: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2026-08-11)
