361661 external_news 1420640379 1475893646 MARTA is entering its most pivotal year in decades. The transit agency, content simply to stay afloat for years, will begin launching bus and rail service in Clayton County and study two more expansion proposals in 2015. But arguably MARTA's most high-profile project in the coming year deals with something altogether different from trains or buses. SCaRP alumna Amanda Rhein, 35, will oversee the initiatives to build mixed-use developments atop lifeless parking lots and bring shopping and other concessions options inside the transit stations. Rhein joined MARTA and picked up projects that her staff, whose praises she sings often, had spent years working on. In addition to overseeing a pilot program that could bring coffee shops and newsstands to platforms and other parts of rail stations, Rhein will lead the ongoing effort to partner with private developers to transform the park-and-ride lots of its Brookhaven, King Memorial, Avondale, Edgewood-Candler Park, and Oakland City stations into mixed-use developments. "The ultimate goal is to have stations themselves become destinations," Rhein says. "Hopefully they will become a gathering space over time. Not because [people] live there or are going to work, but they become some public space that provides a place for the community to spend time and interact."

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