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Lacking any other noteworthy legacy, outgoing Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta may be best remembered for his proposals to relieve transportation congestion by encouraging private investment in projects.
The idea has merit: in some locations, private investment in toll roads can -- with appropriate local debate and participation -- make sense.
But Mineta, the man who kept pushing to eliminate federal funding of Amtrak, amazingly omitted both freight railroad improvements and potential passenger rail improvement in the expansive “Congestion Relief Initiative” for America he unveiled last month.
The danger of his formula is a wave of steamrolled, behind-the-scenes road building deals that ignore the many opportunities for commuter and city rail expansion that clearly do reduce congestion (and our demand for foreign oil).
For Exhibit A of the perils, check what’s happening in fast-growing Atlanta. First, there’s the sheer immensity of what the Georgia Department of Transportation favors. Top example: widening of I-75 in fast-growing suburban Cobb County, as it heads into the city, to include an incredible mile-long section of no less than 23 lanes.
“The thought ... of 23 lanes makes me shudder with fear,” a Cobb County correspondent wrote to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Another expanded: “The confusion of merging, exits, acceleration and deceleration lanes, speed demons, weaving drivers and cellphones is more than the average driver would be able to comfortably handle in, sometimes, split seconds.”
Another possibility at play in current Atlanta road debates: to double-deck I-285, which cuts across the north side of the region -- a project critics say could trigger “a lifetime of delays in construction alone.” Still another: a major truck-only toll road, being pushed by a consortium of construction firms and Goldman-Sachs, the global finance firm.
To push such expansive road building projects front and center, Georgia state agencies set up a “congestion mitigation” process to determine which projects are most pressing. The state’s road-happy Department of Transportation played a dominant role, pushing through a definition of congestion focused almost exclusively on sheer throughput of vehicles.
Almost obliterated in the process: the years-long work of the Atlanta Regional Commission to create a balanced transportation network including a “Livable Centers Initiative” to steer future growth to existing population centers. The process allowed communities to compete for a share of transportation funding based on increased population density, revitalized town centers, remapped street and pedestrian networks that would assure less new roads and air pollution.
“It’s a tragedy,” says David Goldberg, former Atlanta journalist now communications director for Smart Growth America. “We spent years getting metro Atlanta communities to think smart growth, plan, and now we’re yanking the rug out from under them.”
Adding to the roads thrust: Georgia’s so-called “Public-Private Initiative” law that invites private construction firms and investment companies to propose big road projects for which they’d be paid back either in toll revenues, or government transportation dollars, or both.
Late in May the state transportation commissioner, Harold Linnenkohl, signed an initial $1.8 billion deal -- “flanked,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution report, “by five men from builders Bechtel, Kiewit and C.W. Matthews, most of whom smiled, hands clasped in front, eyes on the moving pen that delighted guests eyeing a tasty meal.”
Under the PPI law, much of the specific project information remains trade secrets of the companies. “It’s really scary,” says Goldberg -- “a road lobby closely allied with the state DOT, and huge projects coming through. The window for corruption and poor public policy is wide open.”
Atlanta does offer some sensational positive news: the first land transactions for the new BeltLine, a 22-mile loop of historic railroad right of way around the city’s downtown and midtown sections. It’s designed to become a connected system of parks, trails, and transit through more than 45 neighborhoods. The project will increase Atlanta’s greenspace by 1,200 acres, a “green infrastructure” treasure for an historically park-poor city.
The BeltLine represents “a paradigm shift for American urban parks, raising the bar for cities nationally,” says Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence of the Trust for Public Land (a major player in arranging the BeltLine’s land transfers). By connecting greenspaces with housing and commercial redevelopment, and then with fresh public transit, says Harnik, “the BeltLine raises the bar for cities across the country, to rethink the role of parks in urban revitalization and growth.”
But as the city of Atlanta bootstraps itself into greater livability with the BeltLine, the peril is clear: potential state assistance funds will be diverted to the kind of highway extravaganzas that so often end up triggering more of very congestion they’re designed to cure.
Public-private partnerships are as American as apple pie. But as excesses of some Iraq war contractors suggest, letting private firms call the tune can be a very bad idea.
Comments may be addressed to npeirce@citistates.com
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