Transit was on the minds of many during Wednesday night’s "Wireside Chat" for North Fulton county - and many residents expressed concern over MARTA's portion of the Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (TSPLOST) funding.
According to the Atlanta Regional Commission, between both the North Fulton and Cobb calls Wednesday evening, June 6, nearly 4,500 people took part in the telephone town hall meetings.
Johns Creek Mayor Mike Bodker and Fulton County Chairman John Eaves took questions from local residents on everything from how long the tax will last to specifics about why light rail expansion into North Fulton is cost-effective or even beneficial.
Eaves told callers that he believes MARTA needs to expand to become more accessible and therefore more useful to a wider group of metro area residents. In response to a question about the self-sustainability of the region's transit system, he said more resources were needed now so that it can be a more effective system in the long run, bringing us up to the standards of other big metropolitan cities.
When sentiments of distrust over where the money would actually go and if the tax would ever really end were brought up, Bodker jumped in to say that, while a small group of people decided to extend the Georgia 400 tolls without the consent of the people, that wouldn't happen with the tax. He reviewed the process for the TSPLOST implementation, which, first identifies projects to be funded; and second, puts the option to a vote by the people.
"These projects went through a great scrutiny," he said. "This tax is not intended to create more tax."
Additionally, Bodker said a citizen's advisory committee would keep an eye on the revenue brought in by the tax to ensure it was going to the areas it was supposed to go. A public website would be created and updated with their findings so other citizens could review the intake, as well.
In response to a question about why the gas tax wasn't raised to fund transportation projects, instead of the TSPLOST, the panel replied that there had been no political will to do so.
Information about the July 31 regional transportation referendum, including fact sheets about the 157 projects on the list, is available on the ARC website.
I would much prefer to pursue the characterisitics that make Atlanta a great city: the nicest suburban lifestyle of any American city. I don't want to be like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. I have traveled them extensively, and have always been much happier to be in Atlanta. Atlanta is the one city that business people will give up promotions to stay in. We are not a hub-and-spoke city. We are a network of clusters, with no natural boundaries to our growth. If the transportation planners would stop trying to make Atlanta like Chicago and begin to comprehend what makes us really great we would all be better off. We need a gridwork of arteries, not rail transit.
I also agree that we absolutely do need a gridwork of arteries, but the only thing about that is the seeming political impossibility of trying to retrofit Metro Atlanta with a buildout of a complete gridwork of arteries as many of the type of roads that might be arteries on a north-south, east-west grid with major roads spaced every mile in other cities are instead a disjointed network of winding two-lane roads lined with extensive existing residential development in the Atlanta Region.
With the very intense degree to which established residential development already exists and lines these roads is very unlikely that these severly rush hour-congested nodes will be widened to much better accommodate the very heavy traffic they carry anytime soon, if ever as the political cost would likely be too high despite the pressing need to do so. The extreme difficulty, if not outright impossibllity, to widen and realign severely-congested two-lane major roads due to the extensive existing residential development and the very heavy vegetation that lines them, greatly explains many of our severe traffic congestion problems as many of our at-grade surface arterials are completely inadequate to handle the heavy volumes of intense rush hour traffic that they are forced to handle.
After the rejection of the Outer Perimeter and Northern Arc there seems to be this mindset that has gained overwhelming steam in the Atlanta Region that ALL road expansion is bad, which is unfortunate because while Atlanta, which by the way is the trucking and distribution center of the Southeastern United States, is being lapped by cities like Dallas and, especially, Houston which has pursued a transportation strategy of maximum road expansion (example: the I-10 West/Katy Freeway was recently widened to 26 lanes in width in some sections with room for 28-30 lanes on the pavement, if needed).
When I say expanding the freeway system vertically, I mean expanding freeways by adding an upper deck or second-level of roadway open only to cars and vehicles with six or fewer wheels to severely-congested sections of the freeway system (and paying for said expansion WITHOUT RAISING EVERYONE'S TAXES through the utilization of user fees in the form of tolls on that upper deck of freeway while keeping the second level open to buses, trucks and trailers with more than six wheels) where traditional horizontal expansion is both physically and politically impossible due to very heavy residential development and very popular heavy vegetation (like on GA 400 North through Sandy Springs) and very heavy industrial development that lines the road (like on Interstate 75 through Cobb County in OTP NW Metro Atlanta and Interstate 85 through Gwinnett County in OTP NE Metro Atlanta).