Planning January 2014
City on the Move
What's next for Atlanta's transportation systems?
By Ariel Hart
In the mile or so between the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and Centennial Olympic Park, the city of Atlanta is bringing streetcars back to life for the first time in decades. A figure-eight curve of tracks is now laid between the two tourist sites, and the metropolis known for sprawling highways is reaching back to the transportation mode that once defined it: rail. The first streetcars are expected to carry paying passengers this spring.
It's a heady time for Atlanta transportation planners. And a challenging one.
Like a lot of places, metro Atlanta has big unmet transportation needs. The overwhelming failure of a $7.2 billion sales tax referendum for transportation in 2012 still hangs like a weight, stymying both business groups and planners. The streetcar and other new initiatives have drawn critics as well as fans. The metro area was dubbed "the Sultan of Sprawl" for a reason, and many residents like it that way. Others are seeking walking options that aren't always easy to find. Still others feel trapped in a substandard job market, cut off from options because of a scattered transit system.
However, from the city center to the distant suburbs, new ideas — and old ones formerly cast aside — are on the table or up and running. For the really big fixes, all that stands in the way is what always stands in the way: money.
"Definitely for our region, the failure of the passage of the [referendum] has forced us to go back and re-look at our solutions and investments that we have planned, and make sure we're getting the most we can with [our] limited amount of funds," says Jane Hayse, the Atlanta Regional Commission's former transportation planning head, and now director of ARC's Center for Livable Communities.
Growth engine
Georgia and Metro Atlanta once invested heavily in transportation, relatively speaking. Drivers from bedroom communities now pack interstates as many as 15 lanes across, and limited-access highways were still opening extensions in the 1990s. The 47-mile MARTA heavy-rail system, together with the MARTA bus service, serves 125,000 weekday riders; its most recent extension was completed in 2000.
All that might be enough had the population not grown so much so fast, especially after the 1996 Olympic Games. Studies often rank Atlanta among the top 10 worst commutes or most congested areas in the nation. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is packed, too; it regularly ranks as the world's busiest airport. Hartsfield opened a new international terminal just last year, funded in part by airport revenue and federal grants.
The interstate highways mostly run a hub-and-spoke pattern from downtown Atlanta outward. A perimeter highway, I-285, encircles the area and marks the informal boundary of the suburbs, helping to carry commuters to rising suburban job centers. Arterial road alternatives are narrow, winding, and few. Meeting no real geographic boundary, the area is spread out: The metropolitan planning organization encompasses 18 counties and a population of 4.5 million spread across 4,600 square miles. MARTA is limited to the two central counties, DeKalb and Fulton (where Atlanta is located).
A sales tax collected in those two counties helps fund MARTA operations, as do fares. MARTA counts itself as the only transit agency of its size to receive no state funding for operations. By the state constitution, the state gas tax that is used for transportation — 17.5 cents per gallon — may be used solely for roads and bridges, not trains.
Roads aren't flush, either. Much of that gas tax is charged as cents per gallon and doesn't rise with inflation. Georgia has been less aggressive than some other states in establishing alternative funding sources such as tolls and sales taxes. So the state increasingly finds itself strapped when trying to expand capacity of any mode. A 2008 study found that only Tennessee spent less money per capita from all sources on transportation. When adding in all parts of Georgia's gas tax, the Tax Foundation found it ranked 20th out of 50 states.
Business groups drove an effort to raise funds for transportation through a one percent special-purpose local-option sales tax that would be levied in the 10-county region for 10 years. The referendum, dubbed the T-SPLOST or TIA, the Transportation Investment Act, failed miserably at the polls in 2012. It was defeated by an unlikely coalition of road advocates and Tea Party activists banding together with environmentalists and transit advocates. Each thought the other side was getting too much from the project list; that list split roads and transit about evenly.
So the big question in metro Atlanta is what to do now with the money at hand.
City takes the lead
One major jurisdiction is firm in its support for expanded transit: the city of Atlanta. Planners in Mayor Kasim Reed's administration continue to push for rail and bus lines, transit-oriented development, and bicycle and pedestrian improvements.
But they don't have billions for new highway capacity.
"You know, Southerners love their vehicles," says James Shelby, the city's planning commissioner. "But I think that if they had viable transportation alternatives, people would take advantage of them."
The city of Atlanta has a dramatically different commuting profile than the region as a whole. Regionally, more than 80 percent of commuters drive alone to work; five percent take transit. The top regional alternative commute is telecommuting.
In the city, two-thirds of commuters drive alone, and the top alternative is transit, at 10 percent. A sizeable six percent walk to work.
If those numbers are any guide, the travel patterns are well primed for perhaps the most prominent planning project in the city, the Atlanta BeltLine. The BeltLine is designed to include trails, parks, and transit circling the middle of town. (Learn more about that project elsewhere in this issue.)
