The T-SPLOST Post-Mortem

As most of you know, Atlanta region voters rejected the transportation sales tax referendum by a very large margin (63-37%). Here is the county-by-county breakdown.

This is a pretty crushing defeat, without a single county voting in support. Fulton and DeKalb, where traffic is the worst, came closest to passage but still came up short. And these two counties alone would have needed enormous margins of victory to overcome the committed opposition from Cobb and Gwinnett counties. Certainly there are more votes to be had in these two counties, and I can understand Transportation 4 America’s diagnosis

Atlanta's #TSPLOST appears to have been doomed by a failure to convince and turn out voters in the region's core (Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton)

— Transportation for America (@T4America) August 1, 2012

Low voter turnout is a convenient, but inadequate diagnosis. Why didn’t these people care enough to go vote, if they indeed exist? I am not a political scientist, and so I’m not going to comment on what this may say about anti-tax or anti-government trends in local politics. Given that social justice groups and conservationists also opposed the measure, I think the fiscal conservative argument may be overblown. But I do understand transportation, and even I felt a little queasy about this referendum (though I did vote yes). When a Ph.D. student in Civil Engineering and a committed fiscal liberal doesn’t feel totally committed to a transportation vote, you know you have problems.

I attend church predominantly with people whose political leanings could best be described as “Mitt Romney” (I am a Mormon). Many of my friends sincerely asked me about the referendum, the project list, and how it would be funded. I explained that for me, the most important project was the MARTA extension to Emory and that this project alone was worth funding. I also mentioned that there were many projects that I didn’t think should be built at all, and I could understand if they voted against it. As I tweeted,

@A4Transit @T4America i think the bigger problem was the lack of a coherent project list. Something for everyone means nothing for anyone

— Gregory Macfarlane (@greg_macfarlane) August 1, 2012

So much effort went into creating the project list, and yet a week before the vote my intelligent and generally informed friends had no idea what the referendum was even going to pay for. This is a problem.

I can understand the reasons why the projects were assembled this way. They wanted to build a coalition of lots of different groups, and they wanted mayors in northern Gwinnett County to feel they were getting something, too. But what ended up happening was that the project list became so bloated, that even professionals such as myself could remember few of the projects when asked about them by their friends. If everyone has a project that is meant for them, then everyone has a project that gives them a reason not to vote for it, also.

In 2007, my home county in Utah, one of the most reliably conservative counties in the country, overwhelmingly voted for a quarter-cent sales tax that funded nothing but transit. Or from Seattle,

#TSPLOST I watched a similar roads+transit measure fail in Seattle & then pass two years later as a transit-only bill.

— Kari Watkins (@transitmom) August 1, 2012

In the voting booth, people like simple choices. Romney or Obama? Keep a judge or throw her out? The Untie Atlanta people tried to make a very complicated choice into a simple question, but couldn’t overcome the infrastructure sausage that was the project list. The next city to try this should learn from Salt Lake, Seattle, and Atlanta and push for simplicity.