Teleworking, carpooling, riding transit, and even walking and bicycling are getting a renewed focus from Atlanta’s transportation planners as they wrangle with budget constraints that inhibit their ability to expand roads.
A plan adopted Wednesday by the Atlanta Regional Commission recommends the formation of a new committee to connect local commute option programs with state and local transportation policymakers. The idea is to get everyone at the same table so they can coordinate their efforts to entice solo drivers to try something new.
Many of the programs that would be affected are currently housed in five different business districts or under the Clean Air Campaign.
The plan also recommends more data-sharing, which policymakers could use to direct more funding to the commute alternatives that are the most popular and effective.
The plan is timely since new statistics released Wednesday show the proportion of commuters traveling by car fell in Atlanta from 2000 to 2010. The decrease was 2.9 percent, the 12th-steepest drop among urban regions in the nation, according to the Georgia Public Interest Research Group.
Nevertheless, a recent Regional Commuter Survey conducted by the ARC found 82 percent of commuters are still choosing to drive alone.
“We want to continue to drive that percentage down by offering good transit and making sure there is infrastructure for people to bike and walk on as well as policies allowing people to telework and work different schedules,” said Regan Hammond, a planner at the ARC.
But it’s not clear how much impact these kinds of programs can have without additional funding, especially for transit, said Baruch Feigenbaum, a policy analyst with the Reason Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“This is a great way to make improvements with existing resources,” Feigenbaum said. “But for better improvements, the region needs to consider redesigning its transit system to take residents where they need to go.”
The Atlanta region is expected to add 3 million people over the next three decades. So if the percentage of solo drivers isn’t reduced, the number of additional hours that people are expected to spend sitting in traffic is expected to increase enormously — by 110 percent, according to the ARC.
Tad Leithead, the outgoing ARC chairman, said the plan adopted Wednesday, called the Transportation Demand Management Plan, is an important step toward raising public awareness about the need to embrace commute alternatives because the region just can’t support all those cars.
“We have to find ways to get people out of the single-occupancy vehicle into something else,” Leithead said. “There is only so much right of way for widening roads.”
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