The idea that downtown's 2.7-mile streetcar loop was only ever supposed to be a first phase resurfaced this month at a developer roundtable in Midtown, and the person who raised it has a family history with the notion. At the Aug. 13 Atlanta Design Roundtable, held in JPX Works' Emmi Midtown apartment high-rise, developer Jarel Portman was asked which demolished Atlanta structure he would bring back. He skipped the obvious answers, including Terminal Station, and named a transit system instead: streetcars running straight up Peachtree Street.
Portman's version would not stop at the downtown core. He described old New Orleans-style cars running from downtown up Peachtree past Lenox Square and on to Brookhaven, letting riders get on and off anywhere along the spine rather than sitting alone in a car. The setting made the point for him. The roundtable, moderated by veteran journalist and editor Maria Saporta, looked out over Spring Street during a summer afternoon commute, block after block of single-occupant vehicles. Portman conceded in the same breath that he did not expect it to happen, and Saporta cut him off to remind the room the exercise was aspirational.
For downtown readers, the relevant history is that this was once an organized campaign, not a thought experiment. Atlanta Streetcar Inc., a nonprofit formed to put an electric streetcar back on Peachtree Street, was active until the last decade and carried serious names on its board: Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, executives from Cousins Properties, and Jarel Portman's father, the architect and developer John Portman. The group ran television commercials making the case for light rail on the city's signature street until the Great Recession ended the ad buys.
Its stated mission was to reconnect downtown, Midtown and Buckhead with Atlanta's first working streetcar since 1949. When the current downtown loop opened in 2014, the nonprofit handed its work to the city and dissolved, on the understanding that the loop was phase one of something larger. More than a decade later, the loop is still the whole system, and Peachtree north of downtown has no rail service of its own.
What that would have meant for the street itself is the open question. A Peachtree line running the length of the corridor would have changed how ground-floor retail leases along downtown's main street, how visitors move between the convention district and Midtown, and how much of the trip between downtown and Buckhead happens without a car. It also might have underperformed against expectations the way the existing loop has, which is the counterargument every expansion proposal since 2014 has had to answer.
Saporta's reaction to the old system maps was the blunter summary: looking at how extensive Atlanta's streetcar network once was, and knowing it was torn out, is hard to square with the traffic outside the window. Whether a Peachtree streetcar could ever again assemble the money, the backing and the political will it had two decades ago is unresolved. For now it is a developer's answer to a hypothetical, delivered above a jammed Spring Street.
Original reporting: Urbanize Atlanta (2026-08-21)