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Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Rail reversal may point us to better ideas
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Since Republicans came to power under the Gold Dome, the question has lingered: What difference does it make?
Transportation — and metro Atlanta’s gridlock — is one example.
When Mac Collins was in the U.S. House, and before congressional earmarks became a cause for rage, he and perhaps others in the Georgia delegation earmarked $87 million for the 26-mile Atlanta-to-Lovejoy commuter rail line. Had the proposed train been faster and gone farther, and had it been accompanied by a shift in state government agency offices to the south out of Atlanta, and had there been a targeted job creation zone between Atlanta and Macon, it might have been a worthwhile idea.
But instead it remained a slow train to nowhere that never really made any transportation sense and would never have advanced as far as it did without the lure of earmarked money — which, frankly, was just enough to get the state in trouble.
That project is now reeling from what an AJC story describes as “a stunning reversal of fortune” that “has sent the project careening off the rails.” The “stunning reversal” is prompted by two events. One was the wise decision by new members of the Clayton County Board of Commissioners to rethink the county’s open-ended commitment to cover the line’s operating deficits. The other was a state auditor’s report that cost projections are out of date and that as much as $10 million in engineering costs should have been included but weren’t.
U.S. Rep. David Scott, whose district includes Clayton, thinks the potential loss of federal money “a catastrophic failure of leadership” that’s both “baffling” and “shameful.”
Now to the difference the change in power makes.
The auditor’s report comes because the new chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, state Rep. Ben Harbin (R-Evans) asked for it. And because a Henry County legislator, state Rep. Steve Davis, has championed the interests of taxpayers by raising questions about potential costs and benefits. Their persistence, combined with reservations expressed by cost-benefit conservatives on the state Department of Transportation board, may have brought the state to its senses.
The Georgia Department of Transportation is a projected $74 billion short of the $160 billion it will need through 2035, says DOT Commissioner Harold Linnenkohl. Obviously, undertaking projects that buy no real congestion relief is a luxury — or a waste — the state cannot afford.
There’s some evidence that the inquisitiveness that bodes ill for commuter rail could expand the search for solutions to gridlock.
Robert W. Poole Jr., the director of transportation studies for the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based free-market think tank, made a presentation last week to a joint gathering of the House and Senate transportation committees. It is novel in and of itself that a free-market think tank would be invited to pitch alternatives to legislators.
Poole noted that after Georgians spend $26 billion on transportation infrastructure between now and 2030, congestion will get worse. The transit/carpool model being undertaken here doesn’t work to reduce congestion because metro Atlanta’s density is too low for public transit to be viable, jobs are increasingly not in downtown Atlanta and most commuting is suburb-to-suburb, as demonstrated by last week’s AJC story on long commutes.
“The places that have done the best at keeping congestion under control are those that continued to add capacity,” said Poole. We stopped adding capacity in the 1990s, but traffic didn’t stop growing, he told the committees. About half the traffic congestion that metro Atlanta experiences, said Poole, is caused by weather, accidents, construction and other unusual occurrences and about half is more traffic than the roads can handle.
He offered innovative approaches that would involve the private sector in closing the needs gap and in getting traffic moving, financed mostly by tolls.
The most dramatic would be a tunnel under downtown from Georgia 400 to below I-20, and then above ground to I-675 south of Atlanta, at a projected cost of $6.39 billion. He proposes, too, a separate toll truckway for long-haul trucks that would cut an hour off the trip through Atlanta, extension of the Lakewood Freeway to I-20 east and west, and conversion of HOV lanes to express toll for buses, vanpools and paying customers, with congestion pricing. About 75 percent of the total cost of new congestion-relief improvements could be financed through tolls, he projected.
The ideas are clearly out of the box. And that is good. The answer to metro Atlanta’s traffic congestion problems can’t be 19th-century rail solutions or that congestion is always destined to get worse.
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