What will $2.5 billion buy?
MARTA is dipping its toe into autonomous vehicles by piloting self-driving shuttles at the airport. Photo credit: Glydways
Streetcar boosters estimated in 2021 that capital costs for the entire 22-mile Beltline streetcar would run around $2.5 billion. The truth is that $2.5 billion is almost certainly low. And, anyway, there isn't $2.5 billion lying around for a streetcar that will go in one big circle.
But humor us for a moment by suspending your disbelief to play a game: It’s called: “What will $2.5 billion buy?”
You’ll find the results on this nifty graphic. And below you’ll find our math, along with some interesting background on the partly tongue-in-cheek options we came up with.
Launch world’s best self-driving transit system
The graphic says: Autonomous tech is well-suited for transit. With $2.5 billion for capital costs and 10 years of operation, Atlanta would leapfrog the world into a new era for transit.
The background: We asked an executive at a self-driving-shuttle manufacturer whether a transit agency could build a “world-class autonomous transit system” for $2.5 billion. His answer (aided with a bit of our math): You could buy a fleet of 1,650 15-seat autonomous shuttles and all the necessary support equipment and technology to set up a network of routes for them; then, you could operate that system for 10 years.
The only thing he left out were the dedicated lanes. At $1 million a mile, however, those turn out to be a fraction of the overall investment.
There’s lots of anxiety about autonomous vehicles. Understandably so. Self-driving cars are still having trouble navigating stop-and-go traffic, sudden curves and crazy, weaving drivers.
But transit may prove to be the perfect early adopter of the technology. That’s because a vehicle traveling repeatedly along an established route faces fewer surprises. Autonomous buses and shuttles that operate in exclusive, dedicated lanes are bound to run into even fewer hazards.
Within a few years, self-driving vehicles are likely to be safer and more dependable than human-driven ones. The big benefit for transit? Reduced labor will dramatically lower operating costs. That, in turn, could mean more service expansions.
With those potential benefits, transit agencies are already looking into autonomous systems. MARTA, for example, is in the midst of launching an autonomous shuttle pilot at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The cost of that experiment? Just $10 million.
If that pilot is successful, how about going a step further by operating trials on the streets of Atlanta?
Build 22 miles of ‘wheels & heels’ – 1,114 times
The graphic says: A million dollars a mile buys a landscaped walking path all around the Beltline, next to the existing trail. We could do the same thing over – for 1,113 more Beltlines!
The background: OK. We don’t want to build the same thing 1,114 times. But we are serious about installing a separate “heels” trail – just once. The existing trail would then serve ‘‘wheels.”
For less than one-thousandth the cost of the Beltline streetcar, we’d build on the Beltline’s current glory as Atlanta’s active transportation corridor.
Devoid of ambling adults, zig-zagging kids, dog-leashes clotheslines and friends too deep in conversation to notice the bikes that are trying to pass them, the wide concrete trail would allow bikes, e-bikes, scooters, skateboards and the like to travel more smoothly along the wide concrete trail.
Meanwhile, the separate walking path would be much safer for every kind of pedestrian.
There are variations on this idea. You’d have plenty of room left for a soft running track. You could widen the existing path so that it might also accommodate tiny autonomous vehicles like these. You could design the “heels” path to be landscaped and winding – like New York’s High Line. Or you could make it simpler, more straightforward and much less expensive than our make-believe budget of $1 million a mile.
The point is that we should at least consider the wheels-and-heels concept. Based on traffic counts by the PATH Foundation, we estimate that some 10,000 people already travel along just the stretch of the existing Beltline trail that’s threatened by the first phase of the streetcar. That’s already more than double the projected ridership for the streetcar in that area. Think how that number would grow if wheels and heels were separated from each other.
In other words, you could create a track serving more people than twice the ridership of the streetcar and still have more than 999-thousandths of the money left over for mass transit in places where it’s actually needed!
Develop 5,000 miles of protected bike lanes
The graphic says: At $500,000 a mile, we could blanket three Atlantas with protected bikeways – with enough leftover for every street in Savannah.
The background: Of course, we don’t need to plaster all 1,400 miles of roads in Atlanta with three, two-way protected bikeways. Installing just one two-way bikeway on merely one-tenth of those 1,400 miles would leave every other U.S. city in the dust when it comes to protected lanes.
