Atlanta Magazine
Photograph by Growl
The pandemic has crippled public-transit systems across the U.S. What will happen to ours?
142 For 10 years prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, each weekday morning, Jeremy Wilhelm walked from his house in Grant Park to the King Memorial MARTA station.
There, he caught a train to Five Points and then walked another few blocks to his job in a Marietta Street office tower. In fact, when he and his wife were shopping for a house, their top requirement was being within walking distance of MARTA, says Wilhelm, a project manager and analyst at Westat.
Then, the coronavirus showed up, and Wilhelmâs office shut down. Heâs been working out of his living room since March 2020 and expects to do so indefinitely. His wife, Holly, used to commute by MARTA, too, riding the train up to Buckhead. Her job as an aptitude consultant for the Johnson OâConnor Research Foundation requires her to be in the office a couple of days a week, but these days,