So is our best chance of raising the gas tax on a state level (which we all know needs to be done) to carve up each state, and let the smaller regions decide on the tax for themselves? Officials in Georgia are putting a similar idea to the test.

The Economist reports that Georgia, a state that houses drastic urban diversity (there’s Atlanta, home of Dante-esque traffic, and then a smorgasbord of tiny rural towns surrounding it) is dividing up and letting regions set gas taxes based on road use. Their reasons for doing so are logical — while Georgia was the third fastest-growing state between 2000 and 2006,  it’s infrastructure spending is 49th out of 50 in infrastructure spending per capita, while its gas tax is the second-lowest in the country.  And, as with most states that have a staunch urban-rural divide, the legislature has been bitterly divided over which infrastructure projects to spend money on — and how to pay for them.

As such, Georgia governor Sonny Perdue found himself looking for a compromise, which he eventually signed into a transportation bill. The Economist describes the bill as follows:

[It] divides Georgia into 12 regions, and gives each the power to decide on its own transport projects. Voters in each region will decide by referendum whether to approve a one-cent increase in the sales-tax to pay for those regional projects. Atlanta stands to see as much as $790m through the new tax.

The bill will also help MARTA, Atlanta’s woefully inadequate urban-rail system. It is the largest in the country to receive no state funding; it relies instead on passenger revenue and a 1% sales tax in the two counties it serves. It has long been required to spend half its sales-tax revenue on capital projects, which has starved its operating budget. The bill removes that requirement for the next three years. That will not make MARTA any more effective, but it may stave off some of the service cuts it faces.

While it’s not a boon for public transit, it is a start — and a move that makes a lot of sense when you consider that more and more people are moving to urban areas, necessitating more infrastructure investment in those high-population regions. Meanwhile, the political structure can stonewall urban regions from getting the funding they need, by voting against state-wide measures — like tax raises. So why not allow high-population regions of a state to legislate transportation as they see fit?

Granted, Atlanta residents may have an objection — the urban areas of a state are key economic drivers in the state’s GDP, and provide economic benefits for every resident of the state whether or not they pay Atlanta’s higher gas tax. But the alternative is to keep letting Atlanta lag behind in infrastructure development, and funding.

UPDATE: This post has been appended. We originally stated that the new bill would allow the state subdivisions to raise their gas tax if they saw fit. It does not. Still, would it be so bad if high-traffic urban areas were allowed to collect a higher gas tax if they so chose?