Pricey streetcar won’t ease traffic

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

While the Atlanta streetcar is expected to consume $72 million in precious transportation funds, the project will have no impact on the region’s No. 1 transportation problem: traffic.

The city’s application for a federal grant to help pay for the streetcar mentions the word “traffic” three times in 28 pages, and one of those references concerns how to slow traffic along the corridor the streetcar will travel — 2.6 miles, from Centennial Olympic Park to the King Center.

That’s because the streetcar is not intended to address traffic, its proponents say, but to act as a blueprint for a new kind of city. It will attract life and people and investment all along the streetcar line, they say, and could be the beginning of a larger system that would transform Atlanta and how Atlantans move.

But opponents view the streetcar as a government train wreck — an expensive downtown pipe dream and, in any case, an unwise use of transportation funding when every dime should go toward commuter transit such as MARTA or relieving traffic congestion.

Among 40 mass transit projects rated by regional planners, the streetcar project came in dead-last in half the categories used to measure impact. The ranking was coincidental and done after the city applied for a $47.6 million federal grant to help fund the project. Atlanta won the grant last month, beating out hundreds of competing projects in other cities.

The highest-scoring projects had the biggest regional impact, topped by a $5.6 billion commuter rail network and a $2.9 billion light rail line, from Kennesaw State University down through Cumberland and Lindbergh to Decatur. The most cost-effective project was a $133 million streetcar line on Ponce de Leon and North avenues in Atlanta.

But supporters argue the streetcar is less a mass transit project than it is a vision of what Atlanta could be.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has broken down the arguments for and against:

Investment argument

The city’s grant application said the project’s benefits would outstrip the original investment two and a half times over, largely by raising real estate values along the route. MARTA officials, who provided data to the city, said this calculation played a critical role in the federal decision to award the grant.

The city predicted that property values near the tracks will rise by $159 million over several years, not counting inflation, by virtue of being near the streetcar. The application called that estimate conservative, saying that development around transit projects elsewhere has tended to increase in value from 2 percent to 30 percent, and this application assumed 4 percent.

The Sweet Auburn neighborhood, once the center of African-American commerce in the city, suffered when the Downtown Connector was built, separating the district from the rest of downtown. Supporters say the streetcar will reconnect the halves and make people want to cross from one to the other.

“I think it’ll be great,” said Shana Byrd, owner of YourVitaminLady Herb Shop on Auburn Avenue. “It’s hard to get people to come back to Auburn. There are a lot of tourists, but locals are not utilizing Auburn like they should.” Like other corridor business owners interviewed, she said the streetcar would attract attention and raise curiosity about the neighborhood.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood brushed off the criticism. “This is a big deal,” LaHood said. “And 10 years from now, I guarantee you the majority of people who’ll be riding the streetcar, the majority of people who take advantage of the streetcar that connects this community, will be praising people for having the foresight to think outside of the box, to have a big, big view of the future of transportation for Atlanta.”

Nevertheless, some local residents don’t buy it.

Steve Levelsmier, who works at Peachtree Center, which has been designated for a streetcar stop, dismissed the project as “foolishness.”

“It’s not going to spur development, it’s not going to spur anything,” said Levelsmier, an elevator repairman who drives downtown on I-75 from his home in Acworth. He believes more money should be spent on regional transit to get him out of congestion. “I really like quaint things like that, but when there’s this many people out of work, and that’s how they’re going to use our dollars?”

Among other commuters interviewed at Peachtree Center, a few were supportive, but most were mildly skeptical.

Benita Dodd, vice president of the libertarian-leaning Georgia Public Policy Foundation, said transportation funding should go to more urgent needs. “I don’t see the need for people in that area to move from one end to the other end of that area by streetcar,” Dodd said. “Our needs are immediate, not focusing on development that may or may not take place however many years ahead of now.”

The face of the corridor varies, including big buildings, parking lots and small older storefronts, some doing lively business, and some boarded up. Car traffic on one part of Auburn goes just above 300 vehicles an hour at rush hour, and at a spot measured on Edgewood Avenue, just under 1,000.

Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, who writes about racial injustice in transportation choices, would have preferred a different transit investment.

In the end, the streetcar is simply too small a solution, he said.

“In terms of shuttling people from one neighborhood to another, in terms of where the jobs are in the big picture, I don’t think that’ll get us to where we need to get to while MARTA’s going broke,” Bullard said.

Service argument

Transit traffic on the route, from Centennial Olympic Park to the King Historic District, was insufficient to merit a MARTA bus. A MARTA tourist bus once hit some of the same stops but failed because of lack of ridership.

Paul Grether, manager of regional coordination at MARTA, said the bus had such a different route, and buses offer such different service, that it wasn’t comparable to the streetcar line. The streetcar does almost the opposite of a bus: It will create demand rather than relieve it.

