Going almost anywhere in Atlanta Metro is more difficult
than you will find in other cities. This is particularly true in DeKalb, Fulton
and the City of Atlanta. The cities that used the grid design are much easier to
navigate. You will also find that out-of-control in-fill development has been
done with no regard for limiting gridlock. Atlanta’s failure to build an
outer-belt, highway bypass forces interstate traffic through the center of
Atlanta and adds to the gridlock. Our infrastructure should have allowed for
growth, but it didn’t.
I’m not sure why urban planners in Atlanta failed to use
the grid design to connect their streets to make them easier to navigate. They
must have played with Spirograph when they were younger and then carried these
circles to their road designs. In the 1980s, we resisted expanding roads and
removing confusion. The in-fill development we built since the 1980s made
gridlock worse.
If you have driven anywhere out of the Atlanta Metro area
and taken one of our Interstate Highways, you will note the easy-to-use,
massive and logical clover-leaf systems in rural areas that allow you to go on
and off the Interstate Highways.
But when these Interstates go through larger cities, the
massive clover-leaf systems disappear. The exit and entrance ramps become more
complicated and confusing. They are not driver friendly. I think the reasons
for this have to do with cost and density. Land costs in rural areas are lower
and there is room for big, easy to follow clover-leaf systems.
Expanding Interstates is a very political process and is
much worse today than it was before when we actually chose the lowest bidder.
In the big cities, the land speculators want $1 million per acre for Interstate
expansion land and in the rural areas you can get it for $6,000 per acre.
Highway expansion and maintenance costs doubled in the last
decade, because laws and ordinances (written by the well-connected consultants)
required extensive consulting and design and low bidders no longer got the
jobs.
The “high density” we find in Atlanta Metro has caused
gridlock, because our road and highway systems have been untouched for decades.
Public transit is not the answer to relieving our gridlock,
because these trains and busses only go where they go and that isn’t usually
where you need to go. Most Atlanta residents need to have a car to get to work,
get groceries and pick up their kids. They are on a tight schedule and need a
car to function. They want to live close
to work and have grocery stores and schools close by.
Tax funds should not be used to subsidize public transit
expansion. The public transit lobby has joined the developers to push for tax
subsidies. The failure rate of these projects is too high. The MARTA trains go
to the shopping malls that are closing.
The Georgia Regional Commissions are a left-over of UN
Agenda 21 implementation as “unelected governance” and need to be rolled back
to reassert “elected governance”. Cities and Counties should have final
approval of how tax funds are spent based on what their voters want. The
ordinance and land-use plans that were imposed since 1992 need to be revisited
to remove UN Agenda 21 requirements.
If we are able to get manufacturing to return to the US,
most of these plants are likely to return to rural and suburban cities. Tax
holidays will probably be granted to these companies.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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