10/25: T-SPLOST a good idea for Cobb County?

It’s a horrible idea, and I’ll be voting no.

The project list for Cobb basically consists of 3 things: light rail to Cumberland Mall, enhanced bus service from Acworth to midtown, and some money for McCollum field. Only the second project makes any economic sense or could relieve any traffic.

And besides, 15% of the funds won’t be dedicated to any special projects and will inevitably end up as a “slush fund” for the local pols to handout in exchange for campaign contributions, also known as bribes.

Vote this turkey down. It’s just more” soak the poor” disaster capitalism.

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Speaking of light rail, the light rail line planned to run from Midtown to Cumberland and eventually continue up Cobb Parkway to the Kennesaw/Town Center area is a misallocation of resources at this time.

A light rail line that would better serve Cobb County and the gridlocked I-75 Northwest Metro Corridor would be a light rail line that originates in the Cumberland area and runs eastward to the Perimeter and I-85/285 NE Spaghetti junction areas to help relieve the even more gridlocked I-285 Top End Perimeter stretch which backs up traffic on I-75 most mornings all the way up to Acworth.

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Chris

October 24th, 2011
7:29 pm

“It’s a horrible idea, and I’ll be voting no…..The project list for Cobb basically consists of 3 things: light rail to Cumberland Mall, enhanced bus service from Acworth to midtown, and some money for McCollum field…..And besides, 15% of the funds won’t be dedicated to any special projects and will inevitably end up as a “slush fund” for the local pols to handout in exchange for campaign contributions, also known as bribes…..Vote this turkey down. It’s just more” soak the poor” disaster capitalism.”

There is alot of talk and speculation that the state may attempt to raid the T-SPLOST funds for “enhanced bus service” on I-75 to pay the $300 million public portion of the $1 billion I-75/575 Northwest Corridor HOT lane project that there is currently no funding for whatsoever as just the $300 million public portion of the project is more than the roadbuilding and maintenance budget for the entire state.

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We just need more roads. Especially through intown Atlanta. And get those buses out of the way.

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10-4 Road Boy!!!

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I will be opposing TSPLOST. It does not address the traffic needs of the region and of Cobb County in particular. I don’t know what criteria they used but it was not relieving congestion. Tim Echols missed the boat and will lose his chairman seat as a result.
The traffic pattern in Altanta is no longer from the suburbs to the city. It is from one suburb to another. This plan is a giant miss.

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Folks, I live in DeKalb County and I’ve not talked to a single person who will be voting “yes” to this obvious debacle. It just doesn’t look right……and besides, we’re looking at a pretty bad economy right now and a “New Tax” is “NOT” what we need.

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@ East Cobber Paying ENOUGH Already
October 25th, 2011 9:02 am

If Fulton is so currupt stay out of it. Don’t come to enjoy all that Atlanta offers. Tell your Cobb constituents to stop taking jobs from people that live here. Stop coming to enjoy the entertainment in the city. The only reason Cobb is what it is today is because of Atlanta. People want to be near this city even if they don’t live directly in the city. Do you think Cobb would even be 700,000 strong if they weren’t in the metro ATLANTA area?

It’s obvious that building more and more roads isn’t working. There has to be an alternative. If the idiots of Cobb would have voted to fund MARTA in the first place there would already be heavy rail in the county and a much more extensive bus system other than CCT that primarily has service within the Cobb Pkwy corridor, which funny enough would have been where the MARTA rail line would have gone.

Rail transit is much more acceptable that bus transit. The county won’t support MARTA but you’ll fund sorry CCT that connects to MARTA anyway and does everything that the heavy rail line that was planned would do. Instead you have a bunch of buses that get stuck in the same traffic. Then your county complains that transit doesn’t work. If the region wasn’t so “conservative” (aka racist)the rail service would be there and we would be working on things like an extensive commuter rail system, cross town rail like the I-285 from Cumberland to Doraville, and a commuter bus system from suburb to suburb. But no, Cobb wants to continue to support CCT and “enhanced” bus service. That just means the same bus service that is there that comes more frequently. Instead of having buses every 30 minutes that are stuck in traffic they will come every 10 minutes….. and be stuck in traffic.

