So, it seems that some Atlanta leaders are looking at Sunbelt peer(ish) cities like Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix and seeing the benefits of building quality public transportation systems.

“I continue to be frustrated that we can’t seem to move in that direction,” said Sam Olens, chairman of the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Cobb County commission. “We’re losing our competitive advantage.”

Two years ago, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce invited reporters to hear officials from Phoenix and other cities talk about their new transportation initiatives. The message was clear: Atlanta and Georgia could be left in the dust.

On Wednesday, Sam Williams, president of the chamber, said in a statement that “cities that have made transportation a priority, like Phoenix, Dallas and Charlotte, continue to leapfrog Atlanta with respect to regional mobility. … While these areas make progress, we seem choked in congestion with little leadership to get us out.”

As another legislative session begins, Atlanta remains the second-most-congested urban area in the nation. The Georgia Legislature has tried and failed to pass a transportation funding measure and is preparing for another go in the 2009 session.

Olens said plum employers with skilled jobs are slipping away. “In the last two years, I’ve had two major corporations tell me they would not move their headquarters to the Cobb Galleria area because all we had are buses,” Olens said this week.

This really isn’t that difficult to understand. Places like Charlotte had a lot of initial success attracting a quality labour force because they could offer workers cheap, nice suburban homes within an easy commute of downtown (or as Charlotteans insist, uptown). But that strategy has largely run its course, for two reasons. First, places have run out of land for such development within easy reach of job centers (and congestion is now endemic). And second, a very large chunk of the labor force is no longer that interested in such housing. You see lots of young, well-off professionals that want to live in a cool apartment within walking distance of chic bars and restaurants, and increasingly you see single or childless older professionals who want the same thing.

In other words, the Atlantan system of development doesn’t do a particularly good job of meeting the needs of either group — driving suburbanites (now stuck with extreme, congestion-plagued commutes), or walking urbanites (too often SOL). And just as a city that failed to provide other crucial infrastructural benefits, like ample water or good schools or reliable trash pick-up, would have difficulty attracting employers, so too will one that insists upon one kind of development pattern.

This also is another reason that “pro-business” or libertarian opponents of public transit are so weird. Their positions have long been foolish, but increasingly, they’re also unpopular. If residents and businesses and political leaders are demanding more transit, what, exactly, is the logic of continuing to heavily subsidize road construction while ignoring rail, and pretending that that’s what the market dictates?

And finally, this all seems to support my theory of a growing transit constituency. More transit makes it easier to build more transit. You have more cities, voters, and leaders calling for increased federal support for transit, you have more people familiar with and comfortable with rail, and it then becomes the expectation among employers, employees, and local leaders that there should be a rail option.

And I suppose there are probably scale economies, as well. More transit means more transit expertise (such that each city needn’t reinvent the wheel) and more of a market for mass-produced transit equipment.