From Dec. 2015's "Economic Benefits of Investing in Transit study," sponsored by the Metro Atlanta Chamber and the Georgia Transportation Alliance:
The Transportation Funding Act of 2015 is estimated to generate just under $1B (billion) per year in new transportation funding for road and bridge projects. With Georgia’s road funding needs largely addressed, it is prudent to study other elements of the state’s transportation ecosystem, including public transportation in Metro Atlanta.
As Atlanta’s population and employment have grown, the importance of MARTA to the metro area’s economy has increased dramatically over time.
As businesses look to attract millennials to their work force and create economic mobility for under-and-unemployed, they are specifically looking for proximity to transit as a key feature in location decisions. Within the last two years, recent corporate relocations are bringing jobs and investment to the metro area.
Proximity to MARTA is a key factor for these corporate location decisions … .
Additionally, MARTA has been recently recognized for its impressive leadership and efficient management.
Atlanta ranks 12th in the nation as far as congestion impacts per driver, costing a total of $1,130 per driver annually.
If Georgia’s workforce and commodity flows continue to be negatively impacted by congestion, it compromises this state’s and Atlanta’s ability to be an economically successful region.
From the Berkeley Planning Journal, 2000:
In Atlanta and in most regions, thousands of laws, ordinances, administrative rules and political decisions have woven a complicated policy framework that often lacks the requisite alignment to promote coherent outcomes. New federal transportation laws attempted to connect transportation investments with air quality, but could not address the connection between land use and transportation demand, the state’s requirement that the gas tax be spent on roads and bridges, or the market’s demand for certain types of development (low-density sprawl).
The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority is given real teeth with its control over transportation funding in the region. That authority and its other tools may help it improve the alignment among the various air quality, transportation, and land use institutions that govern the region.
By seeking to coordinate local plans and by wielding federal and state funding as a real stick, GRTA can connect federal and state policy with local decisions in a way that its partner agency, the Atlanta Regional Commission, cannot. GRTA’s greatest success will not come from developing the ideal plan or managing the best transit agency in the country, but it will come from its singular ability to enable existing local, state, and federal institutions to work together and to plan more effectively.
From the 2010 Final Report of the Georgia Joint Transit Governance Study Commission:
Currently, metro Atlanta has a multitude of transit entities that operate essentially independently from one another. Taken as a whole, these uncoordinated systems are confusing to transit users, fall short of achieving economies of scale and cost efficiencies, do not provide a definitive picture of return-on-investment to taxpayers, and produce a disjointed message about the region’s transit priorities.
The Transit Governance Study Commission finds that commuters, transit stakeholders and the general public would benefit from oversight, streamlining and coordination of the individual transit systems in the metro Atlanta region.
From a Jan. 2011 ARC press release:
Today, the Atlanta Regional Commission’s (ARC) Regional Transit Committee (RTC) approved conceptual legislation that provides guidelines and principles for creating an umbrella governance structure for a metro-wide, coordinated transit system.
The model legislation proposed by the Regional Transit Committee is consistent with the guiding principles issued by the Joint Legislative Transit Governance Study Commission, and is meant to be an example of how a statement of regional policy might be written into law in a way that meets those guidelines.
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