Senate Candidate Silvia Delamar: Pro Trail + Rail Platform

Where are we going?: Transportation
During the past few decades in Georgia, our transportation dollars were largely spent to make it easier for people to drive cars farther and faster, as well as to build new roads to open up new land for development.

In the past several years, however, the emphasis has begun to shift. Instead of talking about the growth and expansion of infrastructure, instead of talking single-mindedly about highways, I propose we talk about providing greater transportation choices-a diversity of transportation modes.

This shift in priorities is necessary. After all, old road-building habits are tough to break. But there are a number of motivations, including changing state priorities, new budget constraints at the state levels, and a growing understanding of how highway expansion promotes destructive urban sprawl. In addition, more citizens are realizing how automobiles have been allowed to dominate the landscape, degrade our quality of life, pollute the air and waste energy.

It will take strong public support to get this transportation plan moving in a more sustainable direction. Here are some of my transportation goals and ideas for this state:

Transportation goals I favor transportation projects that will:
• Provide greater transportation choices so people do not have to be totally dependent on the automobile (i.e., maximize use of pedestrian, mass transit and bicycle-friendly options).
• Reduce the need for travel by promoting compact, mixed-use development.
• Minimize duplication of infrastructure.
• Preserve open space.
• Minimize public health threats from air pollution.
• Preserve or enhance a sense of neighborhood and community. ·
• Do not substantially contribute to further erosion of the tax base of any existing urbanized community in the region.

Rail alternatives are looking more and more like an economically and environmentally preferred alternative

• Increased use of trains reduces America's dependence on foreign oil.
• Trains are safe.
• Trains contribute to development that is more compact and less wastefull than auto-oriented development.
• Trains pollute less than other modes of transportation

"The public is saying they want changes to our state government's public policy toward transportation spending. People are tired of congestion and they want to use commuter trains as the way out."

Source: www.delamar.us

Common Ground

"People who can agree they share a commitment to the landscape - even if they are otherwise locked in struggle with each other - have at least one deep thing to share."

~ Gary Snyder

Insani-lanta

If, as Albert Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, then Atlanta qualifies as the craziest region in the country. It keeps expanding highways, convinced that this time it will somehow solve its congestion problems, only to be puzzled when traffic gets even worse. What’s weird is that leaders in Atlanta know that the old ways don’t work, but yet they persist. Why?

Good question. Some believe that the state government in general and the transportation department in particular are so beholden to highway construction interests that they dare not walk away from this losing strategy. (To read an article about this theory, click here.) Another theory: State transportation officials have given up on the future. That is, they’ve spent their careers building increasingly dysfunctional highways, and while that clearly no longer works, they can’t imagine anything working any better. The chair of the DOT board framed this defeatist philosophy when he told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, “As much as we all would love to see everyone ride a bike or a skateboard or a pony to work, it’s just not going to happen.”

And yet leaders in the Atlanta area know better. Two years ago, a task force of top political and business leaders (including some of the region’s top developers) produced a strikingly clear alternative to the DOT’s defeatism. The answer, the Quality Growth Task Force said, was to intelligently link transportation to land use, so that major transportation corridors become far more densely developed than they are today. Predicted result: Many will live close enough to work to walk, and even those who don’t will be much closer to the transit lines and highways that can take them to work. (To view the task force’s report, click here.)

So given this clear new vision — the answer lies in land use and intelligent transportation, not more dumb highway lanes — what has the region chosen to do? Build more dumb highway lanes. They’ve done this by changing the way the region ranks transportation projects, by considering “congestion relief” ahead of any other factor. Long-suffering transit advocates say this simply translates into more freeways, which will disperse population even farther, which will then create more congestion. Perversely, it actually rewards places that don’t do what the Quality Growth Task Force urged, which is to plan for fewer car trips. “What it will favor are the areas who fail to plan,” one transit advocate told the Journal-Constitution, “The more congested you are, the more money you will get.”

Atlanta’s leaders can’t say they didn’t know what they were doing. A week before the decision, a Georgia Tech planning professor wrote an article for the Journal-Constitution warning that the funding change would lead to disaster. “While building our way out of traffic congestion might sound like a reasonable approach,” Brian Stone wrote, “it is flawed in one important respect: It does not work.” What does work, Stone said, is what the Quality Growth Task Force recommended: Land use that allows people to live close to work, a lot more transit and serious pedestrian infrastructure. He didn’t say this, but a few more skateboard and pony paths would be nice too.

~ Otis White writing in the Feb. issue of GOVERNING

Elect Hecht: "the first true transportation visionary to seek statewide office in Georgia"

Former legislator Greg Hecht of Jonesboro is seeking the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor with a plank supporting commuter rail and other transportation options as a major part of his platform. Hecht has gotten way out front on the issue.

Here's a stone fact: Greg Hecht is the first true transportation visionary to seek statewide office in Georgia. Period.

Certainly, Hecht has good reason to be for the train. The Lovejoy line could provide an economic boost to Clayton County, which has been devastated by wave after wave of bad news: the closings of the Hapeville Ford plant, Fort Gillem and nearby Fort McPherson.

But Hecht says he supports commuter rail anywhere, especially the long-overdue line connecting Atlanta and Athens.

If Lunsford succeeds in killing the Lovejoy line, it could cost the state $87 million in federal funds now earmarked for the project and another $100 million sitting on the back burner.

But Hecht stresses the positives of commuter rail: "It will lessen the commute for citizens, bring jobs and commerce, and clean up the air. I believe commuter rail can provide a better quality of life and better jobs for Georgia."

He points out that metro Atlanta's traffic horror is chasing off companies that otherwise might want to locate in the state. "One of the biggest reasons CEOs do not want to come here is the commute time. The movement of goods through the roads is just too slow. Managers don't want to make the commute."

Hecht is running against the highly regarded former Commissioner of Human Resources Jim Martin of Atlanta in the Democratic primary. But nobody's paid a lick of attention to those two substantive candidates because of the holy war in the Republican primary between state Sen. Casey Cagle and scandal-plagued Ralph Reed.

- Doug Monroe