HOT lanes reversal reflects lack of vision, leadership for transportation in Georgia

BW

This is the epitome of reaping what you sow on tax policy. Really it’s a lack of leadership overall. People in Georgia actually believe that user fees will pay for everything and tax increases are never needed for large scale infrastructure projects. This has got to end…those people who believe Georgia has grown enough will be dismayed when the cash cow, which is metro Atlanta (75% of Georgia’s economic activity according to the Economist), dries up.

Yes! Yes!! Finally, a little rationality!!!

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My search for land is narrowing, although Kyle says there is no land available. According to Kyle’s bloggers…

the City of Atlanta is engulfing all things North, East & West.

Ragnar wants to move “the free spending overlords” to Clayton County.

I guess it’s further South for me. Too far South and I’ll be dealing with gnats the size of predator drones.

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BILLY MAYS HERE
December 17th, 2011
12:40 pm

First of all I turn off all noises emanating from narcissistic sources:

Click! You don’t have any authority to tell me what to do.

Secondly, public mass transit has little, if anything at all, to do with gasoline prices.

Thirdly, as long as I pay taxes, particularly the ones designated to pay for roads I have every right to complain at any time about anything concerning commuting or other things concerning public mass transit for reasons federal taxpayer money is used to support it.

Fourthly, be against PUBLIC MASS TRANSIT does not preclude all forms of supporting en masse’ transit (the non-government operational non-unionized non-socialist welfare kind. Whereas I’m very much in support of statewide Private and Public-private mass transit system entities.

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Fourthly, be against PUBLIC MASS TRANSIT does not preclude all forms of supporting en masse’ transit (the non-government operational non-unionized non-socialist welfare kind. Whereas I’m very much in support of statewide Private and Public-private mass transit system entities.

Good luck finding a private or unsubsidized mass transit system! I wish you well!

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December 17th, 2011
1:26 pm

As I said… CLICK!

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Kyle, the voters do get it—you don’t. The middle class commuter has finally realized that this whole boondoggle was about a taxpayer subsidized private road for the wealthy and nothing about reducing congestion for your average citizen. And savvy pols like Gov. Deal realized his voters (the suburban white middle class) had gotten it and that he would be a 1 term governor if he continued down the 1% path. You also seem to be obtuse about DOT Commissioner Beach’s thought that for $500 million we weren’t getting much in congestion relief (actually zero per studies) and pointing out that by spending the whole budget of $1 billion DOT could shape it provide real congestion relief for all of us. If we can’t afford that then fine—all taxpayers will suffer equally in their congested lanes or get jobs closer to home. People will be resourceful.

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BW: I understand that some people don’t want to be around other people… What is your solution?
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I’m around plenty of other people…in my roomy, quiet, safe subdivision, in the local shopping areas, at the business park where I work, etc.

What is my solution, you ask? To what? You’ll have to articulate a problem I care about before I can respond.

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Public-private partnerships would also work better for mass transit because its objective of luring people off of crowded roads at peak times would provide much better congestion relief than adjustable tolls on existing selected lanes that contribute to increased congestion in the remaining untolled lanes during peak hours when traffic is the heaviest.

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yuzeyurbrane

December 17th, 2011
3:38 pm

“You also seem to be obtuse about DOT Commissioner Beach’s thought that for $500 million we weren’t getting much in congestion relief (actually zero per studies) and pointing out that by spending the whole budget of $1 billion DOT could shape it provide real congestion relief for all of us.”

Very good point. Spending the entire transportation budget for zero congestion relief or even INCREASED overall congestion, as is the case with the I-85 HOT Lanes, is just not a wise long-term transportaion, or POLITICAL strategy.

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Will the last Democrat in Georgia please turn off the lights?…..

Public-private partnerships would also work better for mass transit because its objective of luring people off of crowded roads at peak times would provide much better congestion relief than adjustable tolls on existing selected lanes that contribute to increased congestion in the remaining untolled lanes during peak hours when traffic is the heaviest.

If public-private partnerships would work so great, why aren’t there any?

You know what you remind me of? A fresh-out-of-econ 1101, know-it-all college student who has not even held down a full time job yet. Or maybe you’ve already graduated and are schlepping away for 30k and meager benefits thinking you’re gonna strike it rich someday if you just work hard enough, because you’re Mr. Bootstrappin’ Free Market Guy. You just haven’t been dumped on by the system yet. Your time will come.

Your posts would be soooo much better if they weren’t boring walls of text.

