The Georgia Public Policy Foundation has published an analysis of the proposed tax increase being pushed by State Senator Brandon Beach to fund MARTA heavy rail expansions. You should read the whole article by Baruch Feigenbaum here but I will highlight a few of the most critical points here as well.

The north Fulton corridor, in contrast, has a population density of approximately 1,500 people per square mile, far too low to support rail.

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Given the high cost of expansion of rail and the corridor’s low population and employment densities, a bus rapid transit/express bus line using SR 400’s soon-to-be-constructed express lanes would be a much better option.

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Increasing the sales tax is also regressive; it harms low-income riders who depend on transit the most.

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Rail systems, which are hub and spoke, are designed to transport workers from suburban regions to downtowns. But many metro Atlanta jobs are in the suburbs and most workers commute from suburb to suburb. Many residents of North Fulton commute to the Cumberland area, North DeKalb area or other job centers without rail service. Expanding the rail line is no benefit to all these workers.

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North Fulton could have BRT connections to East Cobb, North DeKalb, Southwest Gwinnett, South Forsyth, and Southeast Cherokee counties. Rail is estimated to be 16- to 22 times the cost of bus rapid transit, which means that for one MARTA heavy-rail expansion we could provide 20 high quality bus rapid transit expansions.

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New transit technology is likely to revolutionize transit service over the next 30 years. Many Millennials are substituting ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft for traditional fixed-route transit. Autonomous vehicles while still in the development stage, are likely to revolutionize transit service and land use. While quality mass transit service is important today, policy makers should build a system that has the flexibility to evolve with new technological developments.

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A new quarter-penny sales tax for transit could build one heavy-rail extension that would lock up transit funding and lock in an aging technology for the foreseeable future and take more than 100 years to pay off. Alternatively, the same funding could implement a network of high-quality express bus and bus rapid transit service across North Fulton County.

Any objective analysis shows that Senator Beach’s proposed tax increase for heavy rail would be a tremendous misallocation of resources in a time when transportation dollars are too hard to come by already. What a shame.