By Dave Hamrick
Editor-at-Large

If the Atlanta Regional Commission's new Regional Transportation Plan reveals anything, it's the degree to which our governments are mired in self-perpetuating bureaucratic muck.

Also, lest we forget, it reveals the degree to which bureaucracies — the closest thing we have to unelected dictators in this land of the “free” — are growing more powerful and pervasive everyday.

For those who are bored with such things and don't know what the RTP is all about, I hope you'll be willing to take just a minute and understand what's being done to you. I'll try to be brief and use small words.

The Congress decided some decades ago that each state should be divided into regions and that regional planning agencies should be set up so that federal dollars flowing into the states could be spent more wisely.

Some of us argued that it would make more sense to leave the money in the states to begin with and let the state and local governments decide how to spend state and local residents' tax money wisely, but the Congress believed at that time that all wisdom resides in Washington and dismissed the argument out of hand.

I could go on, but I don't want to bore you too much. It's all about power... we'll leave it at that.

These regional planning agencies did have one advantage to those of us who believe in local control: their boards were comprised of local elected officials. With your mayor or county commissioner on the board, it has been difficult for agencies like the ARC to get completely out of control and take over your lives.

Therefore, more recently, federal agencies have hatched dozens of new schemes to gather power to themselves, one of which is the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to set up some arbitrary air quality standards and even more arbitrary testing methods that could be used to take everyday decisions out of your hands and mine and put them into the hands of still more bureaucrats.

Here's how it works. One federal agency, the Department of Transportation, collects billions of dollars from you and me in taxes. After skimming a large portion off the top and using it to fill Washington, D.C. office buildings with people dedicated to finding more ways to control us, DOT then gives some of the money back to our state DOT, which spends it building and maintaining roads and other transportation facilities.

Another federal agency, the EPA, decides that it doesn't like the way we are spending the portion of our money that the DOT returned to us, so EPA sets up a system for testing air quality, refuses to reveal any of the details to state and local governments (or even to Congress), and decrees that unless we change the way we spend the funds that DOT has, in its largess, sent back to us, we won't get that money back at all.

Faced with the prospect of welcoming a million new people to the Atlanta area over the next 25 years without so much as a new suicide lane for them to drive on, we have no choice but to do EPA's will.

So we develop a 25-year plan. And instead of building new roads for the cars that we know people are going to be driving, we plan to take some of the road space we already have and label it “high occupancy vehicle” lanes, which means that you can't use that lane unless you have more than one person in your car.

Since most people commuting to work need the flexibility of being able to use their cars during or following the work day, we end up slowing down the main body of traffic even further, which increases the amount of pollution coming from cars because they take longer to get where they are going. We accomplish nothing, right?

Wrong. What we accomplish is putting more power into the hands of EPA and the federal DOT, and that's what this whole exercise is all about.

Don't get me wrong. Some of the ideas flowing out of the new plan are good ideas that we will appreciate down the road. Bike paths will add greatly to our quality of life. Rail lines will truly provide a better way to work for some, and will cut down on auto pollution. Alternative fuels will probably do more than anything else to reduce air pollution.

But there's no reason to increase the size and power of federal bureaucracies in order to implement these ideas. In 25 years, our transportation system may be improved, but we're going to be less free, more dependent on the federal government, and more easily controlled.

Enjoy.

Back to Opinion Home Page | Back to the top of the page