I support public transportation. However, the biggest enemy of public transportation is advocates of public transportation. If the goal of public transportation advocates had ever been improving the quality of life, spurring and facilitating economic growth, development of new technologies etc. But public transportation advocates have been primarily interested in social engineering and political goals ranging from environmental to racial.

25 years ago, had public transportation advocates tried to sell the idea that connecting Georgia with a network of commuter rail lines would have made it easier for folks in Columbus to spend a weekend on the coast, folks in Valdosta to see Braves and Falcons games, and folks in Atlanta to ship their kids off to UGA, Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Southern it would have sailed through. After all, at about the same time the Atlanta area had very little problem securing state support for what was SUPPOSED to be the initial phase of MARTA as well as for other things like Hartsfield, Atlanta – Fulton County stadium (and later the Georgia Dome), and a bunch of other big projects.

But when people started to talk about it as A) a way to get Atlanta black workers into the suburbs without them having to actually move there (so they could stay in Atlanta and vote for black Democrats of course) and B) a way to browbeat white flight suburbanites into moving back into the city and C) a grand scheme to try to tell people where they can live (these folks actually expected folks to center their lives around where the government decided to build bus stations and train terminals, and plan their daily schedules around when the government decided to run them) and finally especially during the Reagan – Bush years D) a screaming hate fest against white conservative suburbanites with SUVs.

Basically, the public transportation agenda ceased being an actual public transportation agenda and became a tool of various segments of the Atlanta left (environmentalists, labor, “urbanists”, black leaders, social liberals) to promote their own agendas and vent their hatred on white suburbanites. It wasn’t so much that behaving this way killed support for public transportation among white suburban and rural Georgians. It is that “public transportation advocates” were determined to impose their will on them in spite of their lack of support. It became a personal racial, ideological, political etc. battle that the so – called transportation advocates merely wanted to win. They thought that eventually they would prevail because they felt that Democrats would rule Georgia politics forever. But after losing control of Georgia politics to the conservatives, now public transportation advocates want to blame a few years of conservative opposition that A) they created with their agenda and tactics and B) they could have overcome decades ago had their agenda actually been public transportation.

Now of course, the suburban (and rural) conservatives are not blameless. Sadly, many of them were nothing but Newt Gingrich – Mitch Skandalakis race baiters. (Sonny Perdue, the former Democrat who has taken care of more underprivileged black children in his home than 99.9% of civil rights leaders ever will, has thankfully helped the Georgia GOP begin to move past the more overt race baiting politics.) Much of their opposition is reflexive, bitterness that blacks control Atlanta city government and a desire to see the city collapse and do whatever they can to cause it (at a severe cost to the region and entire state!) just to get that control back. Many of the “conservative” MARTA bashers have made it clear that they would have no problem fully funding and expanding MARTA were the agency controlled by “their kind of people.” (They also think that changing the way that MARTA operates from a model that actually benefits people who actually need public transportation to one that bends over backwards to those who don’t is “the American way.” These are the people who would take away the working poor’s only method of getting to work and then complain about their being on welfare because they have no way to get to their jobs.) Not just MARTA, but this same crowd also spent many years raising vague and unsubstantiated allegations of “fraud”, “corruption”, “mismanagement” etc. over Hartsfield Airport as a ruse of gaining control over it. So, these folks began to oppose public transportation simply because it would benefit Atlanta and the people who live there, and were willing to harm themselves in the process, to cut off their own noses to spite Atlanta’s face.

Now as it turned out, the successful opposition was a good thing, because any plan proposed by people using public transportation as a way to impose their wills on – and punish – their political enemies would have been a massive failure in every conceivable way, and held up as an example of why even worthy public transportation projects – such as the sort that Georgia clearly needs – shouldn’t be built. But we cannot merely blame the loony left. Though the socialists bear the bulk of the responsibility, the Strom Thurmond/Jesse Helms Dixiecrat crowd deserve their share of the blame without coming up with a viable public transportation plan using the best engineering, economic, and planning models available that included a mix of rail and roads that would have benefited both suburbanites and law abiding hard working inner city dwellers. Something like that may have actually overcome political opposition and been enacted, or at the very least would have exposed the transportation socialists for the frauds that they were and kept them from controlling the debate and process. But of course, that would have required hard work and actual leadership, and these folks preferred to pander to their narrow interest groups as well as their own petty agendas.

