By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Sorry if I seem a little too laid back this week, but I took a vacation trip to Jekyll Island this past week and it'll probably take a few days before I get properly tensed up again.

On the way down, I noticed these strange orange barrels all along the road. They looked really familiar, but I just couldn't quite remember what they were for. Then it hit me. Oh yeah, road construction. I'd forgotten what that looked like.

I also noticed something else. The air was nice and clear.

You really have to wonder: is there road construction because the air is cleaner, or is the air cleaner because there's road construction?

I'm sure the scientists at the federal Environmental Protection Agency can explain why my lamebrained, layman's reasoning is way off base, but it just seems to me that withholding funds for road construction will result in more cars and trucks being forced into smaller spaces for longer periods of time, emitting noxious fumes all the while.

True, there is a method behind their madness. I'm sure the EPA wonks know that holding up road construction will work directly against their concerns for air quality in the short run. In the long run, they're hoping to get the Atlanta area to do things that will improve the air quality... in the long run.

Like public transportation. If we get some trains and buses in here, and we get people to ride those trains and buses instead of using their SUVs for the daily commute, air quality is bound to improve.

And, as much as I tend to rebel against federal agencies forcing their will on us average local folks, I can't argue with that basic logic. Put some commuter trains in, and provide some tax incentives to get private companies to provide bus and shuttle services, and I think once people get used to it, they'll find that public transportation can be a good thing.

What are you giving up, after all? The right to sit in your car by yourself for two hours a day, breathing noxious fumes, getting tense, risking a wreck or a run-in with a road rage warrior?

Of course, you'll still have that right. You'll just have a choice.

But the more you listen to the plan, the more the federal reasoning starts to get a little cloudy and the bureaucratic meddling starts to be a little... well, bureaucratic.

You see, it's not enough that we put in the train service and have stations available in case we want to spare ourselves the torture of the commute. Once we put in the rail line, apparently, we have to make sure there are a lot of people to ride it so that the people who forced us to build the tracks won't be embarrassed by news footage of empty train cars running back and forth from Senoia to the airport.

So, in order to ensure the success of the rail lines and bus routes, we have to change our long-term land use and zoning philosophies so that there are high-density developments all along the transit routes.

Now, I realize my reasoning has gotten all fuzzy while I was on vacation, but help me out with this. Too many people want to live here, which is making the air bad. So we're putting in public transit to get people out of their cars. But that costs money and we want to make sure it's successful, so we have to make sure more people live here.

And having more people live here makes the air bad... right?

I've gone over the GRTA reasoning numerous times, starting at different places each time. I really want to believe that somehow life is going to be better in the Atlanta area with the changes being forced on us by those pointy-headed bureaucrats up in Washington.

But every time I go through it, I come up with the same answer. They want to improve air quality, which, they tell us, is caused by too much growth. And their solution is to increase density, i.e. increase growth.

I hate to say it, but it begins to look like there may be other motives behind all of this than simply improving air quality.

I've been an observer of bureaucracies — federal, state and local — for a long time, and there is one characteristic they all have in common: they spend at least a third of their time, energy and money justifying their own existence.

Often, there is sufficient public need to provide that justification. But when there is not, another unfailing characteristic of bureaucracies is that they will always manufacture crises to justify not only their continued existence, but expansion of their funding, their staffing and their power.

Casual observation of the actions of the EPA, the ARC and GRTA over the last year will confirm that this is a textbook case.

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