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Friday, November 16, 2007
Governor in driver’s seat on transportation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Leave it to a trucker — a trucker of a sort — to get to the gist of the traffic congestion problem in Georgia.
He did it by recounting four seconds as a child on a school bus field trip. The bus hit a bad stretch of road. The driver, tossed from her seat by a sudden bump, tumbled into the exit well.
The driverless bus “began to lose direction and speed — we were only going where momentum was carrying us. …” Of those who reacted, some just yelled, others reached for the wheel, and others reached for the driver.
Getting her back in control “probably took only about three or four seconds … but for those of us who saw it, it was a moment frozen in time, a moment that seemed as though it would last forever.”
The trucker speaking here is Ed Crowell, president of the Georgia Motor Trucking Association. His remarks were made at a luncheon of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation think tank. There’s a point to his story that reflects an indisputable truth.
“Our state today may be in that same kind of frozen moment,” said Crowell. “We may not have anyone in the driver’s seat.”
There can, of course, be one only person in the driver’s seat — and that is Gov. Sonny Perdue.
Crowell, a clever man who was describing an event in his childhood in Haddon Heights, N.J., describes Georgia’s transportation system as a “Yankee containment system.” The state’s strategy a half-century ago, he said, was “to funnel all the major interstates into a ridiculous nexus right in the heart of Atlanta” and to add “an overabundance of off-ramps to ensure congestion, along with illogical interchanges and convoluted connectors to create confusion.” What’s more, he notes, they threw a major airport in the same region.
“Then, just in case some Northerners still found their way out, they ensured the travelers would see absolutely nothing of significance on their 250-mile trip south until they crossed into Florida.”
No darts, please, from the natives to the South, for while terribly attractive points of interest have, indeed, sprung up or grown out to the interstates, Crowell is speaking of the past. As he noted later, too, he would have been a Georgian earlier but for “the unfortunate geographic facts of my birth (please understand I wanted to be near my mother), but I got here as fast as I could.”
The state’s strategy, he said, was growth: “growth was the only definable goal, growing was the strategy.”
Here we depart from Mr. Crowell to examine where the bus is moving in the era beyond growth for growth’s sake.
Promising things are happening. Just this week, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) approved a memorandum of understanding that defines how projects are to be chosen and funded. The agreement will include the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Georgia Department of Transportation.
It picks up language from a metro congestion mitigation task force committing the state to selecting projects on the basis of how they solve gridlock. All would be required to use congestion relief as the major factor (70 percent weight), subject them to cost-benefit analysis and to fix and measure a gridlock-relief goal. All will agree to adopt plans “that clearly target congestion and mobility.”
That’s big — and it’s vital.
Meanwhile, a joint House-Senate task force, which has been studying the state’s transportation and funding systems, will produce legislation to be introduced in January. Elements likely to be included would convert the 7.5-cent gasoline tax into a statewide sales tax as an even swap, roughly two-thirds of a penny. And it’s likely to include a proposal to allow counties to join together to levy a local sales tax, something metro Atlanta leaders favor, though the governor may not yet be sold.
Most importantly, though, are two related needs: an honest-to-goodness statewide transportation plan — statewide, not regional — and a clear delineation of roles and authority with a hierarchy that leads to, and stops at, the governor’s office and the Legislature.
There’s one driver. That’s the governor. There’s one school bus procurement source. That’s the Georgia General Assembly.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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