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I'll continue to beat the drum that I know you guys don't want to hear...build public transit from WHERE to WHERE? As we have discussed ad nauseum here, the vast majority of commuters do not need/want to go downtown. The vast majority of commuters are traveling within and between suburbs, so unless you have a plan to address that need, it's all just hot air.
More excellent points.
One of the very-formative, yet major transit expansion plans to address the suburb-to-suburb movement of commuters is to implement a high-capacity transit line (possibly bus rapid transit, but likely light rail transit or heavy rail transit) across the Top End Perimeter of I-285 between Cobb County and Gwinnett County by way of Cumberland, Perimeter and Doraville.
This link to information about the high-capacity transit portion of the proposed "Revive285" transportation upgrades to the I-285 Top End Perimeter gives some insight into where an east-west cross-regional high-capacity transit line and transit stations might go in the I-285 Top End Perimeter corridor: http://www.revive285.com/f/TSPSAInfoSheets.pdf
Other transportation plans involve the implementation of 'premium' bus service (up to possibly Bus Rapid Transit) and widespread grade-separated major intersections on upgraded major arterial roads (to speed heavy traffic on express lanes through major intersections) across and through the fast-growing Northern suburbs like GA 120 Roswell Road in Cobb County, and GA 92, GA 140, GA 141 and State Bridge/Pleasant Hill Road in Cherokee, North Fulton and Gwinnett counties.
There are also increasing desires by local business interests in fast-growing Cobb, North Fulton and Gwinnett counties to expand high-capacity passenger rail service (LRT or HRT) out into the I-75 NW, GA 400 North and the I-85 NE corridors as a way of establishing a direct rail transit link between those fast-growing and increasingly heavily-populated areas and the world-leading Atlanta Airport by way of major activity centers in Downtown, Midtown, and Buckhead.
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Originally Posted by neil0311
Oh, and then there're the minor details regarding how all of this bus, rail, metro would get paid for, both in capital and operating expenses. You won't get suburban residents to agree to pay taxes for services they can't and probably won't use, so how do you pay for all the great and wonderful transit?
Even more great points.
In this financial and political environment where transportation funding from traditional sources (fuel taxes and sales taxes) continues to dwindle for both financial and political reasons; the best ways to pay for critically-needed improvements, upgrades and expansions to our multimodal transportation infrastructure (roads and transit) are with revenues from private investment (financing from real estate revenues for transit) and user fees (revenues from distance-based fares for transit, and revenues from distance-based tolls for major roads).
Like the State of Georgia leases the publicly-owned Western & Atlantic Railroad freight rail tracks out to CSX Transportation (and CSX's predecessors and any successors) in 33-year increments (the current lease was activated on December 31, 1986 and expires on December 31, 2019), state government can lease publicly-owned roads and transit lines out to private investors by agreeing to permit the implementation of inflation-indexed distance-based user fees on publicly-owned roads and transit lines in exchange for getting private investors to pay the continuing costs of operations, maintenance, improvements, upgrades and expansions to those roads and transit lines as needed.
Using future high-density mixed-use real estate development around future rail transit stations as leverage, you can even get private investors to pay for more immediate improvements, upgrades and expansions to the region's bus service so that the Atlanta region will have a reliable bus transit option to utilize while the region's rail transit network is improved, upgraded and built-out with private dollars.
You can basically use the leverage from future profits from real estate development at and around current and future rail transit stations to get improved and upgraded bus service rolling while the region's rail transit network is built-out in surrounding areas.
Originally Posted by jsvh It should be funded the same way we should be funding roads. With users fees. Of course roads are already soaking up most of the tax funds by percentage (MARTA fares pay a higher % of the cost than gas taxes do for roads) and amount (my far). Stop dumping tax funds into roads (and transit) and let people decide which way it is really worth it to get around.
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Originally Posted by neil0311
I agree that transit should cost a more appropriate amount that covers the actual cost of the service. I would support that of any transit project.
Northern California's BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is one example of a transit agency that aims to cover up to nearly 80% of its operating costs with the revenues from a combination distance-based/zone-based fare structure in which a nearly 50-mile-long one-way regional heavy rail transit ride between the Sacramento River Valley Delta area of the East Bay and the San Francisco International Airport costs as much as $11.05 one-way ($4.10 one-way discounted fare).
Fare-paying customers account for 78% of the operating funds in the FY13 budget.
By comparison, Atlanta's MARTA has only covered between 27-33% of its operating costs with its farebox revenues, demonstrating that a mass transit system like MARTA has not been collecting enough revenues from the farebox during its existence.
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Originally Posted by neil0311
As for roads, and I've commented on this many times, roads are not the same as a rail line, nor should they be treated as the same. Roads are basic and necessary infrastructure, used by public safety, national defense, private citizens, intra and interstate commerce, and even transit (buses use roads). Roads are a primary purpose of gov't used by all for the public good. Roads are a necessity, not a luxury or an option.
Transit (especially rail transit) on the other hand is not a necessity, nor is it something that would be considered a primary mission or responsibility of gov't. Where it exists, it should be paid for by the users who derive benefit from the service, which in Atlanta for MARTA is roughly 500,000 total riders (bus and rail) and about 225,000 rail riders. That's approximately 10% of the population that uses MARTA on a daily basis, as opposed to the number of people who use roads, which I would estimate must be north of 90%.
