Attacking Rail is not climate policy

Calling Beltline rail an environmental threat while defending car dependence is a strange kind of green.

But that is what Cox Enterprises' Chair Alex Taylor did in his Op-ed printed in the AJC on Friday May 22nd. Cox wholly owns or owns significant interest in the AJC, WSB-TV, and a slew of other companies.

The Beltline vision has always been trails + parks + transit, with light rail designed to work alongside the path on a grassy green corridor.

Meanwhile, Cox’s own 721,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas reporting shows significant greenhouse emissions and includes corporate jets, registered in its name. Cox Communications has also paid a multi-million-dollar hazardous waste settlement. The total emissions are enough to power 84,000 single family homes or 171,000 gasoline-driven cars. So the criticism of Beltline rail as some sort of environmental disaster hardly passes muster.

So maybe the problem is not the electric public transit.

Maybe the problem is the selective and suspect environmental rationale against Beltline Rail from the people who for a variety of reasons are very comfortable with the status quo. And who fear it changing, even thought it was the plan all along and still is.

The fact is, electric rail transit in a grass-tracked corridor- parallel to but not replacing the pedestrian path we have, is about the most environmentally friendly option we have, eliminating storm water runoff, cutting particulate and sound by absorbing it, and returning oxygen to the air to benefit walkers and riders on The Beltline path.

A thousand cars are still a thousand cars.

Finish the trail. Keep the green. Build the rail. Finish the Beltline.