So now, we are stuck with this mess: a metro area that is so large, populated and poorly planned that no transportation plan will solve its problems, and a federal government that will almost certainly use the Clean Air Act and other devices as an excuse to impose a transportation plan that suits its needs, not ours.

A local solution MIGHT have addressed MOST or SOME of the legitimate concerns of both groups. But a federal solution won’t solve the problems of either. They won’t care about the poor economic conditions faced by the Atlanta region’s underclass. They won’t care about the property values, quality of life, or personal freedoms of the suburbanites. Instead, they will impose a solution whose only goal and effect will be to increase the federal government’s scope and power, and make more people dependent on it.

So urban liberals and suburban conservatives, you had your chance to come up with your own regional transportation plan and you blew it. Good luck being a mere cog in the federal transportation plan. Enjoy your five hours on the train to your job in Memphis, Birmingham, Charlotte, or wherever the feds decide your job is going to be!

Blaming Obama for the mess that we are in is dishonest. The guy has been in office 5 months. It isn’t that none of his policies have had time to take effect yet – though that is certainly true – but that virtually none of his policies have even been passed, and those which have passed haven’t even been implemented. For instance, the guy hasn’t even passed a budget blueprint yet. The stimulus wasn’t written by Obama but by Congress, with much of the work obviously done while the presidential campaign was going on. Also, Obama inherited TARP and the other bailout ideas from the Bush regime, and had little choice but to implement them because the economy was going so badly so quickly, and also because so much of the money had been invested already. You can complain about the car bailout plan all you want, but A) it was mismanagement that got the car companies in trouble in the first place and B) the auto bailout wouldn’t have looked much different had it been done by Bush or McCain. And please recall that Congress rejected the Bush automobile bailout with the GOP leading the way.

Secessionists: why didn’t you want to secede when Bush was president? Do you honestly think that Obama has spent more in 5 months than Bush did in eight years, and the GOP congress that was in power from 1994 to 2006 did? You guys only love limited government and less spending when the left is in power. When you guys are in power, you never limit government or cut spending because you know that it is politically unpopular. You aren’t going to cut anyone’s Social Security, Medicare, SUBURBAN public school funding or anything else like that because you know that the voters would throw you out in five seconds. So, you wait until the other party gets into power and then complain about how they won’t make the spending cuts that you never did when you had the chance and never will when you get the chance. Obama gets into office and NOW we need a flat tax? No one wanted a flat tax when the GOP was using the tax code to write corporate welfare checks to the very Enrons and AIGs that collapsed and took the economy down with them.

Won’t ya take me down south, in the land of cotton,
where the idiots reside, and politicians are rotten….
Look away, float away, go away…
Dixie land.

Enjoy your car!

Question: What’s the quickest way to Alabama from Little Five Points?
Answer: 20 miles in any direction. Once you cross 285 its all Alabama.

Like you, Bookman, my jaw dropped to learn Perdue was meeting with VP Biden on high-speed rail. People – if we get high speed rail through Georgia to connect up the Eastern coast, it will drive down airfares out of Hartsfield which will, in turn, increase travel opportunities for pleasure and business. Competition drives down prices. Besides, having the option to take a train ride, which surely would be more comfortable, is appealing compared to Delta’s “Greyhound of the Skies” coach seating.

We cannot squeeze any more lanes onto I-285, yet we cannot live with the daily congestion that drives commuters bonkers and keeps corporations away from setting up headquarters here. Rail is the answer… connecting more points ITP and OTP.

get digging….