The project has galvanized activism both in favor and against. Within the area of the project, support remains enthusiastic. Its founders credit that community fervor with bringing the BeltLine from a theory to a policy embraced by two mayors.
On the other hand, the libertarian Georgia Public Policy Foundation has questioned the BeltLine's rail mobility goals, and called it "one of the worst Atlanta projects" on the 2012 referendum.
Without referendum money, construction may have to rely on public-private partnerships and more federal funding. Funding plans for the transit loop were based on rising property tax revenues that were originally estimated in the bubble years.
In the short term, parts of the trail are already being built. The first section of trail, a 2.25-mile stretch on the loop's east side, opened in 2012 and is already a big hit. A 2.5-mile southwestern section has just won an $18 million federal TIGER V grant. The proposed transit corridor has been redesigned, and now includes a crosstown line traversing downtown.
And thanks to the federal stimulus, one small seed of that BeltLine transit system is a reality: a 1.2-mile streetcar line. A $47.6 million TIGER II grant jumpstarted the roughly $100 million project, and the city and a self-taxing downtown business group are set to pay the rest. It is scheduled to open to passenger traffic this spring.
Back to the future
The Atlanta Streetcar is to run between two major tourist attractions. In between, it passes beneath the dour I-75/I-85 overpass, known as the Downtown Connector. If all goes as planned, the streetcar would relink the two disconnected sides of the Connector for pedestrians.
Concerns exist about the initial streetcar plan: the long headways coupled with the short line length. Currently the cars are scheduled to run only every 15 minutes, a disincentive to passengers. Reed has said he is working to find money to run more frequent service.
Tom Weyandt, the city's senior transportation policy advisor, hopes it will not be limited to 1.2 miles for long. He wants to see extensions growing out eastward and westward, toward the walls of the BeltLine, within three to five years.
"We're really trying to implement the policies and plans in the Connect Atlanta plan," says Joshuah Mello, AICP, Atlanta's assistant director of planning for transportation. He's referring to the comprehensive transportation plan approved in 2008. "It really has a multimodal focus, to transform the city into a more walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented city."
The city intends to double its total bicycle lanes — to extend 60 miles by 2016, Mello says — and to double the percentage of people who bike to work from 1.1 percent to 2.2 percent. The city and MARTA want to engage the private sector in transit-oriented developments that will simultaneously serve and create new demand for transit. The state department of transportation is in on the act, too, working on a plan for a central transit station and real estate development downtown.
So what about all those drivers? After all, they make up two-thirds of the city's commuters. Some drivers aren't happy with the handful of "road diets" that are thinning down roads to make arterials safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.
"The reality is we don't have the resources, or the appetite, to widen roadways within the city," Mello counters. "The negative impact to the neighborhoods is just too great. So we're really focused on improving operations and safety, then encouraging people to walk and bike wherever they can."
On the (suburban) road
Some transit planning is under way in the suburbs, but the big suburban action is in roads. There, too, planners are looking for innovations.
In the face of thin funding, "you're going to see [fewer] capacity projects, and more operational projects," says Hayse, of the Atlanta Regional Commission. That can mean outside-the-box designs such as diverging diamond interchanges and arterial roundabouts, which have just gained currency at the state DOT within the last five years.
It also means new approaches on big-ticket projects. The DOT has decided that the state cannot afford to add new travel lanes on metro Atlanta's limited-access highways, as it has in the past, because they will inevitably just fill back up. Instead, it will build express lanes: dynamically priced toll lanes.
The state has scraped together the money to build an $840 million expansion to I-75 and I-575, mostly in Cobb County, northwest of the city, and is building another express lane in Henry County, south of the city. Both will be optional toll lanes, barrier-separated and built beside the current highways. Their toll fees are to rise and fall along with congestion.
Despite the toll revenue, though, the lanes require hefty subsidies. The state has set aside $549 million in gas taxes to subsidize the I-75/I-575 project's construction, in addition to borrowing $285 million against toll revenues. Part of that borrowing is a $275 million federal TIFIA loan. In the beginning the toll may not cover its own operating costs, estimated at $5 million to $8 million a year. State transportation planners say profitability is not the point. For them, the idea is to provide one place where drivers can reliably find flowing traffic on the roads, even at rush hour.
Those two projects drew less controversy than the state's first express lane, on I-85 in Gwinnett County northeast of the city, completed in 2011. That one did not build new capacity. It converted an existing HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lane to HOT 3+, a high-occupancy toll lane ejecting free two-person carpools in favor of tolled vehicles carrying one or two people. Carpools carrying three or more occupants could still drive free. The resulting traffic debacle prompted a citizen uprising, but the state stuck to its guns and the lane remains, with steadily increasing use.
