Transportation

For much of the last decade we have not adequately invested in metro Atlanta and North Georgia’s transportation infrastructure.  Traffic congestion around metro Atlanta easily has the potential to halt metro Atlanta’s economic growth engine, which feeds and supports the economy of North Georgia.  If the U.S. Congress and the Georgia General Assembly don’t adequately fund and improve transportation congestion within the next five years, Georgia’s growth is likely to stall and fall back among the pack among other Southern states.

As State Senate Majority Leader, I fought to hold the line on gas tax, new toll roads, and the disproportionate expenditure of road construction dollars to areas of the state without the traffic needs to support them. I was a supporter & sponsor of legislation to finalize the Blue Ridge Parkway, northern extension of I-575, and a supporter of a non-elevated road bed to improve the Georgia Highway 120 corridor to serve as an east/west connector for north Georgia and intra-state trucking (keeping thousands of trucks and tons of trailers off of I-285).

The Georgia Department of Transportation, traditionally a ‘highway’ agency, needs to expand its mindset and mission to include passenger rail, greater use of HOV lanes, mass transit and even bike paths.  Again, local leadership plays a key role here as many communities in Georgia and elsewhere have flourished around the return of passenger rail, or something as comparatively inexpensive as the Silver Comet Trail, which runs from Cobb County to Anniston, Alabama, along an abandoned rail corridor.  To maintain our transportation pre-eminence, the state of Georgia may well need to take a more active and deliberate role at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, as well as move forward with long discussed plans to construct a multi-modal transportation facility in the ‘gulch’ of downtown Atlanta, near the former headquarters of Norfolk/Southern Railway.  I am also a supporter of commuter rail, such as the proposed “Brain Train” from Athens to Atlanta, as long as the benefiting communities, as well as the passengers riding these trains, are willing to supply the bulk of the operating revenue, and not look to the state or federal government for long-term, ongoing operating subsidies.