The Greyhound Bus Station In Atlanta Need to Close (Columbus: homes, live)

[fourthwarden]

Originally Posted by Atlwarrior

LMBO! That was only a political cover up to take attention away from GA 400 tolls not being removed at the time in an election season. That proposal was never going to happen.

K.

That said, those tolls should have never been removed. GDOT estimated that removal of the tolls would lead to an increase of traffic between 10% and 18% along the route, representing roughly an additional 11,000 vehicles per day. Though data is not available for the GDOT traffic count station at the GA 400 toll plaza for 2013, an approximation of the traffic increase can be made from other years. In 2012, an average of 113,780 vehicles passed the booth per day. In 2014, this had increased to an average of 152,000 vehicles per day, representing a 33.6% increase over the 2-year period, or an annual increase of 16.8%, made up of some 19,119 vehicles, per year.

SRTA reported the 2013 average daily volume of traffic to be 110,547 vehicles. Using this and the GDOT numbers together, the increase actually becomes much more drastic, with an increase of 37.5%, made up of an additional 41,453 vehicles, added to the road in a single year. This far outstrips GDOT’s initial estimates.


At the time of the toll's closing, it was generating $21 Million a year in revenue. It cost us $4.5 Million to actually tear everything down, and added a newly unfunded $2 Million in annual GA 400 maintenance to the state's budget.

More traffic + more costs = bad policy.

Originally Posted by arjay57

We don't need to go crazy with a bus station. Just make it clean and functional.

Well, a clean, functional, and centralized bus station was part of the MMPT.

Originally Posted by samiwas1

Planned, or suggested? I'm not sure there was ever a viable, actual plan.

I dunno, we got far enough that there was an entire 3-D tour video produced for it, which means there were accompanying drawings somewhere that the models were all built off of. Not to mention all the planning and effort that GDOT put into the Georgia Passenger Rail Plan that had the MMPT at its heart.

[architect77]

Originally Posted by fourthwarden

K.

That said, those tolls should have never been removed. GDOT estimated that removal of the tolls would lead to an increase of traffic between 10% and 18% along the route, representing roughly an additional 11,000 vehicles per day. Though data is not available for the GDOT traffic count station at the GA 400 toll plaza for 2013, an approximation of the traffic increase can be made from other years. In 2012, an average of 113,780 vehicles passed the booth per day. In 2014, this had increased to an average of 152,000 vehicles per day, representing a 33.6% increase over the 2-year period, or an annual increase of 16.8%, made up of some 19,119 vehicles, per year.

SRTA reported the 2013 average daily volume of traffic to be 110,547 vehicles. Using this and the GDOT numbers together, the increase actually becomes much more drastic, with an increase of 37.5%, made up of an additional 41,453 vehicles, added to the road in a single year. This far outstrips GDOT’s initial estimates.


At the time of the toll's closing, it was generating $21 Million a year in revenue. It cost us $4.5 Million to actually tear everything down, and added a newly unfunded $2 Million in annual GA 400 maintenance to the state's budget.

More traffic + more costs = bad policy.



Well, a clean, functional, and centralized bus station was part of the MMPT.



I dunno, we got far enough that there was an entire 3-D tour video produced for it, which means there were accompanying drawings somewhere that the models were all built off of. Not to mention all the planning and effort that GDOT put into the Georgia Passenger Rail Plan that had the MMPT at its heart.

Building trust in Georgia is of extreme importance.

People remember if there was a promise to remove the tolls once the loan is paid off.

The tolls that continued for just one year after the loans were repaid further damaged the public's trust.

As to your point about traffic increasing on GA400 after tolls were dropped, so what?

That's a good thing, it means that 11,000 more citizens benefitted from the road that now is paid off.

You need to discern actual bad things in the bigger diatribe against driving.

There is no goal to reduce usage of our public roads, nor should there be.

You get confused about what's opinion and what's in the best interests of the tax payers.

[arjay57]

Originally Posted by fourthwarden

K.

That said, those tolls should have never been removed. GDOT estimated that removal of the tolls would lead to an increase of traffic between 10% and 18% along the route, representing roughly an additional 11,000 vehicles per day. Though data is not available for the GDOT traffic count station at the GA 400 toll plaza for 2013, an approximation of the traffic increase can be made from other years. In 2012, an average of 113,780 vehicles passed the booth per day. In 2014, this had increased to an average of 152,000 vehicles per day, representing a 33.6% increase over the 2-year period, or an annual increase of 16.8%, made up of some 19,119 vehicles, per year.

SRTA reported the 2013 average daily volume of traffic to be 110,547 vehicles. Using this and the GDOT numbers together, the increase actually becomes much more drastic, with an increase of 37.5%, made up of an additional 41,453 vehicles, added to the road in a single year. This far outstrips GDOT’s initial estimates.

I have to agree. A lot of us fought like crazy to keep those tolls in place.

They were a good thing and everybody knew that once they came off you'd never find a politician (or bureaucrat) with enough guts to put them back in place.

Not a good day in Georgia transportation history.

[fourthwarden]

Originally Posted by architect77

Building trust in Georgia is of extreme importance.

People remember if there was a promise to remove the tolls once the loan is paid off.

The tolls that continued for just one year after the loans were repaid further damaged the public's trust.

There were better options for handling the situation. Such as, perhaps, holding a referenudm on whether or not to keep the tolls going.