Current leaders have said they will only approve new express lanes if those lanes added new capacity.
Around the region
Planners haven't given up on suburban transit. They note that buses will ride free in the express lanes. But regional rail is a matter of heated debate.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of the 10-county region, conducted in November 2012, found that 70 percent of respondents thought rail service should expand beyond the two central counties currently served by the MARTA heavy-rail system. But they differ on how. And the citizens who don't want it really don't want it.
They point to studies like the 2007 work of Alain Bertaud and the Reason Foundation's Robert Poole, who concluded that Atlanta can never build enough density to justify an expanded transit system.
"I still believe that," says Bertaud, who was principal urban planner in the Urban Development Division at the World Bank and now researches at New York University. "Atlanta is one of the least dense cities in the U.S. It's so out of scale. To me, it's mind-boggling that people are even questioning it. The problem among planners and my colleagues is that transport has become a religion."
Bertaud stresses that he is not a transit opponent, noting that he recently advised Beijing that it needed to expand its rail system. But he believes efforts to transform Atlanta's density through transportation are futile. Using an analogy from biology, he says, "If you have a group of cells, initially those cells could transform themselves into an elephant or a frog. But once you are an elephant you can never become a frog, and once you become a frog you can never become an elephant. I think that's what happening to Atlanta."
ARC planners disagree. Hayse, for example, points out that transit works well in other parts of the U.S. that are also spread out. They also mention the work of Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Charles Bendit Distinguished Scholar and Research Professor of Urban Real Estate at George Washington University School of Business. In a study last year, Leinberger found a steady increase in the portion of property development that was constructed in denser, walkable centers across Atlanta and with a few in the suburbs.
From 1992 to 2000, just 10 percent of development occurred in "WalkUP" areas, Leinberger found, using the term that the study applies to walkable areas. But from 2001 to 2008, that percentage increased to 22 and since then it's been 50 percent.
Leinberger believes this is the market speaking, indicating a growing preference among residents, shoppers, and workers for these walkable environments. He believes it also speaks to a readiness and need for expanded mass transit.
There is little disagreement on one point: What public transportation does exist in the suburbs could be improved.
Work needed
The five central counties of metro Atlanta contain four transit agencies. One of the five, Clayton County, provides no local transit, having canceled its bus system during the recession. MARTA operates in the two core counties, Fulton and DeKalb. Cobb and Gwinnett counties have separate bus systems; they and MARTA are not allowed to leave their jurisdictions except with permission.
The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority runs most of the regional bus service, Xpress.
They try to work together, for example allowing common use of the Breeze fare card. But they have separate organizations and separate budgets. For consumers, they have separate websites and schedules.
A new study by scholars at Harvard and Berkeley hints at some possible repercussions of the sprawling, long commutes. The 2013 study, dubbed The Equality of Opportunity Project, looked at cities across the nation, or more precisely, "commuting zones." Its goal was to gauge social mobility — how often poor kids grow out of poverty — and look for possible factors. Comparing Atlanta's 18-county commuting zone to others with one million people or more, Atlantans were among the least likely to rise from poverty, coming in 60th out of 63.
"If Atlanta were to make commute times lower, would Atlanta have more social mobility?" asks Nathaniel Hendren, an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University and a study coauthors. "We don't have precise answers to that. But it does suggest thinking of things like transportation in terms of issues of social mobility."
The Metro Atlanta Chamber has long agreed that long commutes, whether by transit or road, hinder Atlanta's economic growth, providing employers a "truncated" labor market.
Committees at the ARC and the state legislature continue to work on planning regional mass transit, in hopes of agreeing on a governance structure and perhaps funding. Others hold out a more limited solution of private van companies.
At the crossroads
It's hard for some to fathom how transportation became such a lightning rod. But after helping to defeat the referendum, Tea Party activists moved on to the issue of planning itself. They know that with transportation and land use, government actions have a powerful long-term effect on the shape of communities. They are deeply concerned about what that effect will be. And they don't want to lose local voter control.
After the referendum tanked, the activists encouraged their newly energized members to scrutinize county plans for words such as "sustainable development" and to speak out at local government meetings. "Warm and fuzzy words like ‘comprehensive planning' [and] ‘smart growth' . . . were carefully chosen to make us feel better about giving up our sovereign rights," wrote one of the activists, Field Searcy, in an opinion essay in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
On the other side of the equation is one of ARC's signature programs, the Livable Centers Initiative, which is meant to encourage sustainable development, with transportation funding as the incentive.
