Will MARTA ever make to Cobb and Gwinnett? (Atlanta, Dunwoody: tax, live in)

[ATLTJL]

Shocking that Gwinnett officials would drop the ball on something so important...

[bu2]

Originally Posted by ATLTJL

Shocking that Gwinnett officials would drop the ball on something so important...

I thought it was a good plan.

What doesn't make sense is to spend billions of dollars and give people worse service. Beyond a certain distance, rail is just slower than express bus in HOT/HOV lanes because you have so many stops and it can't provide as good a service to the end destination.
(there are limited express trains to distant suburbs in places like Paris, but that is a whole separate system from the Paris metro, so you would be adding extra infrastructure instead of building on MARTA and that certainly couldn't be cost justified here).


Rail is only justified in that case when you need the extra capacity of rail. Gwinnett is not dense enough to justify rail to Suwanee, even commuter rail. And the dispersion of their jobs as Arjay showed means its difficult for rail to service. So a lot of people would be paying taxes and get little to no benefit. And as mentioned, the long time frame before "payoff" gave some people pause.

This plan would tend to generate jobs around the end of the rail station that could be served by rail coming out and express bus coming in. And it gave right-sized transit to the rest of the county.

[ATLTJL]

It was a terrible plan because the stretch of road that needs an alternative more than any other in Gwinnett county is the portion of I-85 between I-285 and Pleasant Hill Road.

You can't do it with buses because they sit in the same traffic (the HOT lane often doesn't move any faster).

Rail extended to Infinite Energy Arena would also make that venue much more profitable by opening its performances up to a much broader intown audience.

No matter how you package it, you will never be able to sell voters a plan to make their commuting lives easier by putting more buses on the road.

[Gulch]

Originally Posted by bu2

I thought it was a good plan.

What doesn't make sense is to spend billions of dollars and give people worse service. Beyond a certain distance, rail is just slower than express bus in HOT/HOV lanes because you have so many stops and it can't provide as good a service to the end destination.
(there are limited express trains to distant suburbs in places like Paris, but that is a whole separate system from the Paris metro, so you would be adding extra infrastructure instead of building on MARTA and that certainly couldn't be cost justified here).


Rail is only justified in that case when you need the extra capacity of rail. Gwinnett is not dense enough to justify rail to Suwanee, even commuter rail. And the dispersion of their jobs as Arjay showed means its difficult for rail to service. So a lot of people would be paying taxes and get little to no benefit. And as mentioned, the long time frame before "payoff" gave some people pause.

This plan would tend to generate jobs around the end of the rail station that could be served by rail coming out and express bus coming in. And it gave right-sized transit to the rest of the county.

If the plan that got shot down had rail going to Gwinnett Place (basically the 1990 plan) or IEA, it would've been much more palatable.

[arjay57]

Originally Posted by Gulch

If the plan that got shot down had rail going to Gwinnett Place (basically the 1990 plan) or IEA, it would've been much more palatable.

I agree!

[sciblue]

I live in Gwinnett and I didn't vote to approve the MARTA deal. I am not a racist. I chose not to support a decades-long tax increase for possibly 4 miles of rail that I would never or only rarely use. Neither MARTA nor GC government has shown to be great stewards of taxpayer dollars.
I am certain some voters are racist but to say we were all motivated by racism is a flat-out lie.

[Turnerbro]

Not sure why people are acting like racism is such a major factor. Gwinnett has bee a majority minority county for some time now. True racist should have moved out of Gwinnett a long time ago.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by ATLTJL

It was a terrible plan because the stretch of road that needs an alternative more than any other in Gwinnett county is the portion of I-85 between I-285 and Pleasant Hill Road.

You can't do it with buses because they sit in the same traffic (the HOT lane often doesn't move any faster).

Rail extended to Infinite Energy Arena would also make that venue much more profitable by opening its performances up to a much broader intown audience.

No matter how you package it, you will never be able to sell voters a plan to make their commuting lives easier by putting more buses on the road.

The HOV lane inside 285 does move faster. It doesn't move a lot faster sometimes after the 400 merge, but that can and should be fixed. Atlanta's HOV lanes are like a lot of stuff GDOT does, the cheapest way out, just putting down a stripe. Other places do HOV/HOT lanes much better and its not terribly expensive to improve.

[bu2]

https://reason.org/transportation-ne...sletter-185/#a

"Networks of variably priced express toll lanes (ETLs) are being developed in more than a dozen large metro areas, and their impact is starting to be reflected in the congestion figures for those regions. Before reviewing what is going on, I want to call your attention to a new (not yet published) paper on the subject by researchers from Cornell University and McGill University. “A Comprehensive Welfare Impact Analysis for Road Expansion Projects” uses transportation data from the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area to compare, quantitatively, the effects of four possible highway expansion options (in addition to doing nothing): adding a general purpose (GP) lane, adding a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane, adding a priced ETL, or converting all lanes to conventional toll lanes. The priced ETL ranked highest in both regional economic impact and improving system-wide travel time, and was judged to produce the greatest increase in overall social welfare.

Those results are not yet widely known, which may be why ill-informed opposition still exists to some of the proposed projects. But overall, the picture is one of considerable progress toward entire ETL networks in some of America’s most-congested metro areas. Here is a brief recap as of first-quarter 2018...."

[toll_booth]

Originally Posted by sciblue

I live in Gwinnett and I didn't vote to approve the MARTA deal. I am not a racist. I chose not to support a decades-long tax increase for possibly 4 miles of rail that I would never or only rarely use. Neither MARTA nor GC government has shown to be great stewards of taxpayer dollars.
I am certain some voters are racist but to say we were all motivated by racism is a flat-out lie.

If there had been a lot more rail in the plan, would you have voted for the expansion?