Keep in mind that half-a-million is a high-end estimate for a buffered (or protected) bike lane. Even then, at 140 miles, that comes to only $70 million.
Give Away 100 million Lyft/Uber rides
The graphic says: At $20 a ride, the city could fund five million Lyft/Uber rides annually for 25 years. That’s 10 free solo rides yearly for each Atlantan.
The background: Do rideshare apps qualify as transit? In most cases, no. But some transit experts have been arguing for years that supplementing transit with ridesharing could actually save transit agencies money and, counter-intuitively, reduce congestion.
Los Angeles is among a handful of cities already experimenting with “transit wallets” that allow certain target groups (usually the poor or the elderly) to spend monthly transit allowances on Lyft or Uber, as well as public transit options.
Private-vehicle ridesharing apps may or may not reduce congestion and carbon emissions. But a related reform could help do both. Forward-looking transit agencies are finding ways to apply rideshare technology to on-demand transit (the shuttle buses that are used to pick up elderly and disabled riders).
At present, it doesn’t make sense for MARTA to spend $2.5 billion on ridesharing. But a tiny fraction of that money could be used to improve on-demand services, allow more people to use them and do more to reduce congestion than an expensive barely used streetcar.
Buy three e-bikes for every Atlantan
The graphic says: At $1,600 per bike, 1.5 million bikes be made available – that’s close to three times the population of Atlanta.
The background: E-bikes have only recently begun to be taken seriously as a desirable active transportation option. They make particular sense in Atlanta, where heat, humidity and hills contribute to abysmal bike-commuting numbers.
It’s true that every single Atlantan child, adult and senior doesn’t need three e-bicycles. And we’re not so sure that free e-bikes-for-all is a winning strategy.
So how about if we offered a $1,000 rebate to any Atlanta resident who wants to buy just one?
Come to think of it, that’s very much like the rebate plan that Councilman Matt Westmoreland worked through City Council in January. In concert with the Atlanta Regional Commission and PropelAtl, the city expects to roll out the rebate program this fall.
It will provide $500 rebates for standard e-bikes purchased at stores participating in the program, and $1,000 for cargo models. There’s also a hardship clause: Households with incomes below $54,000 can qualify for $1,500 and $2,000 respectively.
Other cities are already up and running with similar programs and are even expanding them.
Atlanta’s program will start out with a pretty small pot – just $1 million. Maybe, it’ll never be funded at $2.5 billion (ha-ha), but even a tiny smidgeon of that amount could put a big dent in car trips.
Build much more of More MARTA
The graphic says: We could nearly double the money available for all More MARTA projects.
The background: Finally, we’re talking about a realistic plan for our imaginary canceled-streetcar windfall!
To be clear, there’s not an extra $2.5 billion lying around to fund, say, 30 or 40 of the currently unfunded More MARTA projects – just like there isn’t $2.5 billion lying around to sink exclusively into the Beltline streetcar.
To get an idea of the scale of spending required just for the streetcar, it is useful to see what else that would buy us in conventional transit projects.
Atlanta voters approved the half-penny More MARTA sales tax in 2016 to go toward bus service expansions and capital projects. A list of more than 70 projects, including parts of the Beltline streetcar, accompanied the referendum. At the time, their combined cost was estimated at $11.5 billion.
Over its 40-year lifespan, the More MARTA tax is expected to bring in $2.7 billion. Although Beltline streetcar has failed to qualify for federal funds and isn’t likely to do so in the future, most other projects on the list do qualify. That will make the $2.7 billion in More MARTA tax revenue go a lot further. According to MARTA, the sales tax and federal money will combine with a few other sources of money to total about $6.8 billion for More MARTA projects.
Politicians and transit leaders never expected the More MARTA tax to pay for all 73 projects (although many voters should be excused for getting that impression!). Nor did they expect back in 2016 that the funded list would eventually be whittled down to nine projects – with eight more maybe having a chance sometime in the 2030s. In other words, as the plan stands now, 50-plus More MARTA projects at best aren’t slated for funding.
What would happen, then, if we threw our imaginary $2.5 billion windfall into the More MARTA pot? And what if you made the reasonable assumption that most of those projects would qualify for federal matches at the rate of one-and-a-half times the local money?
Well then, suddenly, you’d have another $6.25 billion for More MARTA. That would almost double the $6.8 billion we’re expecting in the real world for the entire More MARTA program!
