The Georgia Public Policy Foundation, together with the Reason Foundation recently released their plan for relieving congestion in Atlanta. The plan involves creating three giant tunnels ITP, extending Langford Parkway west above ground, and turning all the interstates into high-occupancy toll (HOT) roads. Many links on this story:
- AJC (includes map!) + Blog
- ABC (Cheerfully — and predictably — licking the feet of anyone who likes roads.)
- CL (Their PR folks would carpet bomb my blog with this link if I didn’t include it.)
Reason estimates the cost of their proposal to be at least $25 billion. The Atlanta Regional Commission wrote in response:
A new report issued this week from the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation – “Reducing Congestion in Atlanta: A Bold New Approach to Increasing Mobility” – contains attention-grabbing suggestions for reducing the region’s traffic congestion. But the report is undermined by inaccurate cost estimates, lack of real-world feasibility, a dismissive approach to the importance of transit and land use planning, incomplete data, misleading statements and accusations that the region’s transportation plan focuses on anything but studied, proven and accepted methods of improving the region’s mobility.
In their lengthy response, ARC specifically addressed the cost issue:
The Reason Foundation report dramatically underestimates the cost of adding roadway capacity at $1 million per mile. ARC recently documented the regional impact of construction costs that have increased more than 25 percent as part of its ongoing RTP update. When Mobility 2030 was approved in 2004, projections showed that adding road capacity and right of way cost $4.6 million per mile. Interchange construction cost $5 million to $10 million each. Those figures ballooned to $7.8 million per mile for road capacity construction and right of way and up to $20 million per interchange in 2006 in the Atlanta region.
Citizens for Progressive Transit (disclosure: I’m on the board) also wrote a response. Using the most conservative cost estimates available, CfPT came up with a few comparisons between the Reason Foundation’s proposal and CfPT’s World Class Transit Vision:
|
Tolls and Tunnels Proposed by Reason Foundation and Georgia Public Policy Foundation |
Beltline, Streetcar, and Selected Commuter Rail Projects |
||
| Project | Cost | Project | Cost |
| Express Toll Lane Network | $9.14 billion | Commuter Rail to Athens (Brain Train) | $383 million |
| Toll Truckway | $7.58 billion | Commuter Rail to Macon (via Lovejoy) | $304 million |
| North-South Tunnel | $4.88 billion | Commuter Rail to Gainesville | $326 million |
| Lakewood Toll Tunnel and Freeway Extension | $3.51 billion | Commuter Rail to Bremen | $310 million |
| Commuter Rail to Senoia | $198 million | ||
| Commuter Rail to Canton | $257 million | ||
| Commuter Rail to Madison | $183 Million | ||
| Multimodal Passenger Terminal | $330.8 million | ||
| Beltline Transit | $1 billion | ||
| Atlanta Streetcar | $350 million | ||
| Tolls and Tunnels TOTAL: | $25.11 billion | Beltline, Streetcar, and Commuter Rail TOTAL: | $3.6 billion |
More numbers are on their way.
Update: As promised, more numbers:
Per-Mile Cost Comparisons
| Project | Cost per Mile | Peak Hour Capacity |
| North-South Tunnel Freeway | $871 million | 14,400 peak-hour passenger cars |
| Heavy Rail | $100 - 150 million | 13,000 - 41,000 people |
| Light Rail | $45 million | 7,000 - 18,000 people |
| Streetcar | $25 million | 3,000 - 14,000 people |
| Commuter Rail | $4 - 9 million | 2,000 - 20,000 people |
| Bus Rapid Transit in exclusive guideway | $7 - 55 million | 2,000 - 10,000 people |
For the same $4.88 billion it would cost to tunnel under Atlanta, we could buy:
- A 7-Line, 45-Station regional commuter rail system (including a fully-built Multimodal Passenger Terminal downtown and the entire Brain Train) — cost: $2.3 billion, and
- A 40-mile streetcar system — cost: $1.1 billion, and
- The 22-mile Beltline — cost: $1 billiion, and
- Have nearly $500 million remaining for other projects, including the C-Loop or express bus service
Just one mile of the tunnel under Atlanta would cost $871 million. For the cost of that one mile, we could buy:
- The entire 72 mile Brain Train — cost $383 million
- The 14 mile Atlanta Streetcar — cost $350 million, and
- the 26 mile Atlanta-Lovejoy Commuter Rail Line — cost $106 million
Sources: Capacities / Costs, Freeway Capacities
GA DOT is a decade or two behind the best state DOT’s. They never hire outside of the state, fail to embrace any cutting edge technology, etc. However, they have no problem being whores for Georgians for Better Transportation, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, the Reason Foundation (funded by big auto and big oil) or big money Georgia road building interests.
