Most of you know me. You know how much I love this city and region, how I’ve spent a professional lifetime doing my small part to help it mature into one of the nation’s most respected and admired urban areas. If Atlanta’s going to retain that status, then I believe 2004 needs to be the year of transportation.

Because I’ve seen this community do great and wondrous things that didn’t seem possible, I’ve always been confident that we would find the will, and a way, to solve even our thorniest problems.

But now I’m not so sure. Now, I’m more troubled about Atlanta’s future than I’ve ever been before. Now, we’re faced with a regional problem we all must pull together to help solve: we’re stuck in traffic because we’ve seen this coming, yet done nothing but talk about it until now.

It doesn’t have to be this way. People outside of Atlanta like to chide us for our boastfulness, but we’ve had more than words to make our case as a progressive city that works. We’ve always had the sheer eloquence of our example: men and women of vision and courage, drawn from business, politics, religion, education and philanthropy, have always ignored selfish, parochial interest and embraced our common welfare in pressing for resolution of our most daunting civic crises.

That spirit in action has built a community where people from all points of the globe have come to build their lives. This is where they want to grow up, get an education, pursue a career, raise their families, retire and give of their time, talent and treasure to create opportunities for everyone.

That’s always been the Atlanta way. It’s the legacy of concern each generation has passed on to the next. It’s become such a reflex response that it must be part of our genetic makeup.

But when it comes to how we get from one place to another in Atlanta, we’ve shunned that legacy in favor of benign neglect of a problem that’s been festering for a long time.

Right now, Atlanta has the eighth-largest metropolitan economy in the United States. Most of its doughnut counties have been, or are on the list of the nation’s 10 fastest-growing counties. Two or three have even held the top spot. In the next few decades, we’ll have 2.3 million more people living here.

How have we planned to cope with that?

We haven’t. Current transportation plans approved by the State and the Federal government have allowed congestion to worsen.

But that’s not what people want. It’s not their preferred vision of the future. The Chamber recently polled Metro Atlanta’s registered voters and we learned that they’re heavily in favor of putting the brakes on growth until we have sound transportation options in place to accommodate it.

Fifty-seven percent want a slowdown until local governments find much better zoning and transportation options than they’ve chosen to date. An astounding 86 percent would give top priority to redeveloping existing commercial and residential corridors instead of greenfields. Another 23 percent want mandatory limits on development.

Can you blame them? No. But they can blame us. And their judgment will be unsparing if we don’t change course now, while we still can. The window of opportunity is closing fast. In another decade or so, it’ll be too late. We’ll be stuck in traffic for good.

How did we get into this fix and how do we get out of it? Much like the City of Atlanta and its obsolete sewers, decades of benign neglect and parochial decision-making are responsible. Too often, in the area of transportation, we make unilateral instead of cooperative decisions, as if the impact of those decisions stops at our respective borders.

When the original M.A.R.T.A. referendum was held in 1972, those of us who saw its potential and anticipated the growth it would serve wanted a vote that would make the system live up to its name—as a truly metropolitan service that would help unify the city and suburbs in a common purpose while laying the groundwork for additional regional cooperation.

Unfortunately, the vote happened after the white-flight pattern of resettlement had been established, and racial mistrust was high. Fulton and DeKalb became, and remain, M.A.R.T.A.’s only members. We had a golden opportunity to take the step that might have changed the course of our growth-and-development history. But we didn’t. Now we’re going to play catch-up and it won’t be cheap or easy.

We’re at a crossroads, with essentially two options: do we take more or less time to do the job, do we use more of our own money or hope for the merciful generosity of the State and, more likely, Uncle Sam?

In our case, we’ve got two ways to go. We can plow straight ahead on the same well-worn path of least resistance, neither glancing left nor right, with a tunnel-visioned look at endless miles of stuck traffic.

Or, we can blaze a new trail. It’s not a straight-and-narrow-minded path, but one that fixes the worst, most congested corridors first, one built on a mix of transportation options, tracking balanced and sensible land uses, where each of the cities and counties along the way pitches in and pulls in the same direction.

The point men and women for this job probably have to be the same kind of people who’ve brokered so many of this region’s watershed choices in the past, the same ones who’ve had to build community-wide consensus, marshal and merge the political and popular will and see the whole picture. Many of them are the kind of people sitting in this room, in executive offices, and on boards of directors. They’re you and me.

I won’t kid you: this isn’t going to be easy to do. We’ve got a lot of inertia to overcome, a lot of this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it kind of thinking to change and, perhaps most important, we’ll have to find a lot more money. The A.R.C.’S recently-completed mobility 2030 transportation plan calls for things like building the nation’s most advanced H.O.V. system, developing a network of cross-regional thruways and expanding mass transit regionally through high-speed bus rapid transit. The projected funds available for that? $47.7 billion. Over and above that, the extra funds needed to get the job done? $27 billion.

I said it wasn’t going to be easy. But it’s possible if we can get everybody on the same page. It’s possible if we have a coherent blueprint that identifies a set of ambitious but realistic goals and spells out how to reach them.

Here’s what the chamber recommends:

• We need a C.E.O. in charge to make sure the plan is carried out and that results match goals. The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority is perfect for that job. That s why it was created; that’s what it ought to do, so we favor Governor Perdue’s call to refocus G.R.T.A. as the transportation C.E.O. G.R.T.A. should be the guarantor of accountability—coordinating with State, county and local transportation agencies to establish performance-based goals and standards, then using cost-benefit analyses to measure progress in expanding mobility and shrinking congestion in the most timely, effective ways.

• I said earlier that local politics, not data, had determined priorities. For example, our most congested road corridor is the northern half of I-285, but no improvements are scheduled for that section until 2015. We want that reversed. So does the Governor. But three things have to happen: A.R.C. must give top priority to the most cost-effective, congestion-relieving projects in the Mobility 2030 plan; the Georgia D.O.T. and the local governments need to support it; and G.R.T.A. needs to enforce it.

• There must be a comprehensive, regional transit system that connects all of our activity centers, where the biggest concentrations of workers are found. We need to cost-effectively link our region’s 20 or so major activity centers in the next 10-12 years and the only cost-effective way to do this is flex trolley. The Chamber, in partnership with the Perimeter/Cobb C.I.D.S., paid for consumer-driven market research that unequivocally shows that flex trolley, if done right, will attract the choice driver. We’ll be releasing the results of that research in the not-too-distant future.

• All of us here have a stake in being advocates of the three goals I’ve mentioned. But the next one is where you and I really come in. It’s summed up in one word – money. That extra $27 billion we need isn’t going to fall out of the sky. We’ll have to mine it—and blast out a lot of hard-rock resistance in the process—from a mix of tough-love financing options, like a steep gas tax hike, a local sales tax and toll financing. To pick up the whole tab, we’d need to pay 20 cents per gallon more tax when we fill up at the pump. A one-cent regional sales tax would get us $25 billion. In either case, this audience, and others like it, must take the lead in building a broad-based coalition to win popular support for measures like these.

We really have no choice but to drink from this cup, but at least we can share it. We have to—with environmental, academic, civic and special interest groups, like Georgians For Better Transportation. The broader the base, the more credibility and power we’ll have to influence planning and funding priorities—and to hold the decision-making agencies accountable.

It’s in our hand, folks. It’s up to us. The business community has to be at the forefront of the wedge to break through the wall of ignorance, fear and downright hostility on this subject. Along with our coalition partners, we need to be educators in 2004, so that we’ll have the public understanding and support necessary to compel the legislators to start funding a comprehensive regional approach to transportation planning.

That’s my charge to you. To us. There’s no more important business to attend to. Now let’s go do it.