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“To what extent is automobile use a “free” good? According to Hart and Spivak, government subsidies for highways and parking alone amount to between 8 and 10 percent of our gross national product, the equivalent of a fuel tax of approximately $3.50 per gallon. If this tax were to account for “soft” costs such as pollution cleanup and emergency medical treatment, it would he as high as $9.00 per galion. The cost of these subsidies-approximately $5,000 per car per year-is passed directly on to the American citizen in the form of increased prices for products or, more often, as income, property, and sales taxes. This means that the hidden costs of driving are paid by everyone: not just drivers, but also those too old or too poor to drive a car. And these people suffer doubly, as the very transit systems they count on for mobility have gone out of business, unable to compete with the heavily subsidized highways.1

Even more irksome is the fact that spending on transit creates twice as many new jobs as spending on highways. Every billion dollars reallocated from road-building to transit creates seven thousand jobs.2 Congress’s recent $41 billion highway bill, had it been allocated to transit, would have employed an additional quarter-million people nationwide.”
Spivak, The Elephant in The Bedroom

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BILLY MAYS HERE

December 17th, 2011
8:27 pm

“lol you are pedantic as hell, get a new act”

You can get angry and try to attack all that you want, but you know that it’s the truth. People relocate into surrounding areas outside of I-285 because the quality of the public schools are perceived, often rightfully so, to be better than the schools in the city.

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Will the last Democrat in Georgia please turn off the lights?…..

You can get angry and try to attack all that you want, but you know that it’s the truth. People relocate into surrounding areas outside of I-285 because the quality of the public schools are perceived, often rightfully so, to be better than the schools in the city.

Yeah no kiddin?!?!?!?!?!

Except that’s not what we were talking about.

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Best of luck finding those “public-private partnership” rail systems!! Write us when you do.

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BILLY MAYS HERE

December 17th, 2011
8:35 pm

“If public-private partnerships would work so great, why aren’t there any?”

There aren’t any public-private partnerships in urban passenger rail transit because the concept and the idea of using them for mass transit is one that has only come back on the scene in the last few years.

Though it should be noted that public-private partnerships still exist in a relative abundance in the freight rail industry, though on a much smaller scale than traditionally.

Hundreds of private freight rail companies, with Norfolk Southern and CSX being the absolute largest, still ship cargo across the country on private and publicly-owned freight rail lines everyday.

Public-private partnerships in passenger rail were also very common in this nation before the automobile became the dominant mode of personal transport at the behest of the Federal Government who, under heavy pressure from the then very well financed big three automobile makers (and then well financed airline industry), in effect “picked the winners” in the transportation industry by subsidizing extensive roadbuilding (and air travel) at the fatal expense of the passenger rail industry.

Except for a few pockets geographical viability, in the Chicago area and the densely-populated Northeastern U.S., passenger rail has been dying a very slow painful and agonizing death ever since.

Though there has been renewed interest in both intracity and intercity passenger rail in an era of spiking gas prices and increasingly miserable traffic congestion (and gridlock) caused by overdependency on automobiles and endless sprawling road-centered development.

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BILLY MAYS HERE

December 17th, 2011
9:26 pm

“Except that’s not what we were talking about.”

It is what you were talking about when you referred to why so many people choose to live outside of I-285, sometimes as far as 50 miles or more outside of the city, and commute to and from work over what can be very long distances.

People commute long distances to and from work by car and/or train in every large major metro area in North America. Heck most of those large and mega-large cities’ (N.Y.C., Chicago, D.C., Boston, Philly, Toronto, Houston, Dallas, etc) transportation infrastructures are setup to deal with the fact that millions of people are going to be commuting to and from work every single workday.

To think that Atlanta, a region of close to six million, shouldn’t have to setup its transportation infrastructure to accommodate the millions of its residents who have to commute to and from work everyday because they should be punished for having to do so is totally and completely delusional at best and totally self-defeating at worst.

Every major city has legions of commuters who have to travel from one part of a population center to another. Atlanta is no different.

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ragnar danneskjold

December 17th, 2011
9:31 am

“State government should move as many of its functions as possible – at least, those that cannot be abolished for lack of real need – to somewhere like Macon, centrally located for the state……”

“…..Get the government out of Atlanta and there will be no need for new transportation expenditures for the next generation.”

Another reason why moving state government out of Atlanta would not work is because it is not necessarily all that advisable to push away a very large part of your economic activity out of a city.

Sure, state politicians and bureaucrats may seemingly have nothing to contribute to the city intellectually except a lot of hot air and the sometimes stagnant economy of Macon and Central Georgia could use the pick-up that would come with being the center of state government and hosting thousands of government employees.

But, despite the way that they are very negatively viewed by the public, often deservedly, those thousands of state employees also contribute very heavily to the economy and the tax base of Metro Atlanta with their presence.