As to your point about traffic increasing on GA400 after tolls were dropped, so what?

That's a good thing, it means that 11,000 more citizens benefitted from the road that now is paid off.

You're assuming that those 11,000 trips, mind you it's not necessarily new people, were without consequence. In reality, they brought additional congestion, which slows everyone down, additional pollution, and additional energy used inefficiently.

Even small additions of vehicles can create huge congestion problems that cascade through the network and make things worse over all for far more people.

You need to discern actual bad things in the bigger diatribe against driving.

There is no goal to reduce usage of our public roads, nor should there be.

See, the problem is that cars are just awful. They're energy inefficient, they're space inefficient, they are a safety hazard, they cause worse economic mobility, and they cause fiscal unsustainability. A reduction in the use of cars is, all around, a good thing. The key, however, is to do so while maintaining mobility, which is what I've argued for the whole time.

You get confused about what's opinion and what's in the best interests of the tax payers.

More traffic + more costs = bad policy. That should not be an opinion, certainly not when there's so many quantifiable, measurable problems with cars in general, and when we have the real-world examples on how to do better, of which tolls are a part.

[MattCW]

But, as I've argued on here ad nauseum, is you can't reduce road capacity before adding transit capacity, especially if you're still trying to grow the city. Build the alternatives first and make them useful! Then you can look at reducing road capacity because hopefully, it won't be needed, rather than trying to force the issue.

[jsvh]

Originally Posted by MattCW

But, as I've argued on here ad nauseum, is you can't reduce road capacity before adding transit capacity, especially if you're still trying to grow the city. Build the alternatives first and make them useful! Then you can look at reducing road capacity because hopefully, it won't be needed, rather than trying to force the issue.

But you can. Induced Demand is real.

There does not seem to be a realistically attainable threshold of transit for most people that make this argument.

Heck, people even seem to have trouble with the idea of giving up a lane for transit!

If you are literally not willing to give up a lane to put transit in that exact lane, you will never reach an acceptable level of transit that you will be willing to give up a lane.

[MattCW]

But you can. Induced Demand is real

For one, it's not an absolute as you like to claim, for two, it doesn't work in reverse. The demand doesn't go away once your hypothetical attractant is gone since if you un-expand a road, you don't displace the people using it, you just make it harder for people to use it. Though if your plan is to shrink Atlanta, then by all means if we shrink enough roads, we'll shrink the city to the point where we won't need transit at all!



Once again, you're looking only at the short-range and/or trying to force-fit a one-size-fits-all solution into a scenario that it doesn't fit. In the case of most of our ITP arterial roads, "adding capacity" by taking a lane for transit doesn't actually do that because a single stretch of road serves many origin/destination pairs outside the corridor. In the case of the post you link to, taking away one lane on N Decatur wouldn't help anyone coming into the corridor from Gwinnett via 78 and I-285, it wouldn't help people coming from the east, it wouldn't help anyone going/coming west of Emory. So yes, in theory, you'd be replacing the ~1500 people per hour lane, with a 2,340 person per hour LRT (195 people per vehicle, 2 vehicles, 10 minute headways) but those 1500 people per hour that you're displacing aren't all able to use the transit so the net result is a reduction in overall corridor capacity across all modes.


One place where I do support taking a lane for transit is our highways. Take one lane for HRT, and you're not only providing a very high capacity replacement (up to 28,000 people per hour), but it's in a corridor where most of the people are actually able to use it so you have a net gain in capacity. Take I-85 for instance, most people are coming out of the suburbs along I-85 (so really CRT has better ROI, but we'll run with this), and heading into Atlanta. So most people will be originating along the line, and terminating along the line, which isn't the case for the above-mentioned segment of N Decatur.

[jsvh]

Induced Demand is a long-term phenomenon.

You close a road overnight and drivers will cram every side street the next morning trying to find a last-minute solution.

But you close a road for 30 years (or open a new one) and people permanently change their commutes.

You also avoided the bigger question: are you acknowledging via the N Decatur example that even replacing a lane with transit is still not enough transit to justify taking a lane? Will you acknowledge that no reasonable about of transit will be enough for you to find losing a lane acceptable?

[MattCW]

Originally Posted by jsvh

Induced Demand is a long-term phenomenon.

You close a road overnight and drivers will cram every side street the next morning trying to find a last-minute solution.

But you close a road for 30 years (or open a new one) and people permanently change their commutes.

Also known as trying to shrink the city and remove the need for any transportation altogether!

You also avoided the bigger question: are you acknowledging via the N Decatur example that even replacing a lane with transit is still not enough transit to justify taking a lane?

Of course I am, I have always acknowledged that and that's kind of the entire point of that post!

Will you acknowledge that no reasonable about of transit will be enough for you to find losing a lane acceptable?

No, I won't because if you even bothered to read my last post, particularly the second part, you would know that to be false.

[jsvh]

Just because people don't want to drive to a transit station does not mean they are not able to take transit.

You are thinking far too short term. People not wanting to drive to/from a transit station is not a reason that cannot use transit. In the longer run many will have new jobs and homes.

The capacity of the road needs to be improved and putting dedicated transit in those traffic lanes ups the capacity. Sure, all that capacity is not going to be used day one, but it does not need to.

And no, getting away from car dependency and moving towards walk-abilty & transit is how you grow the city, not shrink it.

You may personally prefer driving, but that is not a viable solution to handle the transportation needs of a growing and densifying city.