GEORGIA:Northern Arc possible pike

The extended version 97km (61mi) just 40% longer generates nearly double the toll revenues of the version ending at Cumming/GA-400:

The study bases its traffic and revenue forecasts on a recommended toll rate of 7.5c/km (12c/mi) for cars having tested rates between 4c/mi and 28c/mi. Trucks are tolled at 2.5 x cars. The basic 70km route I-75 to GA-400 at Cumming saves 12km (7.5mi) and 21mins. WSA estimates toll revenue would be maximized at 20c/mi for cars, or a near $9 toll, but in line with its usual practice recommends a toll rate somewhat lower.

For the extended toll road from US-41 near I-75 to GA-316 Lawrenceville (about 100km) the savings would be about 15km (9mi) and 18mins, but the extension apparently attracts a lot of traffic in its own right. In fact by far the largest traffic volumes are forecast for the extension, east of GA-400 toward I-85 – the section not yet part of the enviro-permitting process. (WSA modeled two alignments for the basic section of the roadway but the results are very similar for the two, so we don’t complicate the story by distinguishing the two.)

Traffic & revenue

Operating expenses are put at 14c/toll transaction covering toll collection, police patrol, communications, accounting and other services. Maintenance is put at about $1m for the basic road and $1.3m/yr for the extended road. Toll rates are assumed to be raised with inflation, WSA noting that older facilities were often financed assuming stable toll rates. Net 2015 revenues after operations and maintenance costs ($5.3m to $11.7m) are estimated at $34m for the basic 70km road and $72m/yr for the extended 97km version. That $72m is for the first year of operation and represents a discount of 30% to allow for ‘ramp-up.’ After 15 years, by 2030, net toll revenue is put at $145m.

Based on fifth year net toll revenue of $113m, WSA assigns the extended project a ‘bonding capacity’ of $1,096m. This is in the same ballpark as the project cost, suggesting it could be financable as a standalone project.

Truck revenues on the N Arc are projected at about 29% of the total, based on trucks being about an eight of traffic volume.

Plans

The N Arc is by far the largest single highway project presently planned in the Atlanta region in the 25-year regional transp plan (RTP) of the Atlanta Regional Council (ARC), the metro area planning outfit. Indeed it represents fully 25% of the increase in lane-miles planned in the whole area over the next quarter century. They envisage it as helping keep long distance truck traffic off the “top end perimeter” (Georgian lingo for northern part of the I-285 belt route) by intercepting the radial freeways and connecting them further out. A lot of trucks between Texas and the Carolinas and Virginia go through here. But local traffic is the staple as usual. The four counties Bartow, Cherokee, Forsyth and Gwinnett are on the most rapidly part of the region, the northern fringe – an attractive area of many lakes and gently rolling hills.

The board of ARC decided May last year as a policy matter that the N Arc should only be studied (1) as a toll road (2) with interchanges limited to motorway standard cross-roads (3) a wide scenic easement would be acquired to ‘protect it against strip development’ (4) zonings would be required to enforce a landuse plan (5) no capacity increase in parallel roads, notably GA-20, the 2-lane road that the N Arc will roughly follow (6) the project be re-evaluated after the MIS is complete and a new RTP adopted (7) the project could proceed to construction after completion of environmental permitting “around 2003.”

Smardgrophitis

The ‘smart growth’ virus seems to have heavily infected the brains of policymakers in the Atlanta region and under its influence they suffer delusions that they can roll back the dominant automobile by building rail-lines, instead of laying pavement. Although it provides less than 3% of passenger trips and zero local freight service ARC plans to spend 55% of a projected $36b of capital funds over 25 years on transit. Moreover two-thirds of the expanded roadway capacity goes to HOV-lanes, without any consideration of priced lanes.

The ARC staff have said that “as Atlanta moved into the 1990s it became clear that there would be no way to ease future congestion by building more capacity.” (Staff response to call for more road capacity on CD “Transp Solutions for a New Century” ARC, 2000) The staff also say in their formal comments that land values in congested areas such as the northern part of I-285 have got so high as to make widening “cost-prohibitive.” This appears to be a totally arbitrary and economically illiterate judgment since there has been no effort by ARC to examine alternative ways of providing extra capacity, or to test the willingness of motorists to pay for toll express lanes to avoid congestion.

