AJC: (Paywall, but headline tells the story) Days away from the start of the FIFA World Cup, the new, state-of-the-art MARTA trains of tomorrow have not passed mandatory safety tests, and remains possible that they will not be ready for the largest sporting event in the world
There’s really not a whole lot to add to this story. I figure to most people who live in the Atlanta area and are familiar with MARTA’s history, this is pretty much the least surprising thing in the world that Atlanta and MARTA fumbled the bag and in all likelihood won’t be ready for the World Cup despite having years to get shit done.
Progress in Atlanta moves at a snail’s pace, and frankly the metaphor is an insult to the speed of snails across the planet, because Atlanta routinely falls short of expectations unless there are millions of dollars in a treasure chest at the end of a rainbow to incentivize expediency, like when they miraculously rebuild I-85 three weeks ahead of schedule, which was still about like six weeks slower than the time it took Fukuoka, Japan to repair a sinkhole the size of a crater in a weekend.
I vaguely remember a similar situation way back when the College Football National Championship was being hosted in Atlanta, the city really wanted to get the Atlanta Streetcar up and running, mostly for appearances on a national level, because the little ass street car wasn’t going to be realistically moving more than a few hundred people for an event the size of the Natty.
But they failed, and didn’t complete it on time, and when they did finally get it up and operational, nobody cared, nobody rode it, and it’s about as much of an afterthought to the city as much as the Dallas Austin-produced ATL Anthem that was supposed to be the city’s song, akin to Sinatra singing New York, New York, but still cost taxpayers around $5M to make.
So it’s not the surprise of the century that Atlanta and MARTA are on a one-way crash course to yet another failure, and more than likely won’t have the purported trains of the future ready in time for the World Cup. And even if they did miraculously pull off the impossible, there’s no way that they would have passed the mandatory safety checks and requirements, and I could see a situation where a shiny new Cerberus-looking train car, packed to the gills full of Spaniards* and the motherfucker goes off the rails and causes some tragic accident.
*I double-checked Atlanta’s guaranteed match list, and holy fuck did we get the shaft on country draw, where Spain is pretty much the only powerhouse country playing here, with the rest of the field being Czechia, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Haiti, Cabo Verde (?), and Congo; I didn’t even know many of these places even had national teams, much less ones good enough to qualify for the World Cup
Alternatively, once the festivities begin, futbol fans will be subjected to the old and busted, urine-smelling incumbent trains, where local bums and panhandlers are probably rubbing their hands together at the opportunity to grief and harass riders from various other parts of the world, who just want to get to Mercedes-Benz Arena (that’s not allowed to have their own logo in sight, lmao).
Either way, I heard that thanks to the political situation in ‘Murica, there was a lot of reconsideration of would-be fans, travelers and futbol enthusiasts, as far as hotels, tickets and the promised influx of money that an event the caliber of the World Cup is capable of bringing in, and I thought to myself, even if Korea isn’t going to get a match here, it might still be a cool thing to go to a World Cup match, and maybe even take my dad with me. But then I discovered that the duration of the entire Group Stage, I will be out of the country, and by the time I get back, will be only critical knockout futbol matches, where the cost of those tickets will probably be back up to $FuckYou.99/each.
Perhaps I might luck into some watch events in Seoul for when Korea takes the pitch, I can’t imagine that even remote, they could be any less chaotically disorganized as Atlanta and MARTA are. But thank goodness I won’t be around in the city for when the World Cup will inevitably be causing all sorts of chaos around town, and no thanks to MARTA.
