Response to recent conversation
Atlanta Forward readers responded to last week’s columns about flex bus service and the need for metro-wide coordination of transportation operations. Here are a few selected comments:
Bryan-MARTA supporter: Adding a 1 cent tax would generate plenty of money to provide real mass transit within Cobb County to connect the entire region. While I support providing services of some sort, let's give Cobb a real transit option with MARTA and not some wannabe CCT. Time to grow up, Cobb.
Bernie: The smart and only viable solution is more state funding across the board for a single transportation service that connects all surrounding communities.
Georgiadawg70: When I was growing up many years ago, we built our roads with a 3 percent sales tax. Now it's 8 percent and climbing. Where is all the money going? You people are fools.
Road Scholar: Georgiadawg, most roads statewide use federal and state funds. The state gas tax is 3 cents on the gallon and a 1 cent sales tax that the governor controls. That 1 cent has been used on transportation in the recent past, especially to pay off bonds for the GRIP — the rural four-laning of certain state highways (with no traffic on them). The 8 cents you allude to is the state sales tax plus local option taxes such as the MARTA tax in Fulton and DeKalb counties. Other local option transportation taxes are tied directly to a project list by a county or city. The gas tax has not been increased, or at least adjusted to inflation, since the early 1980s. Maryland, for one, has just increased its gas tax based on needs. A regional revenue stream is needed for the entire metro area for transit beyond Fulton and DeKalb counties. A central coordinating group (GRTA?) is needed to make transit seamless in planning and operations. A gas tax increase is needed; adjust it to inflation. Things cost more now than in the 1980s! Dedicate a few cents to transit for planning, construction and operations. This isn't rocket science. Just have the guts to do what is right.
Logical Dude: Cobb leadership is now considering adding flexible transit routes. Just now? Considering? No action yet? How long ago did those routes get canceled, anyway? How many studies do we need before we actually expand MARTA, buses, etc.?
The Last Democrat in Georgia: The flex bus routing with on-demand service is a good idea, probably the best idea at present for an area in which there is a definite demonstrative need for bus service, but ridership is low on traditional fixed routing. While not a bad idea on its face, the idea, suggested above, of instituting a 1 cent sales tax to fund the existing mass transit system (CCT) is a political impossibility in Cobb County. The idea of instituting a 1 cent sales tax to fund the expansion of MARTA into Cobb County is especially politically unfeasible. MARTA is unpopular within many staunchly anti-transit circles of Cobb County's well-established ultraconservative power structure. There are many within the county who are still very cool to the idea of CCT being funded by the county government. They think bus service does nothing more than attract low-income non-whites to a county that has traditionally been dominated by affluent whites.
