Thu 22 Feb 2007
There has been a lot of talk about commuter rail recently. Gwinnett developer Emory Morseberger is spending a lot of money promoting his “Brain Train” from Atlanta to Athens. Other groups are pushing for a rail line from Atlanta to Lovejoy and then down to Macon. Of course these folks want the government (Federal, state and local) to pay for the rail, saddling taxpayers with an expensive boondoggle that many believe won’t really solve the traffic problems in the Atlanta metro area.
Why Rail Won’t work
Railroads are point-to-point. Marta is great if I need to get from Georgia Tech to Lenox Mall or from the airport to CNN Center. It does me no good if I need to get from Howell Mill to Emory, CabbageTown to Vinings, or Tucker to Peachtree City. Atlantians work all over the Metro area: Windward, Interstate N. Parkway, Norcross, McDounogh, Peachtree City. The amount of rail needed to meet the needs of the Atlanta workforce will break the budget.
For the past year I commuted from Gwinnett to Midtown every morning. I85 from Sugarloaf to I285 was stop and go. Once I crossed inside I285, I was regularly able to do 70-80Mph. The traffic from the burbs isn’t going into the heart of the city where these rail lines want to run.
Rail also doesn’t meet the needs of commuters. The Atlanta-Lovejoy line will only run a few hours a day. If you need to run home to pick up a sick kid from school or you have to work late to meet an unexpected deadline, too bad. Rail is also expensive. The Brain Train estimates the cost of a one-way fare will be $6.40. $13 a day in train fare isn’t going to garner a lot of riders.
Rail also suffers from problems at the end-points. Traffic on the roads going to the stations in suburbia will be an issue. Once the commuters make it into Atlanta then they suffer all the problems of Marta: slow, uncomfortable, and dirty (although Marta has gotten better on that last point).
Finally, Rail is subsidized by taxpayers regardless of usage. This eliminates incentive for the rail operators to provide a product that commuters want. I have no objection to a private company that wants to build a rail line. If the idea is economically viable then they should do it. Where I object is when people come along and demand that I invest in their idea through my property, sales or income taxes. That tells me the idea isn’t economically viable and the only way they can make it happen is to force the taxpayers to pay for it. That’s the wrong way to do things.
Why Roads Won’t work
Of course just building new roads won’t solve the problem either. The old axiom “Junk expands to fill the space available” applies to road building. Individuals move to the suburbs for various reasons, the biggest is cost: Houses are cheaper the further out you go. The more roads that are built the further out people will have to move to find a place they can afford. Another major problem is that roads take forever to build. Laying new roads, like the now-defunct outer perimeter, are fraught with issues of property-rights, eminent domain and political patronage.
The state has attempted several schemes to try and reduce the number of cars on the road, but these haven’t really taken off. Carpooling suffers from the same flexibility issues as rail. If you need to leave early or stay late you’ve got a problem. If you need to run errands at lunch you can’t. I can’t walk away from a service outage just because my ride-share partner is ready to leave.
Part of the problem is how lanes are laid out. There is no good reason for GA400 to merge down to one lane when it meets I85 South. Then that lane goes away in a few hundred feet. All the thousands of cars coming from Forsyth & North Fulton have to merge twice in a half mile distance. There are other examples of issues where on-ramp traffic has to cross off-ramp traffic and generates regular snarls. The criminal thing about many of these intersections is that the pavement exists to re-draw the traffic patterns the right way.
Let the market sort it out
Economics is the best solution to our traffic congestion.
There have been a few market oriented ideas floated to help alleviate the traffic problems in Atlanta. Private Bus operators should be encouraged. Converting HOV lanes to HOT lanes (where the toll is based on traffic) would put a direct economic relationship to commute time and cost.
However, the simplest solution is to keep doing what we are doing. The free market is solving the traffic problem as I type. Look at the Atlanta skyline and you’ll see dozens of new condo buildings going up. New Atlantic Stations are being planned for Doraville, Hapeville, Fort McPhearson.
There is no need to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer’s dollars to solve a problem that the taxpayers can solve individually if they want.
February 23rd, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Long, heavily researched critique of many of your points, including a reply and counterreply with anti-transit activist Randall O’Toole.
http://www.vtpi.org/railcrit.pdf
February 25th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
I’m of the opinion no matter how much of a limited resource you attempt to conserve something will take advantage of the surplus.
In atlanta, specifically, I think the short-mid term solution to the problem is two fold.
First is distribution, while you did note the lack of traffic ITP keep in mind there are multiple feed points from the major population centers. I-75, I-20, I-85, GA-400 not to mention in recent years there has been a drive toward ITP workers to live ITP. Outside the perimeter there are fewer major work centers with decent distribution. For example Alpharetta has a large office and industrial base but very little in the way to handle traffic.
Second is thru traffic. Sit above I-85 some afternoon and watch the interstate. 2-3 lanes will be almost all OTR trailer traffic. These trucks represent 3-4 cars, minimum of lane used. If you include their poor acceleration and braking on what is a poorly graded interstate it is no wonder there is congestion. Too much traffic is forced through atlanta for no justifiable reason.
My solution would involve limited access highway grade parkways, similar to Ron Reagan Parkway. These would need to provide critical traffic links between more major sections. Gwinnett County is considering one to replace the outer perimeter link. Next up is ban OTR trucks during peak prime time hours. In return tax incentives could offset the headache.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
I want to point out one fallacy with your argument about cost. You state that “The Brain Train estimates the cost of a one-way fare will be $6.40. $13 a day in train fare isn’t going to garner a lot of riders.
” What you fail to mention is ther cost to drive. Based on what the federal goverment considers the cost to run an automobile which was 48.5 cents per mile last year and a lttle less this year your thirty mile commute into downtown from Gwinnett would cost at least $13 one way. It seems that taking transit is actually much cheaper then driving in a single occupancy vehicle. People in other parts of the country where riding transit is a way of life deal with the occasional issue you mention - “If you need to run home to pick up a sick kid from school or you have to work late to meet an unexpected deadline”.
Even roads have subsidies from taxes. Tell me how many counties have a road component in their SPLOST program.
I agree with your assessment whereby you mentioned how traffic opens up inside of
I-285 traveling south on I-85 out of Gwinnett. What we need is a transit sytem that goes to Perimeter Center from Gwinnett so we can get more cars off the road which cause th stop and go traffic travelling on I-85 and I-285 to and from the Perimeter Center area. Of course we also have the mirror image issue for those people who travel I-75 and I-285 to and from Perimeter Center. We need a transit sytem that traverses the entire top end and connect to systems going north (MARTA), Northeast and Northwest.
The one thing that makes transit work very well in cities where transit is part of the way of life is density. All those new At;antic Station developments you mentioned are great for providing transit stops with solid ridership. We need as many transportation options as we can get.
One of the major traffic issues in the metro area is truck traffic passsing through Atlanta. If we could reduce truck traffic the roads woould work much better. The solution is either the proposed Truck Only Toll (TOT) lanes or the best solution which is putting freight on rail lines which are much more cost efficient and lower polluting than truck transportation.