Before "MARTA closes Five Points station" became a headline riders actually had to plan around, the $206 million redevelopment behind it spent late 2023 quietly working through federal review — and the earliest paperwork already contained a warning that would prove accurate: the station's busiest levels would need to shut down for well over a year.
In December 2023, MARTA and its City of Atlanta partners advanced what the agency formally calls the Five Points Station Transformation Project into public review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The plan calls for removing and replacing the station's concrete canopy, reconnecting Broad Street to pedestrian traffic, and adding space for public art, small-scale agriculture, and communal gathering — reshaping what MARTA describes as its largest and busiest transit hub into what officials called a "compelling civic space." The project is funded largely through the More MARTA half-penny sales tax, with additional support from a federal RAISE grant and the State of Georgia; refinements after the initial pitch actually brought the price down $53 million from earlier projections.
The review process wasn't simple. Five Points opened in 1979, and Georgia's State Historic Preservation Office determined that year that the station carries genuine historic weight — "part of the largest public works project in Atlanta history," per MARTA officials — and found the redevelopment would negatively affect those historic elements, requiring mitigation. MARTA's response included commitments to architectural documentation, photography, and interpretive panels memorializing the current concourse and plaza levels before construction begins.
Buried in that same environmental paperwork was the number that would matter most to daily riders: a projected closure of roughly 18 months for all bus and pedestrian access at the plaza and concourse levels, while underground rail service and transfers continued uninterrupted. MARTA's own figures put more than 17,000 daily customers at risk of disruption — about 4,500 daily bus-to-bus or bus-to-rail transfers and 12,000 daily entries and exits. Spokesperson Stephany Fisher told Urbanize Atlanta at the time that a contingency plan was still being finalized, with displaced bus routes likely relocating roughly half a mile to MARTA's Georgia State station. "We need to know exactly where riders can catch their bus. We need to have everything ready to go," Fisher said. "We'll do an extensive public education" push once the timeline firmed up.
That firming-up came the following spring: MARTA confirmed the closure would begin July 29, 2024, with a temporary reopening planned around the 2026 World Cup — the news that actually reached most Atlantans' radar. But the December 2023 review is where the project's real shape got locked in: the historic-preservation fight, the rider-impact numbers, and the acknowledgment — even then — that Five Points wouldn't be finished in time for the World Cup as originally hoped, even as MARTA promised the station would be "ready to host soccer fans from around the world" regardless.
Five Points remains the connecting point for all four MARTA rail lines and nine bus routes, and the project is expected to help set the stage for future transit-oriented development downtown, including a residential component eventually planned at Underground Atlanta.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published December 2023.
