In an AJC editorial, Jay Bookman addresses the Georgia legislature’s continual failure to provide funding for expansion in public transit, while instead focusing solely on car transportation. One of the things that puts the state (and thus the Atlanta region) in a bind when it comes to transportation alternatives is low taxes. Bookman writes: You can’t drive to work on the lowest taxes in the country. It doesn’t do you much good when you wait for three green lights before getting through an intersection. And with the ninth-highest jobless rate in the country, rising poverty rates and declining household income, it doesn’t appear to have jump-started the economy.You can’t help but wonder if the harm caused by these rising poverty rates could be alleviated by expanded transit — think of the amount of money each low-income household would save if they didn’t have to own a car. As I posted recently, the relatively low cost of housing in the Atlanta region has been found to accompany a high price tag for transportation. This is a situation that affects low-income people in the region the most. Take a look at the graphic above (source). Metro Atlanta and Barcelona have a similar population, but car ownership in sprawling Atlanta is much higher. If Atlanta had Barcelona’s car ownership levels, it would mean 1.7 million fewer cars on the road. This would reduce the need for parking by over 5,000,000 spaces (roughly 3 parking spaces per car exist in the U.S). The amount of land taken up by that many parking spaces is roughly equals the size of Manhattan. Based on costs of car ownership, maintenance and fuel, losing those cars would add a up to $13 billion in consumer spending that could be redirected to other purposes.[Aside: There have been a couple of articles in national publications recently on the possibility of car-free cities in the US. I’m not an advocate for a car-free cities; cars, in their place (meaning ‘as long as they don’t dominate the urban landscape’) can be part of a healthy multi-modal system. Though I’m a MARTA commuter most days, my family does use a car as a piece of our own mobility pie.]What I’m concerned about here is  car *dependency* and how that — together the sprawling environments that feed that dependency — costs us as a society and also as individuals. I firmly believe that it’s possible to build places that can accommodate multiple modes of transportation; ones that benefit society on an economic level, while also addressing the disparity in transit access by economic groups in the region as well as the outsized costs paid for transportation by low-income people here.One is those costs comes from simply owning a car in Georgia. A Bankrate.com study of insurance, repair and gasoline costs by state shows that the state is one of the most expensive places in the US to own a car. The three of those factors alone add up to an average  $2,408 per Georgian (and this is not including purchase price for cars and other external costs such as parking). Additionally, there is data that clearly demonstrates the affordability swindle in Metro Atlanta: low-price housing in a sprawling format accompanies a high transportation cost. Plus, a report last year on the growing level of low-income people in Metro Atlanta’s suburbs found that an increasing number of residents in the region can’t afford a car; they instead depend on whatever transit and pedestrian infrastructure exists.The wealthier classes in the Atlanta region are able to absorb these costs of sprawl in their personal finances. But everyone else is paying a considerable price — both directly and indirectly — for our dependency on cars. We need leadership at a state and local level that can address this issue in a bold way. Particularly in the City of Atlanta, which is known to have a massive problem with income inequality, it’s important to think about the way our built environment and its transportation choices affect the neediest people.