Transit money better spent elsewhere

By Bob Ross

Fayette County stands to get back 98 percent of its 10-year transportation tax payments in the form of projects and discretionary dollars. That could be the only good news if metro taxpayers decide to fund the plan next year.

Looking regionally and long-term, the 2012 vote looks more like a march down the aisle of a shotgun wedding ... to a very high-maintenance fiancé whose clear record of underperforming will continue “until death do us part,” instead of a single decade. “The family,” intent on using other people’s money to finance things, also pushed legislators to change the date from a summer to a fall event (and are expected to do so again).

We all agree that transportation is an essential factor in the region’s well-being, that highways are often very congested and will get progressively worse if we don’t implement effective solutions. We also agree that broad, effective solutions will undoubtedly involve taxpayer funding.

Many concerned Georgians, however, object to the project list allocating half their taxes, about $3 billion, to transit (trains, streetcars, buses) with a 40-year history of construction, operating, maintenance and capital replacement costs that are completely out of proportion to their marginal contributions toward getting cars off the road, cleaner air and economic growth.

You’d think regional commuters are prime transit customers, yet only 5 percent of them choose to use MARTA. To entice more users with low fares, government now extracts about 75 percent of a ride’s costs from nonusers. More telling is that MARTA boardings over the past decade declined at the same time our population rose 20 percent — twice the national average. Why?

The flip side of our cherished yards, parks and green spaces are jobs and residents that are simply too expansive for efficient, effective transit (a 2003 study concluded the need for an astounding 2,800 more metro stations and 2,110 more miles of track to provide transit access that a city such as Barcelona enjoys with its much-higher density).

Forcing the square transit peg into our 10-county region has been an extremely costly hole we can never fill: operating losses last year were $508 million and $503 million the year before. How many other regional needs could $1 billion have funded?

MARTA’s chief warns of a maintenance backlog growing to $2.3 billion over 10 years — even if it gets earmarked transportation tax money. Recently, I listened to MARTA’s CEO testify before Gov. Nathan Deal’s newly convened Transit Governance Task Force. She passionately outlined the system’s challenges, but provided no hope for reversing the continued losses.

We simply must use regional resources more responsibly to address our needs.

Bob Ross is co-founder of the Fayette County Issues Tea Party.