So there was an election this week in which an estimated 24 percent of registered voters participated. Pretty depressing.
But there was also a ton of transit and transportation news we couldn’t get around to covering. So we present it here. Catch up time!
On Oct. 14, Westview and West End residents received good news about the long-overlooked L&N railroad tracks in Southwest Atlanta: the Georgia Department of Transportation finally voted to allow the PATH Foundation to move ahead with a proposed Beltline jogging and biking trail.
For more than a year, Patrick Berry and other neighborhood residents waited for glimmers of progress on the abandoned tracks.
Unfortunately, all they saw were dumped mattresses, shopping carts, and blankets of kudzu piling up.
“When people came to the neighborhood, they’d see garbage and overgrowth,” Berry, vice president of the Westview Community Organization, says. “It gives the impression that nobody cares.”
Beltline officials say they’ve inked a deal with Trees Atlanta to begin a five-year kudzu removal process. Ed McBrayer of the PATH Foundation, which will oversee construction of the the trail, says he plans to meet with GDOT officials this week to discuss the project.
Once completed, the 1.4-mile trail will connect with the West End trail along White Street.
Maria Saporta sends word that the Georgia Department of Transportation has scaled back its division that oversees rail programs in the state.
Vance Smith, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Transportation, distributed a memo on Thursday, Oct. 15 announcing “organizational changes” in his department.
“Over the last few months, we have worked diligently to strategically reorganize the Department to achieve greater efficiency in both functional alignment and program delivery,” Smith wrote in the memo.
He then released the new organization chart which diminishes the role of transit and intermodal transportation in the department.
That’s a sad sign. Georgia’s been sitting on federal funding for years that could kickstart a commuter rail line from Atlanta to Griffin. And just last month, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood publicly criticized the state for dragging its feet on rail.
Check out Saporta’s full report for more details and a copy of Smith’s memo.
Sources: Georgia Department of Transportation, Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, Midtown Alliance, Texas Transportation Institute
The AJC’s Ariel Hart reports that Wayne Shackelford, the Georgia Department of Transportation commissioner during the state’s boomtimes, has died:
Steeped in Gwinnett County politics and heavyweight friendships like that of developer Wayne Mason, Shackelford developed real estate projects including Gwinnett Place Mall, and helped lay the water and road infrastructure that allowed Gwinnett to transform into a booming suburb. Backed by Zell Miller, he rose to statewide prominence as DOT commissioner, a post he held from 1991 to 2000.
…
While Shackelford led the state DOT, Georgia added 1.5 million residents. Shackelford presided over historic projects to help those people move around, such as the opening of Ga. 400’s leg inside the Perimeter, and the HOV lanes that bore traffic for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. During his tenure the DOT’s three-year list of approved projects ballooned from $2.6 billion to $5.1 billion, according to DOT.
Before his death, Shackelford was a vocal supporter of the Brain Train, a proposed commuter rail line that would connect more than 30 colleges and universities along Athens, Atlanta and Macon.
Hart has a thorough story. Check it out.
Dave Williams from the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports:
The State Transportation Board instructed the agency’s staff Thursday to put rail projects on its wish list for TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grants, part of the federal economic stimulus program, after learning that the department’s original list contained only highway projects.
“We don’t ever consider (rail projects) as part of our process,” board member Emory McClinton of Atlanta complained during a staff update on the DOT’s plans for federal stimulus funds. “At some point, we have to change this mentality.”
But there’s a catch. Williams has that for you at the Chronicle’s site. Some of the state’s commuter rail projects include the Athens-Atlanta-Griffin (and eventually — hopefully — on to Macon) line and the long-planned downtown train terminal proposed in the Gulch.
Planning Director Todd Long
The man who’ll help Georgians stop dying slow painful deaths sitting in gridlock was unanimously confirmed this morning as the state’s first transportation planning director.
Todd Long, a transportation-planning veteran who was nominated to the post by Gov. Sonny Perdue, faced final questions from the House Transportation Committee this morning.
The planning director position was created during a Perdue-helmed overhaul of Georgia’s transportation power hierarchy earlier this year. The governor had originally proposed neutering the state Department of Transportation and placing decision-making power in the hands of a new state agency — an agency largely overseen by himself.
State lawmakers, clever jackals that they are, rewrote most of the proposal near the end of the legislative session. What came out leaves GDOT intact but created the transportation planning director position.
Marietta’s parks aren’t the only anonymous gay sex venues at risk this summer.
The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports the Georgia Department of Transportation will close two of the state’s 17 highway rest stops on August 25 due to budget constraints.
Oh hey, Ariel Hart of the AJC, what good news do you have for us this evening?
At a moment when mass transit is taking center stage as a solution to transportation problems nationwide, a [Federal Transit Administration] report has concluded that the Georgia Department of Transportation’s transit program is riddled with financial management problems, according to a report obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The problems were so severe that the federal government has frozen DOT’s transit grants, which average about $28 million a year, including some from the federal stimulus program. The report cast doubt on whether DOT could manage grants for the commuter rail line proposed to go south through Lovejoy.
It’s that last sentence that really smarts. A GDOT spokesman tells Hart that the agency’s taken steps to fix the problems and unfreeze the funding. For a better idea of how behind the times Georgia is when it comes to rail, Hart’s full article is worth checking out.
State auditors have discovered what they call evidence of “possible financial statement fraud” and questionable accounting practices at the Georgia Department of Transportation during two years of former Treasurer Earl Mahfuz’s tenure.
According to a 54-page report released Monday, Mahfuz, who was demoted last year to assistant treasurer, “was responsible for the decision to implement business process changes at GDOT [between 2005 and 2007] that he knew would violate the Georgia Constitution.”
