ATLANTA GA:New Limited Access Pike for N Arc is Compromise

It will only have interchanges (ICs) with GA-316, I-85, I-985, GA-400, I-575 and I-75 as approved, though earlier plans and modeling provided for a total of 12-ICs. The intermediate ICs are to be omitted to discourage development along the highway. The Atlanta planning group also voted approval conditional on the highway being set in a 600m (2,000ft) scenic easement. The highway is intended to support general east-west connectivity across this area which is located 50 to 60km (30-40mi) from downtown Atlanta. It substantially relieves GA-20 and other narrow multi-purpose east-west roads in the vicinity but is expected to have no noticeable impact on the northern leg of 240k veh/day 10-lane I-285. Too far away!

The proposed N Arc pike is so-named because it is the northern arc or segment of an earlier plan for an Outer Perimeter loop highway. Studies in the early 1980s suggested the western, southern and south-eastern segments of the Outer Perimeter were not warranted and they were dropped from planning (though such is the resilience of this brilliant mode that a lot can quietly be done in the name of local road upgrades!) But the north is the principal area of metropolitan development for the Atlanta region, and so the N Arc has been preserved in the planning. A Major Investment Study on the road is presently under way to look at different alternates and an Environmental Impact Statement will follow next year for completion by 2002. Dirt could move by 03 or 04. Leg flows of about 70k veh/day for 2010 and 80k for 2020 were modeled on the N Arc as an untolled facility and with 12-ICs rather than 6-ICs. Truck traffic was projected in the range 10k to 15k veh/day on several legs in 2020.

At the easterly end of the N Arc on GA-316 east of Lawrenceville a 40km (24mi) eastern arc heading south from Dacula to I-20 somewhere between Conyers and Covington is under study.

The N Arc Pike is by far the largest and most spectacular new highway construction project recommended in a May 99 ‘Regional Transp Plan: Needs Assessment Report’ - but only adopted by a vote 18/15 and with the toll, IC-limitations and scenic easement qualifications tacked on. It remains to be seen whether these anti-development provisions seriously undermine the financial viability of the project.

Projections of inter-county trips show that an east-west highway closer in, maybe midway between GA-20 and Atlanta’s I-285 perimeter loop, would attract far more traffic. But the closer-in location has not been seriously examined.

The ARC Plan is premised on the present Atlanta region growing from the current 3.1m pop to 4.8m by 2025, a projection forward of previous rapid growth (1960 pop was only 1.1m) and twice the national average. Atlanta has moderate air quality problems but has been under the USEPA gun, until the courts recently threw out all of that agency’s air rulings as unconstitutional. The other major roadworks proposed are $1,070m to build 272 lane-km of HOV lane on major radial motorways (I-75, I-575, I-85, I-20, US-78, GA-316), and some $135m to upgrade US-78 with ICs from arterial to motorway standard. All other highway projects are 8-digit items.

Railmania rife

Atlanta has a great rail history. It is proud of its role as rail hub of the south. Much of the civil war in these parts was spent tearing up the southern gauge and relaying it to the weeny the northern gauge, and then respiking it wide again, as the crazy war seesawed back and forth. Now regional rail schemes have become a preoccupation. No less than $15.8b or 62% of a total $25.7b of capital and operating cost projections 2000-25 will go to transit, the ARC Plan says, a mode which carries about 2% of total trips and 6.7% of trips to work in Atlanta. The bulk of the expenditure goes to a slew of new passenger rail projects. The new rail cost an averge $39m/km ($64m/mi).

There are some humdingers here:

– a 66km $2.3b light rail Marietta-Lawrenceville (M-L) projected to attract 25k passenger trips/day by 2025 at a cost of $34 per person trip

– 28km of extensions to the existing MARTA north-south heavy rail line costing $1.3b to attract 23k more trips/day at a cost of $21/trip

Both heavy and light rail end up, on the ARC projections (which on experience are likely to prove optimistic) costing $18/passenger trip of which perhaps the patrons would pay $3, leaving taxpayers to pay $15! This plan makes chauffeured limo travel the mode for cheapskates!

Commuter rail on freight tracks is somewhat less exorbitantly expensive by the ARC figuring – $6 to $8/trip. Bus system projects range between $1.40/trip and $15.99. Road costs are in the range 30c to $7.73c/ trip.

