A Reason study advocates four major toll projects costed at about $25b to improve mobility in the Atlanta metro area:

(1) a network of express toll lanes added to existing expressways in place of planned HOV lanes

(2) an eastside 2x3 lane tunnelway extending from the southern end of GA400 at I-85 initially to I-20 and later to the I-285/I-675 interchange

(3) eastward extension of the southern Lakewood Freeway (GA166) in a tunnel to I-20 providing a new east-west route and airport access

(4) a toll truckway system allowing trucks to bypass congestion, part to go under the downtown

Entitled "Reducing Congestion in Atlanta" the study is authored by Robert Poole and co-published by the Reason Foundation of Los Angeles and the Georgia Public Policy Institute in Atlanta and is part of the Galvin Mobility Project - a whole series of studies and reports sponsored personally by Robert Galvin, former president of Motorola. (I've been involved in a couple of these. P Samuel) see http://www.reason.org

Poole was assisted by modeling of traffic scenarios by David Hartgen of University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Regional Commission's drive people out of their cars strategy

Atlanta mobility is threatened by an Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) longrange transportation plan for 2030 that adds not a single new highway, few extra general purpose lanes and only adds HOV lanes. The ARC plan is for the peak hour congestion penalty to grow from the present 46% to 67%, although Hartgen modeling showed the ARC Plan would actually produce an 85% congestion penalty - trips that take 85% longer on average in peak hours as free flow travel times.

The ARC plan is based on the fanciful notion that although increased transit service and extra carool lanes, and densification around transit stops and other landuse planning measures have historically failed to reduce reliance on cars, they will somehow do so in the future. And the ARC plan assumes increased road congestion in Atlanta is acceptable and may drive people out of their cars.

The notion that roadway capacity expansion is futile underlies the thinking of many planners but is refuted by Texas Transportation Inst data which show minor (5%) worsening in congestion in metro areas where demand exceeded capacity expansion by 10% or less compared to major (20 to 25%) increases in congestion where demand exceeded capacity increases by more than 10%.

"The current (ARC) longrange plan, despite devoting the majority of its funding to transit and carpool lanes would lead to no increase in the fraction of commute trips made by carpool, and a less than two percent increase in transit's low market share (3.5%) - while overall congestion soars," writes the report.

Plan 80% toll financeable

The Reason paper offers an alternative to the transit-for-transit's-sake ARC plan and it's fatalism about worsening congestion: aggressive removal of incident based congestion and new capacity managed for free flow with variable toll rates. It estimates that tolls can fiannce about 80% or $20b of the $25b of new capacity needed. To reduce the risk of Big Dig style mismanagement of these mega-projects it says they should be carried out under longterm concession agreements in which the private sector bears the risks of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls.

Unlike the ARC plan which increases net costs the mobility plan would provide large benefits - time savings worth $98b over 20 years. There would be other less easily measured benefits from the ability of employers to recruit labor from a wider radius and employees having access to a correspondingly larger choice of employer.

Applying the Prud'homme mobility/productivity findings to Atlanta a reduction in congestion of 50% would boost per capita incomes by 3.5%.

Improved mobility gives customers access to a wider range of goods and services. It enhances safety by getting people more swiftly to hospital.

People's "circles of opportunity" are enlarged by greater mobility in Poole's phrase - not just in employment but in entertainment, healthcare, education, recreation, and social life. Computer dating services show that social hookups are hampered by congested travel routes.

With a network of free flowing priced lanes throughout the area urgent trips could be made with speed and high assurance of punctuality. A bus-based transit system would have free flowing lanes too - the equivalent of busways. So would truckers on exclusive truckways for a major portion of trips.

Purdue pushes more realistic policies - congestion relief

Governor Sonny Purdue now in his third year in office has killed a number of expensive urban rail projects, supported bus rapid and truck lanes and created a Congestion Mitigation Task Force which is attempting to change the focus of planning toward mobility.

Atlanta is the prototypical new metro area that has developed almost entirely in the automobile era. Despite construction of a major passenger rail system transit use is in decline, an almost inevitable result of growing incomes and dispersed workplaces and other attractions. Cars provide 90.6% of work trips and a higher proportion of other trips. Transit declined from 4.6% in 1990 to 3.5% in 2000.

A major factor limiting mobility is that Atlanta inherits a radial or hub-&-spoke system of roads while having a predominant suburb-to-suburb trip pattern better served by a strong grid. Moreover while most of the development of the past four decades has been outside the I-285 Perimeter belt expressway most of the spending on extra capacity has been within it - not only on a metro rail system but also on single massive north-south (I-75/85) and a single east-west (I-20) expressways. Moreover Atlanta's surface arterials are poorly developed at 0.76mi/mi2 compared to the arterial grids of Phoenix (2.68), Orlando (2.51), Houston (1.61), Denver (2.13), Dallas (2.09), and other comparable modern high growth areas.

As Cox and Pisarski have characterized it: "one of the least core-oriented urban areas in the world has one of the most core-oriented roadway systems."

Also from 1992 additions to expressway capacity slowed and from 1999 virtually ceased due to intervention against road construction by the USEPA.

The Reason report puts the full congestion cost in the Atlanta area at $3.9b/yr currently.

Proposals

It proposes rebuilds of four major interchanges ranked among the 20 most congested in the country: I-75N/I-85N, and I-285 with ZI-85N, I-75N, and I-20. The ARC plan for 2030 proposes the expansion of only one of these I-285/I-75N, leaving the other three to worsen as bottlenecks for the intervening two decades plus.

Hartgen used the ARC traffic model to study what ARC has shown no interest in studying: how much extra capacity would be needed to eliminate LOS-F conditions. The result was 2,613 lane-miles (4,181 lane-km) of which 1,653 lane-mi (2645 lane-km) were on expressways. Spread over the 25 years of the plan this is 66 lane-miles (106 lane-km) per year, a very similar number to what was being added 1983 to 1992 before the virtual cessation of road expansion in the Atlanta area. Poole argues for all additional lanes to be priced in order to manage them for high free flow volumes rather than lower stop-&-go throughput.

Atlanta is "the trucking crossroads of the South" and plays a major role in America's just-in-time logistics network, the report says. It presents an alternative to the perimeter or I-285 centered truckway concept modeled for Georgia Tolls by PB. It provides for truckways to take a more direct path through the center including a mix of surface, depressed and tunneled route following I-75 and I-85.

The revenue and cost estimates show the express toll lanes very profitable but the other three (the tunnels and truckways) needing subsidies.

see http://www.reason.org/ps351.pdf

TOLLROADSnews 2006-12-07