Soapbox: Transit votes offer lessons for Atlanta
November 26, 2007 at 4:00 pm by Soapbox Editor in SoapboxBy Lee Biola
What will the future of transit look like in Atlanta? Will our state’s fixation on ever more asphalt continue to dominate, leaving many residents with no choice but to sit in gridlock even as gas prices reach record highs? Or will we acknowledge the need to grow more sustainably and transition to a sensible approach that is less about dependence on cars and more about real options for commuters? As Atlanta ponders its transportation future — potentially culminating in a landmark regional vote on funding for new infrastructure in the coming years — we can learn much from how other cities are dealing with similar challenges. Last Tuesday’s elections offer lessons from two key peer regions.
We start just up the road in Charlotte, a city increasingly positioning itself as a rival to Atlanta for economic and cultural influence in the Southeast. For much of the past year, a small but devoted group of anti-transit activists waged an aggressive campaign to scrap that region’s primary source of transit funding, a half-penny sales tax dedicated to buses and trains. While most local officials, including the city’s Republican mayor, recognized the importance of mass transit and strongly favored keeping the tax, they nevertheless feared that the group’s anti-tax rhetoric would strike a nerve with voters, and a close vote on the repeal referendum was expected.
The result at the ballot box, however, could not have been clearer. An election expected to go down to the wire was in fact a blowout, with voters backing the transit tax by a 70-to-30-point landslide. As the Charlotte Observer reported the following morning, “the margin of victory stunned even transit supporters.”
The triumph bolsters what was already a strong commitment by local officials to transit. While Atlanta stalls, Charlotte has quietly emerged as one of the South’s more progressive cities on growth and development. The area’s transit agency will open its long-awaited initial segment of light rail later this month, and already has several additional light rail, commuter rail, and bus rapid transit lines in the works.
Charlotte’s transit future now looks bright, and it ratchets up the pressure for Atlanta to get going with its own vision. As we move forward here, however, we must be mindful of potential pitfalls along the way. Tuesday’s elections also offer a cautionary tale of how not to proceed; for that, we look across the country and to the Puget Sound region of Washington state.
Nov. 6 was a sleepless night for much of Seattle’s political establishment, who had just watched the most ambitious funding proposal in their state’s history, a $47 billion package of highway and transit projects known as Proposition 1, go down to defeat at the polls. On its face, the loss was a blow to transit in Seattle; much of the funding would have gone to needed extensions to the city’s fledgling light-rail system. So why did voters in Seattle deal a setback to transit when Charlotte backed it resoundingly?
In a word: roads. Proposition 1 was described by environmental activists as a “shotgun wedding” of starkly incongruous approaches. Specifically, the 50 miles of new light rail were bundled with nearly 200 miles of new highway lanes, centered around a controversial $4 billion expansion of a major suburban expressway link (up to 15 lanes wide — bringing to mind Georgia DOT’s own plan to widen I-75 to 23 lanes). Though some transit advocates supported a “yes” vote out of pragmatism, Proposition 1 was ultimately brought down by an unlikely coalition that included, in addition to traditional anti-tax conservatives, many environmentally conscious voters who couldn’t stomach the conflicted nature of the plan.
The lesson from Nov. 6 is simple and clear: Voters are willing to support big-ticket transportation initiatives, but only if they make sense. A coherent proposal that makes meaningful progress toward a sustainable vision will succeed. A shotgun wedding of incompatible megaprojects will not.
Meanwhile, Atlanta struggles to simply put a funding referendum on the ballot, much less pass one. That’s not surprising, given the lack of any real consensus about what such a proposal would look like. Furthermore, much of the discussion about specific “solutions” remains too focused on hopelessly misguided proposals from the highway lobby, like the 23-lane vision for I-75 or a pie-in-the-sky network of expressway tunnels crisscrossing the city.
Whichever direction Atlanta ends up taking, one thing remains certain: The competition is not slowing down. Charlotte, emboldened by its larger-than-expected victory, will move forward with transit expansion plans more aggressively than ever. And even in Seattle, transit leaders have responded quickly to the Nov. 6 results; two days after the election, Mayor Greg Nickels floated the idea of a new vote on a transit-only package — minus the bloated highway component — as soon as next year.
These are places that, despite occasional setbacks, are ultimately committed to real progress toward a sustainable transportation future. Atlanta now finds its itself at a critical juncture: It can either join the ranks of cities where residents are serious about advancing an ambitious vision for transportation choices, or remain mired in inaction and backward thinking. The choice is ours.
Lee Biola is president of Citizens for Progressive Transit.
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