Great job Cobb!! Instead of improving transit, I just hope you enjoy your traffic and your soon to come HOT lanes. We have seen how successful they are in Gwinnett.

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The region is either going to thrive together or see its fortunes take a turn for the worse. Let’s stop worrying about the selfishness of a few naysayers in the nothern suburbs and start doing what’s best for the region. Vote YES for Metro Atlanta’s future.

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I will be voting against this license to steal.

I live in Cobb. I work in Cobb. I dine in Cobb. I don’t go to Atlanta except if ordered by my employer or except to pass through on the way to the airport. In the words of Dorothy Parker, “there is no there, there.” And even if you DO go, there is no realistic way to get around save the private car. Even the Amtrak station is inaccessible by MARTA rail. How absurd.

I grew up in the NY area. Rail transit was (and is) ubiquitous. Hop on a train and be in THE CITY in half an hour, No gas, no parking, no traffic migraines. Until this bastion of right-wing fearmongers gets the message that the passenger auto is a dinosaur and knuckles down to a REAL rail transit solution, you won’t be getting MY money.

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For those of you against the T-SPLOST, just how exactly, then, are we going to solve any of metro Atlanta’s traffic problems? You do agree that we have some traffic problems, don’t you? And if your problem is that T-SPLOST will entrust funds to the corrupt/evil government, just how then, or who then, is going to solve Atlanta’s traffic problems — the private sector? How is the private sector going to magically solve Atlanta’s traffic problems? And if you don’t like the fact that Cobb and/or other suburban areas are lumped in with Atlanta, you do know that that is the plan for the T-SPLOST devised by your Republican legislature, right? Apparently the Republican legislature thought that we — metro Atlanta — are all in this problem together.

Voting against the T-SPLOST is just a vote to do nothing about a problem that we pretty much all acknowledge, and that can only be fixed by spending public money. Face it, or just go back and bury your head in the sand.

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@ Jeremy October 25th, 2011 12:52 pm

Be real with yourself; if you honestly believe that I see why Cobb is so far behind. Why don’t you tell that to all the developers that have built condo towers JUST for young professionals that want to live in the city, work in the city, and play in the city. Not for people living in Cobb. That’s why all of the jobs are in Atlanta, not Cobb. Cobb’s growth is because of Atlanta’s growth, not vise versa. What affluent areas are there in Cobb? Cumberland/Galleria…. uuummmmm can’t think of anything else. How many million dollar homes are there in Atlanta versus Cobb? I’ve driven around Cobb somewhat and I don’t see nothing out there to make me believe that Cobb is where all the money and rich people of this area live. But I’ve also driven around the Vinings and the Mt Paran area. West Paces Ferry and Buckhead. The highrises of Midtown. I’ve even been out Cambellton Rd (past 285) and seen way nicer stuff than anything in Cobb. Even go to Old Fairburn Rd (between Camp Creek and South Fulton Pkwy) and they have homes from 500K and up with even some million dollar homes. Cobb is just a bunch of behind the times, stuck up folks, that have no solutions to our problems but put down everything that is brought in front of them to solve it. Remember everything that is proposed, from the T-SPLOST to even MARTA back in the days was done thru a REPUBLICAN legislature. If you’ll can trust your own people than who can you trust?!

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Anson (Bob) Roberts

October 25th, 2011
2:23 pm

Very intriguing perspective from your comments as a native New Yorker who has become a transplant in Georgia, moving from an area where using transit is a (very necessary) way-of-life to a town where historically transit has been derided and even feared by the natives.

Many people move here from other large cities (especially New York) disappointed that Atlanta doesn’t necessarily have the same type of transportation amenities.

But you’ve got to keep-in-mind that Atlanta just recently became a megacity only about 15 years ago after the Olympics when the population spiked and began growing at an alarming rate that astonished and scared even the local boosters who so longed for Atlanta to join the ranks of American big cities (be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it…).