Those changes involved GDOT letting road projects even if it lacked the money to do so. The audit notes that the state Constitution has strict requirements when it comes to the state incurring debt.
The audit says the accounting practices might have helped mask GDOT’s budget deficit. It also says GDOT’s upper management and top boardmembers often butted heads with each other and that a general mistrust existed between the agency and the governor’s office. These factors helped create an operating environment that auditors say was “dysfunctional to the extent that GDOT was ripe for fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement.”
The world’s greatest sport and some game that is played between marriage proposals and awkward photos 
of Chipper Jones will create traffic havoc tonight in Atlanta.
This weekend, the Georgia Department of Transportation will be setting beams for the new (yippie!) 17th Street off-ramp (boo!). That project will require the closure of several lanes on I-75/85 northbound. Here are the details:
Starting at 8 p.m., Friday, July 24, the three regular travel lanes to I-75 North will be closed through the weekend until 5 a.m., Monday, July 27. All northbound traffic on I-75 must use the HOV lane to continue north on I-75. The three lanes to I-85 North will be open, but traffic will be very congested. Northbound drivers just passing through Atlanta are strongly encouraged to use I-285 to avoid the congestion.
Emphasis added. The following weekend, GDOT will once again resurface the interstate near the downtown connector, turning it into a real-life version of “Everybody Hurts.” That process will take 10 weekends to complete. The good news is that all of this activities, which are part of the 14th Street Bridge improvement project, will help GDOT finish the project ahead of schedule.
Do yourself a favor, if possible: Avoid interstate traffic this weekend and quite possibly for the rest of your life. Take local roads or I-285. Better yet, give transit a try. From the comforts of MARTA, you can laugh at the sea of gridlocked motorists. Citizens for Progressive Transit has a helpful online trip planner. You can also access a mobile version.
(Photo by Joeff Davis)
Beltline has secured a purchase option on segments highlighted above in red
The Beltline and Georgia Department of Transportation have agreed that key railroad tracks owned by the state agency will indeed be part of the 22-mile loop of parks, trails and transit.
GDOT Commissioner Vance Smith and Atlanta Beltline Inc. CEO Terri Montague announced today the agencies have struck a deal over a two vital segments of railroad tracks in Southwest and Southeast Atlanta.
The set of tracks in Southwest Atlanta stretch more than three miles from Allene Avenue to Lena Street. The other segment, which is much smaller, runs from Wylie Street to Memorial Drive in Reynoldstown.
According to the agreement, Beltline officials have exclusive claim on the properties until June 30, 2012. Until then, ABI will lease the segments and prepare them for public use — think hiking tours, urban sightseeing, etc.
…that’s not the real story.
The veteran political reporter’s sources say the state agency wants to avoid ending the fiscal year with a deficit, possibly by tapping $75 million in federal funding. There’s also the question over what exactly Senate Bill 200, a piece of legislation that shakes up Georgia’s transportation power structure, means for GDOT.
At the same time – and this is where it gets interesting – talks have been underway between the DOT staff and the governor’s office over how to implement SB 200, the governance reform bill that gives the governor (through the new planning director) and the Legislature (through new budget authority) broader control over DOT. There are some loose ends that the bill does not address.
Some believe the two issues have become entangled in something of a quid pro quo, with the governor holding both a carrot (the bailout money) and a stick (the new rules which dissidents believe give the planning director – and through the planning director, Perdue – more power over issues like public-private partnerships and funding allocation formulas than the law stipulates.)
Others don’t see any such entanglement, but this week’s meeting should be interesting nonetheless. Even if there is no suspense about the new commissioner.
At last week’s State Transportation Board meeting in Douglas, Ga., Erik Steavens of the department’s intermodal program director briefed board members on land negotiations that are underway between GDOT and Atlanta Beltline Inc., the agency tasked with designing the planned 22-mile loop of parks, trails and transit that will one day circle the city’s urban core.
GDOT owns two pieces of transit right-of-way that ABI has marked as part of the project’s “spine” — a small sliver in Southeast Atlanta and a larger one in Southwest Atlanta.
After the jump, screenshots from Steavens’ presentation to GDOT board members depicting the properties, including what kind of profit the department might see from their sale.
On April 16, President Barack Obama gave rail lovers some long-awaited good news: As part of the president’s stimulus plan, he offered $8 billion to begin linking major U.S. cities with high-speed rail lines — and an additional $5 billion more to improve rail service over the next four years.
“We need high-speed rail,” Obama said. “It’s happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is, it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.”
By “elsewhere,” the president was referring to Europe and Asia. But he could just as easily have been talking about Southeastern states other than Georgia. Thanks to a lack of vision, little to no funding, and an almost cartoonish addiction to roads, the Peach State’s far behind many of its neighbors when it comes to rail.
Transit and transportation advocates say if the state’s leadership doesn’t work to catch up, Georgia could miss out on a nationwide rail renaissance.
Click here to continue reading this story.
(Photo by Joeff Davis)
“This place is for sale,” muttered the disgusted Democratic state representative a few minutes after one of the strangest episodes in recent Gold Dome history.
The lawmaker had walked out of the House chamber last Wednesday following a much-watched vote on Gov. Sonny Perdue’s pet bill to snatch road-building authority away from the state Department of Transportation — a vote that Speaker Glenn Richardson held open for nearly five breathless minutes while his henchmen worked the room to persuade a handful of pliable pols to switch their votes.
When Richardson, whose podium houses a private voting scoreboard, saw that enough legislators had flip-flopped, he called for voting machines to be locked and cast the deciding vote himself to pass the hot-potato measure to the Senate.
No one said sausage-making is pretty. But in addition to looking ugly and smelling worse, much of the sausage produced of late by Georgia lawmakers is chock-full of legislative salmonella.
