Georgia is kicking around the idea of pay HOV lanes. If you were by yourself in a car and wanted to use the HOV lane you could do it if you were willing to pay a toll. They had an article about it in Sunday's Atlanta Urinal and Constipation.
Of course, one of the liberals' gripes about this is that only rich people can do this and it discriminates against the poor. Cry me a fucking river! Let the poor ride MARTA.
The liberals have this ideal concept of an urban village. They abhor sprawl. They think everyone should live within the Atlanta city limits and ride buses, trains and bicycles to work. Or, even better, walk to work They hate highways.
They hate cars. They hate the suburbs. They would rather throw transportation money at mass transit and force people off the highways by not upgrading them and allowing congestion. They think that highways cause cars.
These same liberals then gripe about air polution because we have cars sitting on the highways in stop and go traffic spewing pollution into the air. Wouldn't it make sense, since they're not gonna be able to get people out of cars (unless there is a viable alternative, and MARTA ain't it) to upgrade the highways so people can get to work faster and thus have the cars on the road for a shorter time and not spewing polution into the air? Not to a liberal.
Another dream of the liberals and train enthusiasts who harken back to the halcyon days of commuter rail is starting rail service from somewhere south of Atlanta (I cannot remember exactly where since it isn't important and will be a waste of money) to downtown.
In my last post on mass transit, there were some interesting comments. This one by F451 debunked a light rail enthusiast.
Last weekend, the AJC printed an op-ed written by a light rail enthusiast who said that one project would take 1,600 cars a day off the roads -- which he described as "a block of cars three lanes wide and three miles long."I spent a minute or so communing with my calculator, then wrote a letter to the AJC asking if this guy's car was 53 feet long (like the other 1,599 -- all SUV's, I guess).
They never printed it.
And anyway, where did he get his 1600 person figure in the first place? He's making an assumption that his imaginary light rail system would have 1600 riders. If this were a panacea, the railroads would still be running commmuter trains in Atlanta.
But just watch. We're gonna take a bunch of money that could be used to upgrade the roads and do practical stuff like build pay to drive HOV lanes and throw it into the cesspool called mass transit.
No matter what they do they will not force the people of Atlanta out of their cars and on to mass transit unless the system is much better than it is today and with the current MARTA management that isn't gonna happen.
So we'll continue to waste money like building light rail between Macon and Atlanta which will not pay for itself and continue to have even more congestion on the highways with the resultant pollution.
As another side effect more businesses are moving to the suburbs, outside the perimeter. I work right outside the perimeter and my commute is east and west so it's not as bad as the people going north and south. That's one of the reasons I moved to beautiful Dunwoody. Better commute.
The congestion is getting worse, and the people in charge continue to dream of mass transit systems that people will want to use.
Unfortunately, their dream, if realized, will be a nightmare.
Posted by denny at March 28, 2004 04:46 PM