Speaker Ralston Wants to Help Atlanta-Area Transit Agencies
In the aftermath of the I-85 bridge collapse, Speaker David Ralston is, once again, speaking on the need to devote more state resources to transit. In a letter sent to Governor Deal on Monday morning, Speaker Ralston wrote that MARTA and the Georgia Regional Transit Authority’s Xpress bus service are already seeing extraordinary increases in rider demand. More transit users will lead to more transit costs, something that agencies are not prepared for at the moment (which is not surprising considering that the Xpress bus is the only transit operation that receives dedicated state subsidies).
According to MARTA CEO Keith Parker, there was a 25 percent increase in riders on Friday. The AJC also reported that the stations were rather packed on Monday morning. Noting that these increases will affect the budgets of transit agencies, Ralston is calling for the agencies to “be made whole” by shifting state funds and leveraging federal dollars to pay for the rising costs. He has already assigned House Transportation Chair Kevin Tanner (R-Dawsonville) and House Appropriations Chair Terry England (R-Auburn) to serve as liaisons to the governor’s office and is considering what the House can do in the 2018 legislative session to help.
Speaker Ralston puts in this teaser at the end of the letter:
The House of Representatives has a long and proud record of working to move our state forward. While this incident will have a short-term negative impact, it is possible we will find new ways forward, working in partnership with other stakeholders, to make long-term improvements to our transportation infrastructure.
It’s no secret that the Speaker wants more state involvement in solving Georgia’s systemic transit problems, not just ad-hoc funding for particular disasters like the I-85 collapse. SB 6 and HB 160 were two bills introduced in 2017 that would have created a regional transit commission to focus on long-term issues. Both were caught up in the squabbling between the House and the Senate, leading Ralston to push through HR 848, which establishes the House Commission on Transit Governance and Funding, on Day 40. According to his letter, the Commission will “soon” begin working toward its goal of improving transit in the long term.
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I find Kyle Wingfield to be tiresome 99% of the time, but he does manage to be onto something every now and then, though it is a good bit less than the frequency of a stopped clock. (For example, I remember his claiming that the money dedicated towards keeping the Atlanta Falcons from leaving downtown for Cobb County should have been instead redirected to property tax rebates.) But giving credit where it is due, here is one of his few and far between columns that not only hit the nail on the head, but actually went against the prevailing “wisdom”:
http://kylewingfield.blog.myajc.com/2017/03/30/opinion-why-atlantas-roads-are-no-match-for-events-like-i-85-collapse/
Not only does the Atlanta area not badly need a bunch of new highways. It needs them in order for any transit plan to, you know, actually work.
Sorry. That should have been “not only does the Atlanta area badly need a bunch of new highways, but it needs them for any transit plan to actually be effective.” That is, if the goal of the transit plan is to actually reduce congestion. It seems as if the goal of transit advocates is to force as many people off the road as possible, and not to meet the needs of a huge 28 county area with 5.3 million people in it … with 500,000 of that 5.3 million living in the Atlanta city limits. (Of course, the “transit advocates” are not trying to use transit as a small carrot and huge stick to force as much of that 5.3 million inside I-285 as possible right? No, that couldn’t POSSIBLY be what they are up to!)
There should have been horse trading on this decades ago: fully funding MARTA (whatever that means) in return for as many freeways as the suburbs want. Unfortunately the intown crowd is as opposed to highways as is the downtown crowd to MARTA. We found that out during T-SPLOST, when a ridiculous coalition of anti-urban Tea Partiers and anti-suburbanite Sierra Club/NAACP types collaborated to defeat the very thing that would have put a lot of worthy anti-congestion projects (in addition to just a little bit of pork) in motion.
So destroying in town established neighborhoods like VA Highlands and Morningside are somehow in your mind an equal trade off to running lines north to serve a market that wants them (contrary to what you said)…I think you need to put a little more thought into that equivalency.
Robert Moses died long ago…time to let his ideas go with him
“There should have been horse trading on this decades ago: fully funding MARTA (whatever that means) in return for as many freeways as the suburbs want. ”
That not only is bad policy, but it is a proven fact that adding more freeway capacity does not reduce congestion. The more you build, the more people will chose to use them, thus making them just as congested as if you did nothing. Freeways have a cost beyond dollars. They destroy neighborhoods, reduce property values around them for residents, increase smog and ozone. There has to be an approach that gives people choices. Just Google all the rail transit that was established when MARTA was and see how neglecting it here put several cities miles ahead. They are better late than never figuring this out. When big companies say they want to locate by transit…you build transit or they go somewhere else.
It is funny … when progressives increasingly say “choice” the options are limited to the ones that they approve of and would personally take advantage of.
What Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Minneapolis offer are choice. They offer BOTH a fully funded (with state and local dollars) and fully constructed transit system AND a robust highway system. The anti-urbanites want ONLY the highway system and wish to starve/eliminate the transit system because the transit system is controlled by urban politicians that they did not elect and cannot influence. (It is true … MARTA would enjoy a lot more political support if the MARTA board was appointed by the legislature instead of DeKalb, Fulton and Atlanta elected officials.) The anti-suburbanites ONLY want the transit system because they want to be able to dictate where people should live, work and educate their kids.
“When big companies say they want to locate by transit…you build transit or they go somewhere else.”
Because of your ideological blinders, you totally blew past my point. Build transit for the companies that want to locate downtown AND build highways for the companies that want to locate in Gwinnett, Cobb, Cherokee and Forsyth. The anti-urbanites want to keep the suburban companies and do their best to lure the urban companies to join them (again out of their spite for the urban politicians and the people who elect them). The anti-suburbanites want to force as many people and companies into areas where they believe that it is socially acceptable, morally responsible, environmentally conscious, global village-connected etc. to live and tell everyone else to go fish with some combination of terrible infrastructure and extremely high gas and property taxes. Both “antis” oppose choice and both of them should be rejected.
Another good column by Wingfield to follow up the last one:
http://kylewingfield.blog.myajc.com/2017/04/04/opinion-i-85-collapse-should-get-attention-of-candidates-voters/