Excellent points about roads as the overwhelming necessity of the road network is a good reason why there still needs to be continuing, but targeted investments in keeping the road network logistically and physically functional.
Though in a fast-growing major metro area like Atlanta that has a road network that is undersized and underdeveloped for the metro region's population of 6 million residents, one can make a very-good argument that transit becomes a necessity in certain high-capacity transportation corridors when the road network has reached a point that it can no-longer be easily expanded on a large-scale because of political reasons (extreme political pushback from a road-expansion averse public in an automobile-overdependent metro region), as has increasingly been the case in the Atlanta region.
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Originally Posted by Ant131531
If that's the case, the same argument can be used for transit in any city, large or small, but some cities, it is definitely a necessity due to how it's built like NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, etc where a very large % of the commuters are using transit. In some cases, transit is MORE important than roads due to the fact that without transit, their road systems would easily clog up.
The problem is Atlanta's not a dense city. It's densifying, but it's nowhere near fast enough and the city itself grows nowhere near as fast as the big cities did in their hayday.
Excellent points, as not only would the road systems of extremely large metro areas easily clog up without transit, but the road networks of those mega-sized international cities would become almost completely impassable throughout much of the day as those very-dense and ultra highly-populated metro areas just don't have enough road space (or parking) to accommodate every eligible person who would want to drive.
As you pointed out, Atlanta does not have very much density (as Atlanta is one of absolute least-densest metro regions on the planet).
Atlanta also has an abundance of parking spaces, unlike very-dense and highly-populated metro regions like NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, etc.
Ironically, for such a highly automobile-overdependent city and metro region, Atlanta has a very-poor arterial road network (and a freeway system that continues to decline in effectiveness) that is one of the worst arterial road networks of any major metro area in North America.
Atlanta has the automobile-overdependent lifestyle of a much more road-extensive Sunbelt metro region, but has the arterial road network of a transit-heavy metro region like Boston.
Atlanta's continued overdependence on such an extremely-poor arterial road network is something that likely will not be sustainable over the long run as the region's population continues to grow and very-little, if any road space is added to a road network that already struggles to support the automobile movements of a much-larger metro population than it was designed to handle.
Metro Atlanta is going to have a make a big choice in coming years.
Either the metro area will have to decide to significantly expand its vastly-undersized road network (something that has not been received all that well by an increasingly road expansion-averse voting public in recent years and decades...see the angry public pushback against the Outer Perimeter/Northern Arc debacle of the late 1990's and early 2000's and the T-SPLOST debacle of 2012)...
...OR the metro area is going to have to embrace transit on a much-larger scale than it has in the past and it has in the present.
Atlanta cannot continue to go on refusing to invest in its transit infrastructure (roads or transit) without negatively-impacting both its economy and its quality-of-life.
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Originally Posted by Ant131531
Atlanta can just keep building roads if they want to accompany the metro growth, but then it will just become another L.A. where despite having a ton of freeways, there's still traffic on every one of them. You can't widen freeways forever. There are some highways in Atlanta that already have 20 lanes to them and yet there is still traffic on them....I-75 north of I-285 comes to mind.
Excellent point that freeways cannot be widened forever.
Though the thing is that Metro Atlanta seems to have reached the point where (because of increasingly negative pushback to large-scale road expansion proposals from the general public) the region cannot keep building roads to accompany its high rate of growth because the public will not let that large-scale road construction happen.
The Georgia voting public kicked an entire political party (erstwhile ultra-powerful Georgia Democrats) of out power largely because of a proposed large-scale road construction project in the Northern Arc that voters on all sides of the political spectrum were angrily opposed to.
Georgia voters also angrily voted down 2012's T-SPLOST largely because they did not like many of the road-expansion proposals which were relatively very-modest compared to other automobile-dependent regions of the country (Texas, Florida, North Carolina, California).
Ironically, there was also a very-significant degree of angry public pushback against a proposal to widen I-75 NW OTP to as many as 24 lanes between I-285 and I-575 as part of one of the earlier versions of the current toll lane proposal which because of very-negative public feedback has been reduced from the addition of 8 bi-directional toll lanes down to the addition of only 2 reversible toll lanes.
Here is a link to the previous version of the I-75/I-575 Northwest Corridor toll lane project (previously known as Northwest I-75/I-575 HOV/BRT) that would have required the dislocation of hundreds (if not thousands) of residences and commercial and industrial businesses along Interstates 75 and 575: NW HOV/BRT Homepage
Here is a link to a map of the previous proposed version of the I-75/I-575 toll lane project which would have taken some large commercial buildings along the I-75 corridor.
Though in a fast-growing major metro area like Atlanta that has a road network that is undersized and underdeveloped for the metro region's population of 6 million residents, one can make a very-good argument that transit becomes a necessity in certain high-capacity transportation corridors when the road network has reached a point that it can no-longer be easily expanded on a large-scale ...
I think it's important to keep the scale of MARTA in mind.
The number of people using MARTA (bus and rail) on an average weekday is 123,400. 29,000 of them ride the train.
That's a lot of folks! And by definition they are concentrated in DeKalb and Fulton, where the MARTA routes are located.
If you put an additional 123,400 drivers on the roads in those two counties, some areas would really feel the pinch.
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