Lanna’s Lionel Complex

And what is this great splurge on rail going to achieve? An increase, says ARC, in transit’s share of trips to and from work from the current 6.7% to 7.6% in 2020. Then if supporting land use zonings to encourage transit are also implemented – a big IF given the manifest unpopularity of such ‘upzonings’ – the transit mode share will reach 9.2%. It isn’t as if a lot of people don’t already have access to transit. 28% of the population of the area are currently within 640m (0.4mi) of a transit line and after $15.8b of new transit expenditures this will have risen to 32%. Only one in three people living less than half a mile from a transit line will want to use these services an average of once per day even though they will be subsidized to the tune of $15/ trip. Some service!

In a spectacular piece of understatement at the end the ARC report asks rhetorically in an offhand manner “Are other options viable?” and answers itself flippantly with: “Last, all viable options must be considered. For example, busways may be an alternative to light rail.”

But there is no sign busways or other rubber-tire on pavement ways have even been considered to this point in Atlanta. The infatuation with trains – the Lionel Complex – has apparently been all-absorbing.

As documented by John Kain (in Essays in Transp Economics and Policy, ed Jose Gomez-Ibanez and others, Brookings 1999 p359-403) Ottawa, Curitiba style busways are almost an order of magnitude more economical than either light or heavy rail. Which is to say costs are about $2 to $3/trip using bus or transitways compared to $20 and $30/trip for rail in Atlanta. And a busway has more potential to attract patronage than rail since many of the same vehicles that run on the busway can also use local streets at each end, avoiding the need for many timewasting transfers and shuttle trips.

Missed potential

The Marietta-Lawrenceville corridor presently designated for light rail desperately cries out to be compared with a variety of rubber tired alternates – possibly real HOVs, buses and vans in the rush hours, and open to toll payers other times? It would be a beauty of an east-west route! And no need to worry about the insidious sprawl because the area is already developed. Quite a formidable design challenge to weave in to the fabric of the built environment, but so will the proposed trolley line. Much better placed than the

N Arc. For about the same capital cost as the M-L trolley it could serve 3 or 4 times the number of trips, more door-to-door trips, that motorists would gladly pay for in tolls, instead of having to be subsidized over $30/trip as a trolley.

In the ARC report’s discussion of area freeway corridor problems the phrase “heavy peak direction” constantly crops up. Yet there is no evidence that the obvious answers of (1) reconfiguring roadway to traffic demand with moveable barrier and reversible lanes or (2) pricing peak travel, has even been considered. Such measures could heavily cut the future proportion of congested travel on area fwys at the cost of perhaps one of the ten rail projects.

Atlanta now has a 25 Year Plan for Increased Congestion at Great Cost. (In that it is far from unique. It seems to be the special mission of MPOs all over the nation to devise dysfunctional schemes loaded down with unproductive rail.)

29% of veh-mi traveled on Atlanta area highways is currently heavily congested (LOS-F) and those creep-&-crawl conditions are planned – note the word – to expand to 41% of VMT by 2025, as compared to 47% if there is no-build. In other words the trips diverted to transit by $15.8b of subsidies will be completely overwhelmed by continuing increases in demand for roadspace by those awful automobilists – which the planners propose to do almost nothing to tame with pricing, nor to accommodate with serious on-road innovation, or new construction. Leave ‘em to congest is the polict for roads. They plan to spend over half the money they see available on an extortionately highcost mode – passenger rail transit – that they admit will serve less than one in ten worktrips, that does little for non-work trips, and nothing whatever for freight delivery or service traffic. Over 50% of the resources to serve less than 5% of the transport workload.

Talk about an elitist and ideological divvy up of the $-goodies!

At least the N Arc has emerged as a shining exception, a project that will justify itself with tolls, or not be built. Unlike the rail lines there is some reality check in place for the N Arc. Atlantans now know tolls. GA-400 toll road inside the I-285 loop is one of the country’s most successful pikes taking 115k tolls/day. Successful, popular, uncontroversial, accepted. But relegating new road pricing to the far periphery of the metro area seems rather like deciding to try grow rice in a desert, when there’s plenty of more suitable paddy fields close in that are not being worked. (Contact Joe Padilla, Atlanta Reg Comm 404 364 1471 jpadilla@atlreg.com)