Transportation: Where to find the money

It’s generally agreed that travel broadens the mind. It’s also true that routinely sitting in congested traffic broadens the costs borne by businesses and citizens alike.

Our new governor must keep the state moving toward reducing this burden.

The governor and members of the General Assembly should head into the Gold Dome next January determined to speed up Georgia’s march toward easing transportation woes. We’ve got a long trip ahead.

Passage this year, finally, of a transportation bill was a solid beginning, but we won’t solve our crisis in one legislative swoop.

Consider the Atlanta
region. The state’s transportation plan estimates that $29 billion to $36 billion
in work is needed in the
next 20 years to keep us moving.

Other estimates run as high as $100 billion for needed work.

The extent of the next governor’s challenge becomes clear when it’s noted that the Atlanta region’s yield from the new tax is unlikely to be more than $7 billion to $8 billion over its 10-year life. Loopholes in the law may well even reduce the total for regional work to around $5 billion .

That’s a giant hole between needed work and what’s available to pay for it.

Georgia must find additional, efficient ways to correct decades of transportation underinvestment.

Our skimpy motor fuels tax counts against us in this calculus. So does exempting fuel from the penny transportation sales tax that voters will decide in 2012.

All of which means a long, lonely drive ahead for the next governor. We can’t delay the trip any longer if we hope to keep Georgia on the prosperity map.

Andre Jackson, 
for the Editorial Board

Atlanta Forward: We look at major issues Atlanta must address in order to move forward as the economy recovers.

Through July 18, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Sunday editorial pages will focus on major issues facing the state’s next governor. The questions mirror themes of our Atlanta Forward project.