The Atlanta establishment are presently fixated on the trendy if incoherent body of ideas called ‘smart growth’ and simply not in a mood to support new road capacity – the N Arc being the major exception. It is located about 50km (30mi) from the central business district and about 35km (20mi) beyond the I-285 beltway so it is too far away from it to provide much relief. From a traffic standpoint the region would be better served by an intermediate east-west route at about the 35km (20mi) north from the CBD. Call it the Less Northern Arc (LNA)! But the N Arc is strongly advantaged as a toll road by the lack of plans for any other improvements east-west through this developing northern part of the Atlanta area.

The advantage is offset however by the ‘smart growth’ style restrictions on development (items 3 and 4 above). The road will be handicapped by the lack of local interchanges (item 2), but many will predict that if development continues in the area that there will be decisive local pressure to build intermediate interchanges. Willingness to invest in the N Arc will depend quite heavily on whether these ‘smart growth’ policies remain, or prove to be a passing fad.

ARC coxed

No transit-besotted organization is ever quite the same after it has been ‘coxed’ – subjected to critical scrutiny by St Louis-area consultant Wendell Cox. Working with the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Cox produced “A Commonsense Approach to Transp in the Atlanta Region” (Commonsense), a 79-page analysis available at www.gppf.org. Commonsense points up many major flaws in the ARC 2025 plan. It makes a persuasive case that the ARC’s projections of mode shift to rail are contrary to all the history of behavior in the region. But even if they were to be achieved, he argues, they would be a highly inefficient use of funds and leave a worse traffic problem than now.

Julie Ralston, a ARC spokesman told us the major flaw in Cox’s analysis – which has been the subject of much local reportage and discussion – is that it overlooks the pressure of the federal clean air requirements to curb automobile use. “The plan is driven by clean air issues,” she told us.

There is no doubt clean air issues have had huge prominence in Atlanta, largely because environmental activists and regulators and the courts have gone further in Atlanta than elsewhere in halting the flow of federal funds for road projects because the area is in “non-attainment.” However the ARC 2025 plan achieves clean air improvements rather easily, indeed by 2003. Its plan produces emissions of NOx 152t/d vs a required 221 and VOCs 99 vs a required 132 by 2025. The past failure to meet air quality requirements results from many old high-emitters on the road, but as these age and are scrapped, and are replaced by new vehicles, air emissions will decline, despite increases in vehicle-miles traveled (VMT).

ARC itself documents this. VMT in the region is projected by ARC to rise from 112m/day to 158m in 2025 whereas NOx go down from 264t/d to 152 and VOCs decline from 162t/d to 99. (Sec4, p16, figs 4.26,4.27)

So any speculative mode shift effects on air emissions from investment in transit pale into insignificance beside the impact of falling emissions per vehicle-mile traveled – which are a function of fuels and engines (nationally regulated) and policing of high-emitting vehicles (a local matter). Air emissions are not going to be significantly affected by which mode is favored in the region’s capital spending because that spending has such barely measurable impacts on VMT.

Transit’s share of total trips in Atlanta is 2.6% and of work trips 7.2%. MARTA, the heavy electric rail system already has over a quarter of work trips to the central business district, mostly middle and upper income commuters. But the center is relatively small and diminishing in importance in the overall region. Moreover, as Cox points out getting new transit riders has been extremely expensive with such an emphasis on rail – $32/new ride or about $14k annually for each new commuter. Transit’s increase of 50k daily riders 1979 to 1999 was about 1% of the 4.5m new daily trips. The overwhelming proportion (99%) of new trips have been catered to by highways, most in single occupant vehicles – despite the development of the largest new urban rail system outside Washington DC and San Francisco.

Love affair with trains

For 2025 ARC projects sharply increasing use of transit, including a doubling of MATRA ridership, based on massive reorientation of growth from the outer counties to Fulton and DeKalb in the core – a complete reversal of suburbanization. Cox points out that even Portland has failed at that, despite pursuing it for 20 years with more rigorous urban growth boundaries and centralized land use controls than Georgia has in place.

MARTA’s mileage is to go from 48mi to 71mi, up 48%. The normal experience as such rail systems are extended to the fringe is for overall ridership to increase proportionately much less than mileage - because fewer people further out have downtown jobs to which the system is oriented and because fewer people there are within convenient reach of stations.

MARTA itself had this experience in the 1990s. Its mileage was increased 38% and its ridership rose only 8%. Yet the ARC 2025 plan suggests the reverse will occur and that fringe extensions of the rail system amounting to 50% will double system ridership! At the same time the planners are trying to get many new riders on the fringe they will be attempting to swing development from the fringe to redevelopment in the core counties!

