Atlanta Belt Line
Creative Loafing Atlanta has a series of articles on the proposed belt line, which would take a 22 mile loop around downtown of underutilized railroad right-of-way and convert it into transit, parks, walking paths and bikeways. The first big hurdle is passing a Tax Allocation District for the area to finance any bonds that will be used over the next 25 years to pay for the project. Basically, some amount of property taxes would be used to finance the bonds, and so all the recipients of property tax funds have to agree on giving a little bit up.
I've been unable to find it, but Metropolis Magazine had a good piece with in the past few years about different options for transit expansion in the Central Atlanta area. Using these existing loop railroad rights-of-way was part of it. The good: the right-of-way exists and can be acquired in large chunks, it hits a good distribution of neighborhoods, it can be connected to the existing transit system - although with some difficulty. The bad: there would be little guaranteed ridership for much of this system, development patterns in Atlanta would need to shift towards more density and walkability over a large area for the transit part of this project to be successful, the financing scheme is untested.
Speculative transit investment is a rare thing in this country anymore. Most transit built these days is to more efficiently move around people in already crowded downtown areas. While this belt line is not exactly being proposed in the middle of nowhere, it is interesting in that it is really being pitched as an economic development and urbanization project - something to finally give critical mass and life to the center of Atlanta. It seems that once the parks and transit are finally completed, a center of Atlanta will have been physically demarcated, something to finally counteract the massive sprawl that otherwise characterizes this city.
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csa | 11:49 AM |
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The thing about transit is that you have two choices. Choice 1: Build tranist through dense areas at huge expense but with immediate utility. Choice 2: Build transit where it can easily be built and wait for the city to grow around it.
Choice 2 isn't cheaper since you're really paying to move the city to the rail line, but the expense is paid by developers who pass it on as realty cost - not as taxes.
Neither is necessarily better, but it seems Atlanta has chosen 2.
