Metro Traffic Jeopardizes Business Development

A recent study commissioned by the State of Georgia shows that the state is losing out to other Southeastern states when businesses consider incentives to relocate.

Dennis Donovan of Wadley-Donovan-Gutshaw Consulting recently addressed the issue of Atlanta’s traffic situation and how it relates to prospective businesses that may be considering Atlanta as a home base.

With 33 years of experience, Donovan is a Location Advisor to major firms such as American Express, Lucent Technologies, Lowe’s, CIGNA, Dun & Bradstreet, and Merck.

His comments about Atlanta were not encouraging.

Though Atlanta still offers advantages to prospective businesses, the horrible traffic congestion is seen as a negative, and is beginning to outweigh the positives of living in the area.

Donovan actually called Atlanta’s traffic mess the biggest impediment to Atlanta’s chances of enticing new businesses to the area.

Cities such as Charlotte and Dallas have expanded their traffic infrastructures by building new toll lanes through partnerships with both public and private entities. This, Donovan said, could give these cities the edge over Atlanta when businesses are deciding where they want to relocate.

The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce is requesting that state lawmakers allow Atlanta area residents to vote on a penny sales tax that would be used to fund traffic solutions similar to those being used in other cities.

Some rural lawmakers have suggested that withholding transportation dollars from Atlanta will spur growth in outlying areas. But not so, says Donovan.

He said without a new transportation infrastructure, Atlanta’s labor pool will begin abandoning the metro area for other areas with less traffic congestion, but they aren’t likely to stay in rural areas.

Tony Green, chairman of the Johns Creek Council of the Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce agrees with Donovan’s assessments.

“I am sure we have lost the relocation of major corporations to Atlanta due to our traffic and transportations shortfalls. We have lost such opportunities for other reasons also,” he said.

“The question of traffic problems is a continual topic of discussion in government and private arenas in every city around the country,” he added. “Being a native of Atlanta and experiencing the Atlanta traffic first hand, I find the problem of traffic to be a relative issue.”

“The level of inconvenience may seem greater to a person in Savannah who has a 30-minute drive from the Oglethorpe Mall area into the business area [of Savannah], than to one of us who experiences a 60-minute drive from Old Alabama and Jones Bridge to 14th Street and Peachtree Colony Square,” he explained.

Green has lived in Houston, Texas and London, England, and says the traffic in Atlanta is relative to all large and economically growing cities.

“It is the ‘Catch 22’ of viable growth that you bring to an area – the logical addition of families, and therefore multiple automobiles. The challenge to go from your residence to schools and jobs is based on where you choose to live in relation to where you find your economic viability (your job),” he said.

Green cites several points that he obtained from the U.S. Chamber regarding transportation issues:

‘America's transportation and infrastructure system, once a marvel of the modern world, has been stretched beyond its capacity and has fallen into disrepair. A decaying transportation system costs our economy more than $78 billion annually in lost time and fuel.

The Chamber advocates for a comprehensive approach to solving the nation's looming transportation infrastructure crisis. Specifically, the group believes that a multi-modal and intermodal vision must increase capacity, reduce congestion, and improve the efficient, safe, sustainable movement of goods and people throughout the country and world.’

Also, congestion in the top 85 U.S. urban areas caused 3.7 billion hours of travel delay and 2.3 billion gallons of wasted fuel, for a total cost of $63 billion, in 2003, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

During the past 20 years, travel on the nation's highways has grown almost 72 percent while lane-miles of highways have risen less than 5 percent, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

Nearly 42,000 people are killed each year on the nation's highways and approximately 15,000 traffic deaths are in crashes where substandard road conditions, obsolete designs, or roadside hazards are a factor according to the U.S. DOT.

The latest report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave an overall grade of D to this nation's infrastructure efforts.’

Green agrees with Donovan’s recommendations on public-private solutions to the traffic problem. He said that Metro Atlanta should address the collaboration between corporate and government transportation projects, and says that these ventures are working in other areas of the country.

“In many of our world problems, when you allow capitalism to attack a problem with the opportunity for profit, the issue is solved quicker and more reliably than the original ‘fix’ envisioned by government,” Green said.

So, what is the answer to the problem?

“If I knew that, I would be Governor of Georgia or President of the U.S.,” he replied.

“We are supposed to be working towards a more utopian livable community; more mixed-use and live-work, to ease these threats to environment and quality of life. All these pieces of the solution puzzle have major components in common – money to fund, land to build upon, resources to repair and build new, and people to make it happen.”

“If we continue to develop our community of North Fulton and South Forsyth to include infrastructure, land use, and zoning that would allow more developments similar to Johns Creek Tech Park, then larger organizations would jump at the opportunity to move to this community,” Green added. “If we provide the opportunity for them to find office space and live in the beauty that our citizens are working hard to build, we will grow.”

“We cannot be ruled and driven by the mentality that we remain a community where we do not build major transportation arteries, do not build recreational facilities, and do not attract a strong business base of larger corporations that can pay healthy taxes,” Green said. “We must be a city open to well-planned growth, which our leaders are working toward.”

Donovan says that he is just now starting to see Atlanta get knocked out of the running at the last minute when companies are picking new cities, and that there’s no way to know how many companies are failing to put Atlanta on their short list to begin with, because of traffic gridlock.
He warns that Atlanta now has intolerable congestion, and is at the point of no return.

Green is aware of all that, but added, “I never would have dreamed this area would be what it is today, and I am very proud of it.”