ARC’s extensive new set of proposed commuter rail lines also run counter to its efforts to thwart fringe area development. And its projections for adding transit riders with some long light rail lines (50k/d) look quite fanciful, given that mode’s low average speed. Its line-haul speed is 15 to 18mph and door to door speed perhaps 10mph given trip-ends and transfers, making it uncompetitive with even congested roads over trips of more than a couple of miles.

Most of the riders for the proposed trolleys seem likely to come off buses. But the plan also projects a 70% increase in bus ridership – in the face of heavily subsidized competitive rail service, increased incomes and car ownership, no reduction in real bus fares, and very little increase in bus frequency and coverage. The only substantial improvement projected for bus service in the ARC plan is the development of HOV lanes and transfer stations. Cox comments succinctly of all this: “This (70% increase in bus ridership) has never been accomplished and is simply not believable.” He points out that the total projected transit increase is five times what was accomplished by a rather similar strategy in the past 20 years.

ARC’s plan is constructed around increased roadway congestion. It projects that after spending $36b – most of it on what Cox characterizes accurately as “exorbitant boutique” rail strategies – that LOS E&F conditions on the highways will go from 32% of daily VMT to 41%. And average speeds on the roads will go from 25.7mph to 23.1mph.

Political sustainability

It has to be wondered how long such a dismal scenario adversely affecting the movement of so many citizens every day will be politically sustainable. Americans are rather attached to the idea that with ingenuity and enterprise problems can be alleviated, if not solved, and that the conditions of daily life can be improved. How long will they buy a longterm plan that is taking them steadily backwards?

The Atlanta plan states that “Slowing the growth in (road) trip lengths” is a “primary goal” of the plan. (Sec 4 p18) These planners only see the costs of road trips, not the benefits versus the costs. The benefits for motorists of many longer trips in a growing region may well exceed the trip costs and therefore be fully justified. People live in large metropolitan areas rather than in pristine isolation in small villages in the countryside because of the benefits of the specialization and choice that such areas offer. But to take advantage of those benefits they have to be able to get around them and make long trips. The ARC-style approach of simpleminded trip reduction, or trip length reduction, rather than accommodating the need for longer trips will make the region’s people worse off, especially as its main means of attaining that goal is to allow congestion to worsen.

ARC-type planning treats all potential funds for transport as equal – just a revenue stream. But whereas fares and tolls signal travelers willingness to pay for a service because it provides net benefits to them, sales taxes (the major source of MARTA funding) are a deadweight economic burden on the region, hamper its competitiveness, undermine the buying power of local paypackets, and signal nothing about the value customers place on the transport service funded.

The last major new motorway standard project built in the Atlanta region is a toll road – GA-400 between I-85 and I-285. It has been very successful in improving mobility in a developing part of the area and also financially. Yet in all the thousands of words in the 2025 plan the successful innovation of GA=400 tolls is mentioned only once, and in passing. And the N Arc way off on the fringe is the only project considered for tolling.

Cox points out that area mobility would be greatly improved by reviving some old highway plans: (1) I-485 extending GA-400 due south to link I-675 to make a north-south reliever to I-75/85 and to improve mobility east of the city (2) completing US-78, the Stone Mountain Fwy westward in to the center and (3) a GA-166 extension eastward to I-20.

Any planning agency serious about relieving congestion and enhancing mobility would be sponsoring studies of such major motorway links as self-financing toll projects given the financial and political success of GA-400. And be looking at priced lanes as a way of financing and managing additional capacity on the existing freeways.

Cox also argues that Atlanta’s sub-motorway standard roads, or arterials are perhaps its most glaring deficiency, many being 2-lane country lanes lacking shoulders and turn-lanes at intersections. He argues for development of a grid of western style ‘expressways.’ Santa Clara county in the Bay area is furthest along in the US in developing such a network of restricted access, median divided 4 and 6-lane ‘expressways’ with selected grade separation, but mostly with signalized intersections. Such corridors could be put out for bid for toll financing based on transponder tolling.

Instead there has been a reactionary retreat into rail nostalgia and East European style economics in managing surface transport. This is likely to be so ineffectual in serving the people, it could leave a void for self-financing highway projects that bypass the planners and their fixation on rail. If tax monies are spent to such little productive effect as indicated in its 2025 plan, either the plan will collapse politically once it is more widely understood, or else it could be bypassed as an irrelevancy.

In this uncertain political context the N Arc is one anomalous toll project that nevertheless has some promise, according to WSA’s work. A Less Northern Arc would be a surefire winner. (Contacts ARC 404 463 3190, Cox 618 632 8507, publicpurpose.com, WSA 770 936 8650)