Georgia Poised to Snub Transit in Huge Road Funding Increase

Whether Georgia even needs all that much money for roads and bridges is an open question. Reporters and politicians are taking to the bank the Joint Committee’s claim that the state Department of Transportation need to double its budget just to upkeep our current infrastructure.

The problem is that the report’s “verified” estimate of $1 billion to $1.5 billion a year just in increased road and bridge maintenance spending was provided to the Joint Committee by a contractor with a big self-interest in more transportation spending. And the committee’s rather thin report doesn’t offer any documentation for the claim. As so often happens in the political media, however, an unsubstantiated claim by an interested party quickly morphs into the neat number that journalists must latch onto. The result: breathless headlines and credulous editorials accepting an increase in the billion-dollars-plus range as absolutely dire.

Meanwhile, Deal himself noted that the state has found the money to add more than $1 billion worth of Interstate lanes in metro Atlanta during his final term. Go figure.

“We are constructing new capacity express lanes along large stretches of I-75 and 575. We are also extending the managed lanes on I-85,” he said. “Over the next four years, we will open to traffic more than 1.1 billion dollars worth of new, reliable Interstate lanes in Metro Atlanta, the largest interstate expansion since the 1980s.”

You get a real sense of where transit stands as a priority when you contrast the scale of those Interstate lanes with the recently opened 2.7-mile Atlanta Streetcar. Even its boosters admit the streetcar isn’t going get a lot of cars off the road — not like, say light rail from Atlanta to Cobb or along the northern crest of I-285 would. The streetcar was funded by the city and the feds; without state help its scope is likely to remain extremely limited.

Deal’s speech and the general lack of any actual proposal to fund transit bodes poorly for an authentic effort to solve the transportation mess that’s strangling metro Atlanta. The good news may be that Georgia politics aren’t particularly transparent. Most real decisions in the state legislature are cooked up behind the scenes.