New York has been a mega-sized American city and one of the world’s leading cities for over 125 years and has had a dependable rail-centered transit system for over 100 years.

Atlanta had a fairly dependable rail-centered transit system until just after the Olympics when the population growth spiraled out of control far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

While cold to the idea for many years when Atlanta was just simply a fast-growing mid-sized big city, the population is quickly warming up to the idea of increased and dependable bus and rail transit service, ESPECIALLY commuter rail, which is gaining an increasing following as commuters outside the Perimeter realize that there’s not much more that can be done to increase capacity on the area’s limited surface road network.

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Bryan — MARTA supporter

October 25th, 2011
10:45 am

“It’s obvious that building more and more roads isn’t working”

Actually, Georgia hasn’t really built many roads as a means of relieving congestion since the opening of the Highway 400 toll road in 1993 as nearly all of the roads built since then have been county-funded roads built for commercial development purposes (see East-West Connector in Cobb County and Sugarloaf Parkway).

Contrary to popular belief, the State of Georgia doesn’t really build that many roads, ESPECIALLY when compared to our Sunbelt counterparts in North Carolina, Florida and Texas as Georgia ranks 49th out of 50 states in transportation infrastructure investment.

The big problem hasn’t been that Georgia has built too many roads, but rather has been that since the completion of the “Freeing the Freeways” interstate widening project in the late 1980’s, the State of Georgia has built virtually NOTHING (no surface roads, no freeways, no toll roads, no rail lines, NOTHING) in the Atlanta Region in the last 20 years while the population of the region increased by a staggering 100 PERCENT growing from 2.9 million in 1990 to 5.8 million today.

The total lack of investment in transportation over a 20-year period of explosive growth in which the region grew by almost THREE MILLION residents means that our region of nearly six million residents is dependent upon a transportation infrastructure that was only meant to support a population of three million.

“There has to be an alternative. If the idiots of Cobb would have voted to fund MARTA in the first place there would already be heavy rail in the county and a much more extensive bus system other than CCT that primarily has service within the Cobb Pkwy corridor, which funny enough would have been where the MARTA rail line would have gone.”

Cobb residents voting down MARTA back about 40-plus years ago in 1969-70 is just a convenient excuse (and a poor one at that) for political leaders to attempt to fall back on for a total and complete lack of leadership on the transportation issue, especially at the state level.

When MARTA was voted down by Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton Counties (and I think that it may have originally been voted down by then-very suburban DeKalb the first time in 1969 before being voted in a second time in 1970-check the history on that one), most areas in those counties were still largely semi-rural and exurban.

Clayton County was a predominantly white bedroom community and still relatively new suburban area where airline employees at the Atlanta Airport were buying up new homes in droves.

Gwinnett County was still largely rural, exurban and very sparcely-populated with only 72,000 residents and eight high schools in 1970 (Gwinnett has over 800,000 residents and 21 total high schools as of today).

Cobb County was also just still very rural starting to gain its legs as a major suburb with a population of just under 200,000. At the time of the first MARTA votes in 1969 and 1970, Cumberland Mall hadn’t even been built yet (the now-defunct Cobb Center Mall in Smyrna was the only major suburban mall in Cobb at that time) and the ultraconservative movement that Cobb County has come to be known for was just starting to gain steam amongst disenchanted whites who were moving out of Atlanta to get away from a growing and strengthening black population.

The Atlanta Region was a very different place as many places in the metro area didn’t even observe desegregation laws yet and the population of Metro Atlanta hadn’t even reached two million people yet as the first MARTA votes in 1969-70 were held about four million new residents ago.

There’s no way that anyone in that era when Atlanta was much, much, MUCH smaller and much more provincial, that Atlanta would grow to be as big and as expansive as it is today covering an area of nearly 30 counties with a population of nearly six million people with 20-lane freeways and nearly every country on Earth represented in its population ranks.

This region has outgrown far beyond any solution that can be managed by local governments alone as it is way beyond time that the state to stepped in and took an active and COMPETENT leadership role in managing the transportation issues of a region that now encompasses nearly 30 counties in North Georgia.

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