Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > March > 12
Monday, March 12, 2007
Vision makes comeback in road debates
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sitting in his den with a legal pad, former Department of Transportation board Chairman David Doss of Rome did something that department officials once did routinely in the days before anti-road activists started messing with their heads: He developed a comprehensive state transportation plan that relieves traffic congestion and reduces the barriers to economic growth.
Two components are of great urgency. One is to devise a plan to get traffic in both directions from I-85 to I-75 north of Atlanta without coming down to I-285. The other is moving traffic through Atlanta. Adding interstate capacity around the city is vital, too. And completing the state’s four-lane highway network before development makes it costly and politically difficult, as happened with the project dubbed the “Northern Arc,” is a must.
Critics will pooh-pooh Doss’s approach, snorting that it did not come out of the “planning” process, as a former chairman of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce’s transportation policy committee, Ben Johnson, did in an interview with the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Fair enough. Fair enough, too, to niggle the details. Cost-benefit analysis will establish whether any particular component of the Big Idea state transportation plan should go forward. If we’re not buying improved mobility for the greatest number of Georgians, we should be spending elsewhere.
Doss, in one bold exercise, has reinvented the Georgia Department of Transportation by reasserting its role as the state’s transportation authority. One day responsibility for all state — and metro Atlanta — transportation planning, management and priorities should be consolidated in the DOT, acting according to guidance established by the Georgia General Assembly. The chain should be that regional transportation plans be funneled through the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority to be incorporated, with revisions as appropriate based on legislatively established priorities, to the state DOT. The Legislature, meanwhile, should establish guidelines for funding, including mobility improvement.
But long before that’s possible, the state needs to acknowledge that failing to give manufacturers a route across North Georgia was a serious mistake. Given the option of giving the carpet, automobile and poultry industries a generous tax break or of offering another enhancement that would preserve or grow their businesses, I’d do what Doss has done. He’s identified a corridor about 20-30 miles wide stretching from Jackson to Gwinnett counties on the east to Bartow and Gordon on the west as the route for a toll road, estimated to cost about $7 billion.
The route passes over Lake Lanier and goes through increasingly expensive real estate in Cherokee and Forsyth or Pickens and Dawson. The urgency in getting on with it is that the land becomes pricier and develops more people problems with every passing week. “That’s the single most needed transportation project in this state from an economic development standpoint,” says Doss, accurately.
The connection should already have been under way, but as with so much of Georgia’s transportation planning it got sucked into a variety of parochial agendas. Downtown Atlanta interests objected then, as they do still, because a connector represents “sprawl” — to their minds, at least. Plus, it’s a highway, which is an evil that allows people to flee their social obligations to the inner city and draws money and effort from transportation “alternatives.” And, of course, neighborhoods along the Northern Arc objected, as they do in every instance where something more dramatic than a bike path or a walking trail is proposed.
If Doss is able to do anything worthwhile with his ambitious proposal, it should be to induce state leaders to think comprehensively, to look at all of Georgia and decide which projects will improve the quality of our lives 25 or 50 years from now. Side agendas, whether it’s to discourage development that is pejoratively referred to as “sprawl,” or whether it’s to appease interest groups, should be resisted. What moves us? What removes barriers to economic development?
A real state transportation plan that makes life better for the next generation. That’s what Georgia needs.
Permalink | Comments (127) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
Don’t bet against Newt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Newt Gingrich created a buzz last week when he acknowledged in an interview with James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, that he had an affair — with the staffer who is now his wife — during the effort to impeach Bill Clinton. Clinton was impeached for lying under oath, of course, not for the affair in the White House with a young staffer.
The interview is widely interpreted as an indicator that Gingrich is, indeed, serious about a presidential campaign. Move the discussion about his personal life forward, so the thinking goes, and its kick will be gone next year.
The question for moderates and conservatives is whether Gingrich is supportable as the Republican presidential nominee. Conventional wisdom is that he’d have a tough time in the General Election because his negatives are high, even among Republicans. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 14 percent of potential Republican voters flatly rule out voting for Gingrich.
I’m undecided still, but I am ready for a Big Ideas conservative — and Gingrich is. On health care, for example, the nation is in a mad dash to taxpayer-financed universal health care — something that has the potential to bankrupt this country. The alternative is marketplace solutions based on informed choice and personal incentives.
It’s a problem that requires a committed conservative who knows where he wants to wind up, and has some sense of how to get there. Doing deals that expand government — a prescription drug entitlement, for example — is the conservative’s route to Hillarycare.
Conservatives need somebody who can think and explain the Big Ideas, who can use the bully pulpit to educate Americans to the choices — or else the opposition and media critics will spend four years labeling every initiative as an attempt to “slash” benefits for the needy, or a hard-hearted attempt to save a few pennies at the expense of somebody’s suffering. We really have to move beyond that in the debate — one of the reasons Gingrich is attractive.
Can Newt do it? Probably. He’s right about one thing, already. A year-long pre-campaign season is an eternity. People will be so sick of the celebrities by Labor Days that they’ll be ready to throw them out of office — before they ever put them there.
