Metro Atlanta’s now back into a familiar routine.
Goodbye easier mid-summer commutes. Resumption of the annual back-to-school rite means more yellow buses and parent-driven vehicles are once more tooling onto this region’s overworked roads.
And new money for road-building also means there’s now a construction site seemingly around every other blacktop curve here as well. Which, long-term, is not a bad thing.
All of which adds emphasis and energy to the ongoing, routine Passion Play that is brake lights and backups on our streets and highways.
Combined, that makes for a good time to check in on the multi-pronged patchwork of fits, starts – and some progress — that comprises efforts to ease mobility here over the long-haul.
Most visibly, GDOT is energetically pursuing highway projects across the metro that’re intended to both catch up on deferred maintenance and pave ahead on improvements. The latter includes significant expansions of toll lanes on area interstates.
A hard-won hike in gas taxes is fueling this roadway work. Despite the hard push needed to get that measure approved by the Legislature, it might well have been the easy part of helping metro Atlantans – and all Georgians, really – move around more efficiently.
Efforts in the General Assembly to push a multi-county proposal for transit projects stalled this year. In its place came a greatly scaled-down plan for a sales tax referendum in the City of Atlanta that would fund transit expansion within city limits. The downsized referendum that’s approved for the November ballot is much better than more thumb-twiddling, but it’s still well short of a plan to bring better service by buses, trains – or both – to more of this sprawling region.
Specifically, the Atlanta proposal, if approved by voters, could over time expand light-rail in the city beyond the much-maligned current downtown streetcar loop. That would begin to build out Point A-to-Point B lines more like those in San Diego, St. Louis, Cleveland and many other cities that move riders long distances on separate rights-of-way at highway-like speeds at times.
The future’s opportunities and needs lead us to note that it’s not too early to begin looking toward next-phase solutions that can be acted on next year. In a recent meeting with the AJC’s Editorial Board, MARTA Board Chairman Robbie Ashe said the agency plans to approach the General Assembly in 2017 about revisiting the plan to allow a sales tax referendum for transit expansion in the rest of Fulton County and DeKalb County.
MARTA’s remarkable, ongoing financial and operational turnaround under General Manager Keith T. Parker puts them in good position to make this ask, we believe. The agency has acted decisively in recent years to address legislative objections.
For its part, before adjourning last spring, the Legislature enacted another pair of committees to study transit. Based on video of a recent organizational meeting of the new House Study Committee on Regional Transit Solutions, its chairman, Rep. Christian Coomer, R-Cartersville, gave hopeful signs that this latest iteration might actually get something done.
Coomer said, “It seems that a lot of those (previous) study committee reports lean heavily toward passing the buck … .” He added that, “I’d like for us to be able to come up with some real-world, near-term suggestions (that) … have some positive effect on transit and on transportation more broadly in the metro area in particular, and around the state.”
We heartily agree. And we’d point out that research indicates Georgians have similar expectations. The Legislature should not forget that when it’s inevitably tempted instead to stray into easier, crowd-pleasing topics.
Much as was done in getting the gas tax increase passed into law, the Legislature needs to once more summon sufficient courage to enact Act II of what’s needed to increase mobility here.