“How can Washington State’s transportation department be so precise about the growth of congestion? Because it buries electronic sensors in highways to measure speed and volume. This is, DOT officials told the Seattle Times, a far better way of measuring congestion than studies that guess what it’s like based on traffic volume and highway mileage.”
http://www.governing.com/notebook.htm
You Can Get There
The Emerging Downtown Advantage
Posted November 27, 2006
Since the 1970s, people have been aware of the major geographic changes in metropolitan areas, not just the movement of families to the suburbs (people have been aware of that since the 1920s), but the commercial reordering as well. In the early 1990s, we finally got a name for the clustering of work in the suburbs, “edge cities,” and with that name, a firm understanding that we live and work in regions with multiple business districts. Turns out, though, that some of these places work better than others.
Background: What we learned from the book “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,” published in 1991, was that unlike residential growth, commercial development (work and retail) doesn’t spread evenly across the landscape; it clusters, mainly around major highway intersections. Hence, Washington, D.C.’s Tysons Corner, Atlanta’s Perimeter Center, Tampa’s Westshore area. These suburban districts were creations of the post-World War II highway construction boom, but they were accidental creations. Nobody set out to create business districts at these intersections; they just happened.
Now, consider what happened with traditional downtowns at the same time. Even as some businesses were leaving, downtowns improved their positions as true transportation hubs. The interstate highway system (for better or worse) sliced through neighborhoods to bring in people from all over the region. Transit systems were started or upgraded to haul people downtown. Where intercity rail was important, the big train station was almost always located downtown. Result: Today, it’s easier in many metro areas to get to downtown than to one of the edge cities. And as congestion worsens, that could be a huge competitive advantage.
You can see the advantage starting to tilt things in the Seattle area, where a new, sophisticated study of commuting times shows that, if you live in Everett on the northern end of the metro area, it takes longer to drive to the edge city of Bellevue than to downtown Seattle, even though the mileage is the same. And downtown’s advantage is growing. That is, congestion is increasing everywhere, but it’s getting worse faster in the suburbs. (You can find the study of Seattle congestion by clicking here.)
Well, if downtowns have such advantages (they were designed as hubs and offer choices for getting to work, including transit), why haven’t they competed more effectively in the past? Because congestion wasn’t as great a problem in the 1980s and 1990s. As the study makes clear, the daily commute has escalated since the 1990s from annoyance to full-blown crisis. (Snapshot: If you set out at 7:40 a.m. on a weekday to drive from suburban Auburn to Renton along Highway 167, a trip of less than 10 miles, it will take more than two and a half hours. In 2003, the same trip would have taken a little more than an hour.) How long will businesses and their workers endure such agony? Not long, we suspect.
Footnote: How can Washington State’s transportation department be so precise about the growth of congestion? Because it buries electronic sensors in highways to measure speed and volume. This is, DOT officials told the Seattle Times, a far better way of measuring congestion than studies that guess what it’s like based on traffic volume and highway mileage.
Comment by Trackboy1 — November 28, 2006 @ 12:34 pm