MARTA will help run the streetcar, and passengers will use the Breeze card with its regular fare.

Ronnie Agassie, on a getaway from New York City at Centennial Olympic Park last week, said he wasn’t planning to go to the Edgewood area or the King district, but if there were a streetcar, he probably would.

“Why not?” he said. “It’s a lot more convenient. It’s more charming. You can see the city from a different viewpoint.”

Tourism is a significant factor in both districts. The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site drew 700,000 visitors last year, according to the National Park Service. A handful of Centennial Olympic Park-area venues — the Georgia World Congress Center, the Georgia Dome, Philips Arena and the park itself — have a combined annual attendance of 8.3 million, according to the city’s application.

Connecting those two districts with a streetcar will move tourists from one to the other, potentially multiplying the economic impact of both.

Even the experts, however, can’t say for sure what the results will be.

While “ridership forecasting is an art, not a science,” said Grether, the methodology was all based on established, federally accepted procedures, and the application used very conservative numbers for both ridership and economic development.

Efficiency argument

The Atlanta Regional Commission may have ranked the streetcar 40th for its overall impact, but it ranked the project fourth for cost-effectiveness. The $47.6 million federal grant that will complete the streetcar’s financial package wouldn’t have begun to pay the costs of those other projects, whose price tags reached into the billions.

Even the city’s original streetcar concept, which included a long Peachtree Street leg and cost $298 million, was rejected by Washington in February largely because of funding.

No small matter were the ongoing costs to operate the downtown streetcar line, estimated to start at $1.7 million the first year. The streetcar project was small enough that the city and the downtown self-taxing business district, Central Atlanta Progress, together were able to pledge enough money along with fares to pay the streetcar’s operating costs for 20 years, a crucial step. And those businesses that make up CAP believe in its financial potential enough that they’re also putting $6 million toward the capital costs.

It should also get done quickly as new projects go, being under construction by 2012 and operating in 2013.

“It’s a manageable size. It’s funded,” said Tom Weyandt, director of comprehensive planning at the Atlanta Regional Commission. “I think it’s an appropriate first step in putting together a network.”

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed argued that it’s not as if the streetcar money could necessarily have gone somewhere else in Georgia. Reed said the project will create 5,600 jobs. In the first round of grants, announced in February, no project in Georgia won a dime. In this round, 1,000 projects nationwide competed and fewer than 80 won.

In any case, Reed said, in the long run it’s not either-or.

“The Atlanta streetcar needs to be viewed as part of a multi-pronged solution to our congestion challenges,” Reed said. “You’re always going to have a cadre of folks that are critical, but I think they’re wrong there.”

Even if it were legal to apply the grant money to other transportation projects, $47.6 million wouldn’t have been enough to fund any of the 39 other projects the streetcar was ranked against by the ARC. However, a sum that size could have plugged a substantial portion of MARTA’s operating deficit one year, or fully paid for a moderate road widening, such as Ga. 140 from Rucker Road to Ranchette Road in north Fulton County, or McGinnis Ferry Road from Union Hill Road to Sargent Road on the border with Forsyth County.

Sustainability argument

Supporters say the streetcar is the seed of a much larger, longer-term project to reshape development and an example of how to plan transportation in light of its broader impacts. Instead of responding to heavy traffic by widening a road that will just fill up again, that long-term project aims to provide new travel options and remake the traffic, they say.

Instead of only enabling far-flung suburban development by building ever longer and more expensive highways, it encourages people to live closer to work and entertainment, making cars less necessary, helping the environment and decreasing reliance on oil.

Advocates sometimes call this effort “sustainable” or “livable” planning, and see the alternative as short-sighted and tunnel vision.

The Obama administration made sustainability and livability key factors in the grant applications, and the streetcar’s companion winners last month included $10 million for a California pedestrian and bicycle network and $16 million to convert a Connecticut highway into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard.

Tom Weyandt, director of comprehensive planning at the Atlanta Regional Commission, said it’s about thinking long-term and shaping growth, not just responding to it. He said when resources get short is especially the time to do that.

When pressed, some of the local officials and planners whose organizations sent a pile of letters in support of the city’s application explained the project this way: not as the most important thing to build in itself, but as a way to start building an important new system.

“There continues to be and always has been a large debate in this country on, does it make sense to invest in roads, the 93 percent who use cars, or do we try to have more of a balance?” said Mike Meyer, a former head of the Transportation Research Board who teaches at Georgia Tech.

Meyer noted that the $600 million grant program from which the streetcar grant came is dwarfed by the federal government’s overall transportation budget: more than $20 billion a year, which is spent heavily on roads.

“Will this catch fire in the Atlanta area?” Meyer said. “I think it depends on a lot of factors that I don’t have any control over and don’t think anyone else does either.”