Those hundreds of politicians and thousands of bureaucrats own homes and pay property taxes contributing to the property tax revenues of their local Metro Atlanta city and county in which they reside.

Those thousands of people in state government jobs also shop and purchase retail items contibuting heavily to the sales tax revenues of the metro area. Pushing them out of town would push away millions-of-dollars in economic activity and tax revenues.

Also, it’s not like those state employees, especially the politicians, would ever want to move their jobs out of Atlanta as there are too many corporate and lobbyists goodies to get into in Atlanta.

Many legislators LOVE coming to Atlanta because they know that some large corporation is going to shower them with gifts and perks like free meals at five-star restaurants, tickets to sporting events, all-expense-paid multiple nights at five-star hotels, nights out at all-nude strip clubs and even female escorts.

State legislators and bureaucrats know “which-side-their-bread-is-buttered-on” and it ain’t at a Waffle House next to a roadside motel in Macon.

Anyone who thinks that unethical state politicians and bureaucrats who often spend much of the legislative session as very much welcomed escape from their poduck small towns partying-it-up out of the view of their wives, families and communities, is going willingly move their “jobs” out of fun big-city Atlanta to boring small-town Macon is somewhat very delusional in their own right.

Moving the State Capitol is an idea that may make logistical sense from a physical standpoint, but there are so many reasons, including legislators who would NEVER cooperate, why it will never happen.

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@ Will the last…

I’m not sure why the idea of moving the Capital would even be proposed as a solution. After all, much of the problems with the congestion surrounding any capital city has to do with the businesses and support services that pop up to service the government along with the people that then move to the area to be closer to their work. Relocating them would only shift the problem o to another area without providing a real solution.

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Mahopinion

December 17th, 2011
11:21 pm

@ Will the last…

“I’m not sure why the idea of moving the Capital would even be proposed as a solution. After all, much of the problems with the congestion surrounding any capital city has to do with the businesses and support services that pop up to service the government along with the people that then move to the area to be closer to their work. Relocating them would only shift the problem o to another area without providing a real solution.”

Relocating the State Capital, the businesses, support services and employees would also shift tens-of-millions of dollars in economic activity.

It’s an idea that comes from, A) Lack of leadership on transportation at the state level over the last 20 years, B) People who think that the only way to deal with a problem is to run it away and, C) People who would like to see Atlanta return to being the much smaller more provincial city that it was in years past.

There are honestly people out there that would like to chase over five million people out of Metro Atlanta so that it can be the cozy small town that it was back in the “Good-Ole-Days”, an approach that is about as realistic of a way to deal with traffic congestion as “punishing people who outside of I-285″ and “not building rail outside of I-285 because it may bring more crime from the city”.

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Will the last Democrat in Georgia please turn off the lights?…..

It is what you were talking about when you referred to why so many people choose to live outside of I-285, sometimes as far as 50 miles or more outside of the city, and commute to and from work over what can be very long distances.

Cobb (just outside 285) ≠ Cherokee (which is many miles outside 285)

But you can find good schools in both.

So, clearly, moving far outside 285 just to find good schools is nonsensical.

Ask yourself why I have to hold your hand through this. You’re a big boy right?

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Mahopinion

I do drive more than 30 miles to my work, not because I CHOOSE to, but because that’s where my job relocated. So while you are whining about urban sprawl, remember that not everyone chooses to live in an over crowded neighborhood. Some people actually prefer not being quite so cozy with their neighbors.

If you want to be an antisocial coot and never see nonwhites (let’s face it, that’s the real reason you want to live so far out), that’s perfectly fine but you pretty much have no ground to stand on if you think traffic–or gas prices–are problems you want the state to fix.

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BILLY MAYS HERE: If you want to…never see nonwhites (let’s face it, that’s the real reason you want to live so far out)
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BILLY MAYS HERE makes decisions about people without having the facts at his disposal.

BILLY MAYS HERE: Prejudiced.

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I say just wait a couple years. The way some of these idiots drive and kill themselves and others, coupled with the pisspoor excuse for “drivers education” and the fact that the DMV will hand out a license to anyone……we just have to wait until the lowest common denominator thins out the herd a little more.

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I agree with Smokey above – as long as the new HOT lane is an added lane, and will pay totally for itself in tolls – I don’t mind it being built.

Also, when I-575 was built a number of years ago, it was overcrowded when it opened. I thought that the DOT was supposed to make ten-year projections and buid for the projected traffic. They could easily have made it three lanes in each direction, but they stopped at two. Now to install that third lane would be construction traffic.

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What are you guys are talking about??? Governor Nathan Deal just recently stated that everything is working just as intended and it is working well, especially the HOT lanes, people are using them and the demand is growing.

All guys have no clue what you are talking about!

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