Bloglanta

People regularly complain about MARTA and yet, given today’s road construction environment, it seems the smart choice at the moment.

The Georgia Department of Transportation and all the local counties have begun their annual round of construction projects.  Often, it seems the goal of these projects is to annoy and aggravate as many people as possible.  For example, what makes the idea of shutting I-75 down to one lane on a Friday afternoon even remotely sane?  The last time they did major work on the connector, they at least had the decency to do the major work in the middle of the night.  Doing the work during the day is bad enough, but on Fridays?  At Rush hour?  That’s just hate.

Regrettably, Georgia does not have a disparate impact law regarding construction projects that anyone is willing to enforce.  The value of people’s time needs to be considered in when and how construction is done.  It’s worth paying some extra money for the project if the overall impact to hundreds of thousands of people is lessened.  Further, there are tons of local problems that the equipment and day crews could be fixing while waiting for traffic to die down and do night time projects.  With the increase in Truck traffic from the Port of  Savannah, it’s only going to get worse.

MARTA, of course, is a great alternate, but if you have to drive, at least check Georgia Navigator before you go.

The DOT’s massive silliness does create one positive perversity effect… People who are now stuck in their cars an extra hour should want for transit.  The idea of taking a train, however, may not have occurred to them.  Hence, Gorilla action is warranted!

Imagine this:  Thousands of drivers are stuck and as they approach an overhead exit sign, a 3 foot by 1 foot sticker has been attached saying “If You’d Voted For Passenger Rail, You’d Have Been Home an Hour Ago!”   Wouldn’t that be a nice thought?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 9:38 am and is filed under ATL Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.