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This part here simply isn't true. Yes, there is a fair bit of intra-suburb traffic, but have you seen the road inbound in the morning and outbound in the afternoon? Atlanta is still the core and where the majority of people are going to/coming from at rush hour. Our job centers are along a spine from Downtown through Perimeter. The only major center off that is West Midtown along Howell Mill and Marietta St, and even that can be linked by buses and streetcars coming off the spine. Having P&Rs along the major corridors is what we are already building toward, and what every other major city in the world has. There is nothing wrong with them.
Actually 1-285 going eastbound from !-75 towards Perimeter Center is a lot more crowded in the mornings than I-75 going southbound south of 285. I-75 ITP is a breeze until you get to the Brookwood interchange. Also, there is now a large workforce who live close in and commute northbound on GA 400 to Windward Parkway and other employment centers in North Fulton. That is the reason that GA DOT is constructing Peach Pass - Express Lanes in both directions on 400 because of this reality. Whereas on I-75, there are no major employment centers in North Cobb to justify having northbound lanes during the morning rush hour.
Where Atlanta is different from other metro areas nationwide is that its rail system doesn't offer any express trains and it has no rail service to two large suburban employment centers - the Cumberland Galleria area and Windward Parkway.
In the Bay area, the CALTRAIN has Express trains which travel from Downtown San Jose to the San Francisco Airport during afternoon rush hours in less than an hour (this is about 40 miles). It does this by having only two stops along the way.
Philadelphia's train runs direct from the Airport to the 30th Street Station the hub station where all of the Amtrak, regional trains and city subways meet.
In New York City, on the Park Avenue line, one can take the 4 or 5 Express Trains from Grand Central Terminal on 42nd St. and be at the Wall Street Station in 17 minutes. This is just one example of the fast trains in Manhattan.
The challenge which Atlanta faces is that when MARTA was designed in the early 1960's, the Atlanta area had a lot smaller population and the planners did not anticipate the explosive growth therefore, they didn't see the need to construct additional rail lines to accommodate express trains like what one sees in New York and California. In the early 1960's MARTA was replacing a private bus system which was transporting almost exclusively people who didn't own a car - if someone doesn't own a car, you sort of have them over a barrel - They will wait for a bus because they have no other means of getting there.
Today, the hurdle that MARTA or any other regional mass transit provider faces is to convince those who do own their own vehicle to give up the convenience of using it and to use public transit. The issue comes down to time in this case and as someone has already said, spending 2 to 3 times as long to take public transit in some cases is the biggest obstacle
Free roads? Let's dig into that...gas tax directly pays for the majority of major road costs. Gas tax is paid for only by motorists. Now...let's look at what MARTA riders pay: the fare. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but passenger fare revenue does not pay for capital costs. So, it would appear that as far as your cost to ride transit, the infrastructure is "free".
Using 2010 numbers
Quote:
Total, Share of Road Spending Covered by State/Local User Fees & User Taxes, Plus Federal Aid Financed by Federal Gasoline Tax: Georgia 49.7%
They are funded by property taxes because EVERYONE uses them, regardless if you drive or not - just because you do not own a vehicle does not eliminate your entitlement from paying your fair share for the infrastructure necessary to make goods, healthcare, emergency services, and mass-transit available to you.
Automobiles pay an ADDITIONAL tax - Ad-Volerum, Gasoline, and in some cases, Gas Guzzler. That tax is what covers automobiles usage - but you also use the road, just not directly - and property tax is what covers that.
Either way regardless if you drive or not, you will still pay for the road - the only thing that may change is the mean of which you will pay for it.
If they removed property taxes and tolled the roads and even if traffic decreased - your transit fare will increase to cover the expense necessary to maintain the infrastructure to make the transit possible. The same goes for goods, groceries and items will increase in cost to cover the additional transportation expenses.
Bottom line is, there is no free lunch, regardless of whether you like it or not you will still pay for the road in one form or another.
Last edited by Need4Camaro; 05-31-2019 at 02:52 PM..
