Five Points gets the headlines, but MARTA's downtown rebuild has spread to every station inside the Connector. The latest is Peachtree Center, where the agency's Station Rehabilitation Program began on March 30, 2026, with the closure of the station's southeast entrance - the first in a series of temporary, rolling entrance closures that will move around the station as work proceeds. Both elevators are to remain open throughout.
Peachtree Center is the deepest station in the system, its escalators descending through granite to a platform carved 120 feet below Peachtree Street, and its mid-1980s finishes have shown their age. The rehabilitation follows the pattern MARTA used at Garnett Station in the fall of 2025, when a six-week skip-stop from September 15 to October 26 allowed crews to replace the platform's 40-year-old pavers while Red and Gold Line trains ran through without stopping and a shuttle connected riders to Five Points. Garnett's redesigned street-level plaza was unveiled in June 2026.
Two other changes arrived in January 2026. On January 9, the East-West center platform at Five Points reopened with new tile and lighting, initially for southbound transfers only while northbound work finished. And the station beside the Georgia World Congress Center quietly got a new name: MARTA now calls it SEC District Station, for the Southeastern Conference's headquarters-anchored entertainment district planned around Centennial Yards and the stadium. The name first appeared in a January 28 notice that the station's west entrance to Mercedes-Benz Stadium would close starting January 30 for new faregate installation, with riders directed to the east entrance on the State Farm Arena side.
Those faregates were the Better Breeze project, MARTA's replacement of its entire fare-collection system with contactless equipment. Through February 2026 the installation brought full or partial entrance closures to Garnett (February 11), Peachtree Center (February 16), Civic Center (February 17), Georgia State, and Vine City. The new system went live on March 28, and by August the improvement district was reporting Better Breeze fully operational: riders tap a credit or debit card, a mobile wallet, or a new orange Breeze card at gates and bus validators, with account management through the Breeze Mobile app.
Add the Rapid A-Line, which opened April 18 with temporary boarding stops at Five Points and City Hall while real-time passenger displays were installed, and the picture is of a transit core being rebuilt piece by piece while it runs. Peachtree Center, the busiest of the hotel-district stations, is simply the next piece.
Source: Downtown Navigator, March-May 2026 editions (Downtown Atlanta Inc.), published March 18, 2026.
