Macon the Lovejoy Line
Now that Sonny has been re-elected, he can do a lot more things without having to worry about fighting all the same battles. Apparently, that may include the Lovejoy line! For those of you who have forgotten, The Lovejoy Line from downtown Atlanta to Lovejoy (at the southern most point in Clayton County) was supposed to already be up and running! Now, apparently, they’re supposed to be ready to go by 2009.
The problem is that Sonny has already proved himself fickle and fey on support for the line. He looks south, sees committee chairs who might throw tantrums and backs down. Certainly more pressure from Metro Atlanta will not help. But Metro pressure from another city might help and that’s Macon.
Yes, Macon. The City in the center of the state has long term prospects tied up with the Lovejoy line. According to planning done by the GDOT, the Lovejoy line is a first step toward building commuter rail to Macon. Macon has a lot to gain. They have several tourist spots which are underutilized and commuter rail would bring scores of day trippers eager to get out of the traffic and Atlanta for a day and enjoy a more traditional southern city. The rail could provide the kind of re-birth that has driven Chattanooga.
Macon, along with Griffin, Warner Robins, and other smaller cities would provide the non-Atlanta political muscle to get regional rail moving quickly. Once started, this would also likely give momentum for the Brain Train, which the state desperately needs.
Pressure for these trains need to come from both ends of the line and from the people who will be the riders on them, and with a complete Republican sweep, the farther they live from Atlanta, the better.
November 15th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
[…] UPDATE: Jeez, this was a glaring omission from transportation news. There’s new information about the Atlanta-Lovejoy rail line. Filed under Current Events/Georgia at 12:42 pm […]
November 15th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Yes this would be excellent, I would love to take this train home for the holidays.
P.S. That little air force base town (est. pop 50,000) is spelled Warner Robins
November 15th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
Thanks, BTI… fixed…
December 4th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
[…] In addition, we’ve got news of Cobb (my de facto county) making nice with MARTA (finally) and news of Macon joining the commuter rail party as well. […]
December 8th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
“The obvious problem, in Virginia and elsewhere, is that the state is a lousy place for making transportation decisions because it’s too distant from the people served.”
http://www.governing.com/notebook.htm
Dec. 7, 2006
Say It Slowly for State Legislators
Let’s Link Land Use to Transportation
The greatest value of the smart-growth movement may have been its connecting of land use to transportation. It’s so obvious — where you put highways and transit lines affects how land is used nearby — some may well wonder that these things were ever not connected. But this is the price of America’s hyperfederalism: Highways are laid out by state governments and transit by regional authorities, and land use is the responsibility of local governments. And many times these entities don’t work well together. Which makes the revolt in Prince William County, Va., very, very interesting.
Prince William is an exurb of Washington, D.C., that has seen 72 percent population growth in the last 15 years. As this formerly rural county has been drawn into the Washington metro area, it has enjoyed the benefits (rising income levels, better shopping) and the drawbacks (choking road congestion). Like others in Northern Virginia, its county government and legislative delegation have begged the state for new highways and expanded roads, but to little avail. (More than most, Virginia lawmakers hate raising taxes.)
This fall, the county did an end-run around the state with its own $300 million bond referendum for road improvements, which is a nice down payment. It was this referendum, approved by 80 percent of voters, and the feeling that the state government had let down Prince William, that gave Supervisor W.S. Covington III an idea: If the state wouldn’t fix transportation, then maybe Prince William shouldn’t approve any more housing permits.
In November, Covington introduced a resolution to stop all residential construction for the next 12 months. “This is something we need to do to get the governor’s and the General Assembly’s attention,” he told the Washington Post. “The resolution recognizes the fact that there is a limit as to how far local governments can go. The state has been collecting these tax dollars for years, and they have been neglecting our infrastructure.”
This isn’t a no-growth effort, then, it’s a protest. (Thanks to the housing slowdown, there are no big residential projects on the drawing boards.) Covington’s point: If the state can’t manage its half of the land use-transportation equation, then maybe the county shouldn’t do its part either. Others on the county board of supervisors say they’ll likely go along, if the county attorney says it’s legal. “I think to get the attention of the General Assembly and, you know, the governor, I will say that this would be a shot across the bow to say we need some help dealing with these types of problems,” one told the Post.
It’s not clear that Virginia legislators would recognize a warning shot if they heard one, but one group certainly did: homebuilders. An official with the Northern Virginia Building Industry Association warned that Prince William’s moratorium could cripple its economy. Besides, he said, it was wrong to punish homebuilders for the foolishness of a distant government. “It would make equal sense to put a moratorium on all new automobile sales in the county to solve the transportation problems,” he told the newspaper.
The obvious problem, in Virginia and elsewhere, is that the state is a lousy place for making transportation decisions because it’s too distant from the people served. Better that Northern Virginia make its own decisions about the transportation it needs and the price it’s willing to pay. Better yet if some of those decisions could be made by the localities themselves. Wouldn’t that just invite chaos? Unlike, say, the current situation?