They are congestion tolls and they do relieve traffic.
Transit is not the only alternative people have. They have a million other options such as:
-choose to drive at a less busy time
-buy a home close to work
-change jobs
-consolidate their trips
-shop closer to home
-order online
-carpool
-walk
-bike
-scooter -take the Chattahoochee river
-take a hot air balloon
-take an "eXpress bus" (or whatever they are called now)
-just pay the darn cost of the road you are using!
-etc etc...
We will never have MARTA coverage good enough or highways wide enough to handle all the people that will choose to drive on free roads during peak times if given the option.
Pricing roads is the only solution to traffic.
@ the bolded --- you're hopefully joking about this.
I love how y'all tried to go line by line and come up with situations for why a given option would not work for everyone all the time.
I actually know someone that commutes via Kayak on the Chattahoochee during the summer.
So, don't say something is not an option. No one option is going to work for everybody all the time. But it doesn't have to.
Y'all need to get over the notion that you need to centrally plan everyone's commute. Stop trying to spend billions in tax payer dollars to force everyone into car dependency. It is simply impossible for everyone to get around a large city by car.
Put the price on roads / traffic and let people figure out what option works best for them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Need4Camaro
And trust me, coming from Texas, Toll Roads will not put a stop to traffic, especially if there is no feasible alternatives to driving, and quote the worse 'feasible' as most people will sacrifice alot before they sacrifice driving.
Please name any example of congestion pricing (without caps) anywhere in the world that regularly has bad traffic congestion. I call BS.
Congestion pricing works. Certainly a lot better that the alternatives of widening roads that just induces more driving.
This part here simply isn't true. Yes, there is a fair bit of intra-suburb traffic, but have you seen the road inbound in the morning and outbound in the afternoon? Atlanta is still the core and where the majority of people are going to/coming from at rush hour. Our job centers are along a spine from Downtown through Perimeter. The only major center off that is West Midtown along Howell Mill and Marietta St, and even that can be linked by buses and streetcars coming off the spine. Having P&Rs along the major corridors is what we are already building toward, and what every other major city in the world has. There is nothing wrong with them.
You're missing Emory/CDC and the Cumberland area. Both are large employment centers, especially Cumberland.
Either way, it doesn't matter that the end result is along a spine. You still have people coming from every direction. And someone from Gwinnett going to Buckhead is not going to want to head to Perimeter first. Someone going from Smyrna to Downtown isn't going to want to stop in Buckhead.
First of all, great job at pulling numbers from 9 years ago, years before before Georgia increased is fuel taxes by 35% on cars, and tied it to inflation (2015), meaning it now rises every year. It has risen another 5.7% since 2015, or 42.5% overall since before the first increase. Federal should increase their rate some, too, as it hasn't changed in forever. MARTA fares haven't increased in 8 years. And since when have they increased 42.5%? 18 years ago.
Quote:
Also non-state maintained surface streets are funded by property taxes, so NO all roads are not funded by drivers.
I would encourage you to reread my post, or any post I have made in the past, and quote any point in which I stated that drivers fund all roads. I said "the majority of major road costs". Most major roads are state-maintained roads, and the fuel tax pays for the majority of those.
Indeed local surface streets are paid for by local property taxes. The vast, vast, vast majority of local people drive on those roads, and the very minute number of people who do not still receive many benefits from those roads. You will note that in almost all of my posts, I specifically exclude local surface roads because they are mostly used by local residents and aren't part of the major road network. The vast majority of vehicles on most roads in your neighborhood of Kirkwood, outside of maybe Hosea Williams, are local residents. No one is commuting from the suburbs on Rogers Street.
So, like I said, NO all roads are not funded by drivers.
The vast, vast, vast majority of local people drive on those roads, and the very minute number of people who do not still receive many benefits from those roads.
What's your source? Maybe in exurban cul-de-sacs. But I'd wager a pretty penny that most of the cars putting the wear on CoA streets are from outside the city limits.
CQ, you need to realize that this didn't disprove the point the other point made.