Under the LCI program, areas apply for grants to plan town centers along with transportation projects that would make the place more compatible with walking or transit. Then, the town is eligible to apply for grant money to fund those transportation projects. The ARC has about $500 million programmed for those projects through 2040 — from well-established walkable areas such as Decatur to distant suburban towns such as Woodstock. (Learn more about LCI elsewhere in this issue.)
Tom Weyandt, the program's architect when he worked at ARC, makes no apologies, either for the LCI program or for all that he thinks transportation planning can still do to shape Atlanta.
"While its success has varied, you still have [many] communities that have looked at themselves differently" as a result of their participation, he says. "And some have embraced it heartily and changed themselves in ways they wouldn't have."
Ariel Hart is a staff writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was the newspaper's transportation reporter from 2005 to 2013.
| Transportation and Equality |
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By Laurel Paget-Seekins Atlanta has some catching up to do when it comes to transportation and equality. In studies of key indicators in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, Atlanta consistently ranks near the bottom. An extensive 2013 study on upward mobility from researchers at Harvard and U.C. Berkeley found that Atlanta ranks last among the largest 50 U.S. cities in the percentage of children who are born in the bottom fifth income group and who reach the top fifth by age 30. In a parallel metric published by the U.S. Census Bureau, the city of Atlanta has the highest Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) of any U.S. city with a population of over 100,000. Why do children born into poverty have a better chance of escaping in some regions of the country than in others? The Harvard-Berkeley study, The Equality of Opportunity Project, found correlations between upward mobility and the following: more mixed income neighborhoods, more two-parent households, better schools, and more civic engagement. The size of the black population is correlated; however, both black and white poor children in Atlanta have low upward mobility. A New York Times article published in July 2013 suggested that Atlanta's poor transportation access and economic segregation might be key factors in its poor social mobility. The Atlanta region ranked 91 out of 100 U.S. metro areas in a 2011 Brookings Institution study on transit coverage and job access. Only 22 percent of jobs were reachable in a 90-minute transit trip. At the same time, there is an imbalance between the job-rich northern suburbs and massings of low-income households to the south. Access to jobs, education, and health care certainly can be determining factors for children in low-income households. Atlanta's transportation infrastructure and low density make access difficult and expensive, forcing a large percentage of the city's working families to own cars (and drive long distances) even when they cannot afford them. A study from the Center for Housing Policy in 2006 found that Atlanta families with $20,000 to $50,000 in household income spent an average of one-third of their income on transportation (and more than the 29 percent on housing).
Poor accessibility isn't an accident The region's era of rapid economic growth coincided with the construction of interstate highways and the rise of suburban development. But this cannot be separated from the white flight from the city that followed the integration of public spaces and a refusal by several suburban counties to fund MARTA — in part because of racial fears. Atlanta's built environment, designed to exclude and separate, continues to do so today. However, the demographics are changing, poor households are being pushed and pulled out of city, and the very people the suburbs were designed to keep out are living there in increasing numbers. By 2010, more than fourth-fifths of Atlanta's poor lived in the suburbs, where transit and nonmotorized trip-making is difficult. Unfortunately, there is still a perception that transit is a social service for poor (black) people, and not a vital transportation infrastructure investment. This contributes to the refusal of the state of Georgia to fund transit and the failure of the transportation regional sales tax in 2012. Despite the constraints of the built environment, the region could become more accessible. Public transit could be funded enough to increase service levels, coverage, and regional accessibility. Affordable housing could be located in all communities, especially near low-wage jobs. Institutional changes could address structural inequalities, for example by using proportional voting on regional boards. But first the people and leaders of the Atlanta region (and the state of Georgia) must decide to take serious steps to address their bottom rankings. Laurel Paget-Seekins was a transit advocate in Atlanta for five years. She is now a research fellow at the Bus Rapid Transit Centre of Excellence at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. |
Resources
Images: Top — Come spring, the cones will be long gone and a sleek, new streetcar will be running on these tracks instead. Planners hope the 1.2-mile line will eventually be extended, connecting to the BeltLine. Photo courtesy AtlantaDowntown.com. Bottom — There are three MARTA stops in Decatur, including the Decatur Station on Church Street, making it relatively transit-rich among Atlanta suburbs. Photo courtesy Downtown Development Authority.
City of Atlanta Connect Atlanta Plan: http://web.atlantaga.gov/connectatlanta
Livable Centers Initiative: www.atlantaregional.com/land-use/livable-centers-initiative
MARTA TOD planning: www.itsmarta.com/TOD-real-estate.aspx
Clean Air Campaign: "State of the Commute": www.cleanaircampaign.org/Your-Air-Quality-Transportation/State-of-the-Commute
"Density in Atlanta: Implications for Traffic and Transit": http://reason.org/files/0d642e267c868322f65139ee573965c4.pdf
The WalkUP Wake-Up Call: Atlanta: www.atlantaregional.com/walkups