“If you go forward with this, traffic congestion will get worse and you’ll waste a lot of money.”
That is Wendell Cox’s assessment of T-SPLOST, Atlanta’s awkward acronym for a July 31 referendum for a 1 percent sales tax for transportation projects. In the public’s eye, Atlanta rivals Los Angeles for its legendary traffic congestion, and proponents of the new tax that would raise approximately $7 billion say the projects funded would overhaul highway interchanges, fund mass transit projects, and pay for road construction and improvements across metro Atlanta over a 10 year period.
So why wouldn’t pumping all that money into metro Atlanta alleviate congestion? Because 52 percent of the funding would go to mass transit, “leaving less than half of the money for road improvements.” And transit’s impact on congestion is negligible.
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