He was discussing major roads, like an interstate in this case.
You're data is using a source that is combining local spending with state and federal spending.
If you remove local spending, which is often about last few miles for universal property access for all parcels, and focus on major roads like interstates... He is largely correct.
Even more so that the Hot lanes are directly a toll revenue generating program.
In the mean time, transit generates no capital funding for itself from direct or indirect user fees/taxes and doesn't even cover its operation costs.
This is the barrier that has to be overcome for arguments that are I herently pro-transit/anti-road only. There is real financial demand being fed into one of these modes and a system really needs to be found and possess demand to put more money into transit on a larger scale.
What's your source? Maybe in exurban cul-de-sacs. But I'd wager a pretty penny that most of the cars putting the wear on CoA streets are from outside the city limits.
I don't have one. What's your source for most of the nonsense you post? Most CoA streets are not viable commuting routes. Most are not much longer than a few blocks. No suburban commuter is going to drive down Sanders Ave. in your neck of the woods. Why would they? Why would they be on any street but Glenwood in that area? And even Glenwood doesn't go the distance...it ends at Boulevard. The people coming down roads like Memorial are most likely from East Lake, Avondale Estates, and areas around there. They're local commuters. hyper-localizing street usage is a pointless endeavor.
Who should be "allowed" to use Memorial? How far are they allowed to travel on it before they infringe on someone else's space? Should someone from Avondale Estates be scolded for daring to drive down Memorial into Downtown? Should they be required to backtrack to 285 then come down 20, because Memorial then runs through Kirkwood, and only Kirkwood people should be on it at that point? If you believe that, do you not realize how ridiculous it sounds?
Nope...I stand by my opinion that most suburban commuter traffic in the city is sticking mostly to the arterial roads and interstates. The various neighborhood city roads (which make up the vast majority of local streets), are being used by people in the general area. It simply makes no logical sense otherwise.
Of course, seeing that the city limits are only 1-2 miles east of downtown and midtown and Buckhead, and 2 miles north of Buckhead, you could win that argument based on that technicality. Of course CoA residents also use those areas' roads, so there's that. All in all, it's a pointless argument.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cwkimbro
CQ, you need to realize that this didn't disprove the point the other point made.
He was discussing major roads, like an interstate in this case.
You're data is using a source that is combining local spending with state and federal spending.
If you remove local spending, which is often about last few miles for universal property access for all parcels, and focus on major roads like interstates... He is largely correct.
Even more so that the Hot lanes are directly a toll revenue generating program.
In the mean time, transit generates no capital funding for itself from direct or indirect user fees/taxes and doesn't even cover its operation costs.
This is the barrier that has to be overcome for arguments that are I herently pro-transit/anti-road only. There is real financial demand being fed into one of these modes and a system really needs to be found and possess demand to put more money into transit on a larger scale.
Thank you, cwk. I tried to rep you, but this stupid site's rep policy wouldn't let me.
I still love the arguments from people paying a very small percentage towards their transportation expenses arguing that others aren't paying enough, when even their very old numbers show nearly 50% by direct user fees and taxes.
I love how y'all tried to go line by line and come up with situations for why a given option would not work for everyone all the time.
I actually know someone that commutes via Kayak on the Chattahoochee during the summer.
So, don't say something is not an option. No one option is going to work for everybody all the time. But it doesn't have to.
Y'all need to get over the notion that you need to centrally plan everyone's commute. Stop trying to spend billions in tax payer dollars to force everyone into car dependency. It is simply impossible for everyone to get around a large city by car.
Put the price on roads / traffic and let people figure out what option works best for them.
Please name any example of congestion pricing (without caps) anywhere in the world that regularly has bad traffic congestion. I call BS.
Congestion pricing works. Certainly a lot better that the alternatives of widening roads that just induces more driving.
Name me one place in the world that HAS congestion tolling without caps
I'm not opposed to toll roads or even congestion tolling, but implementing them before feasible alternatives is plainly not a solution. How is it going to cut vehicular traffic when they are still forced to drive?
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