Today, as every day in metropolitan Atlanta, more people will come here and congestion will increase because we are not implementing comprehensive transportation improvements.

When you're facing a tough problem like ours, sometimes it helps to get an outside perspective from folks who've done something about solving their problems.

That's what Georgia's business, civic and elected leaders got last Monday when the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce brought in experts from six states to talk about how they are tackling one of the biggest threats to the economic health and quality of life of fast-growing metro areas —- traffic congestion.

The experts, better described as "doers," from Virginia, California, Colorado, Utah, Texas and New Jersey, discussed a range of approaches to transportation funding, including toll lanes, congestion pricing, regional tax votes and public-private partnerships.

I was especially struck by the words of Lane Beattie, CEO of the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce and former president of the Utah Senate. He compared congested highways in northern Utah to clogged arteries in a human being. And he said decreased quality of life and lost productivity caused by traffic are like physical pain in a heart patient.

Beattie got a big laugh when he showed a humorous ad from Utah's traffic funding campaign in which a doctor tells a heart patient he should just wait it out while the problem gets worse. Obviously, that kind of advice is absurd, whether it's a clogged heart or a clogged highway.

In Utah, the region's business community took action. And it worked.

Voters in five northern Utah counties recently approved a sales tax to fund major transportation improvements in the Salt Lake region. And today, residents are seeing their investment at work as projects are being implemented.

As the panelists shared their experience from the trenches, a packed room of Georgia's state and local elected leaders, agency officials and transportation stakeholders listened intently. And while the approaches we heard were as different as the political environment in each state, they all had one thing in common: They took action.

Traffic has begun to burn out of control in metro Atlanta. Our region has become a poster child for congestion, with embarrassing features in publications like USA Today, Time Magazine and Fortune telling our misfortunes to the world. In some respects we are seeing the benefits of our successes —- healthy growth —- as well as the horrors of our failures to build adequate transportation infrastructure.

How much longer before we act?

As Scott Reed, assistant general manager of public affairs at the Denver Regional Transportation District, told the transportation gathering: "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible." After a successful regionwide sales tax referendum, the RTD's FasTracks program of light rail and commuter rail is moving to implementation.

Georgia's desire to fix transportation has yielded lots of plans, ideas and recommendations, but not much in the way of results, as some wait for the perfect plan.

Some say tolls are metro Atlanta's cure-all. But Bob Chase, who spoke about his work leading a business-citizen transportation advocacy group in Virginia, said tolls are part of the solution, but "no substitute for substantial, broad-based transportation funds."

The forum proved there is no single solution to fix our problem, but there are lots of options at our disposal. It may take a combination of several to get the job done. The one thing we can't do is stand by while the problem gets worse.

Are there any "doers" out there? Hello?

> Harry West, former executive director of the Atlanta Regional Commission, is a professor at Georgia Tech's Center for Growth and Regional Development.