As I was driving out to work the Gwinnett Gladiators game last Sunday, it was the first time I had been in Gwinnett County for a few months.  For those of you who don’t live in the area, there is a massive construction area that is wrapping up which “rights” a “wrong”.  I’m not sure what possessed the initial road engineers to allow a two-lane highway (Rt. 316) to merge south into the left lane of an interstate highway (I-85).  Spitting traffic out into a lane where people average 80+ miles per hour in non-rush hour times is a recipe for disaster.  Now they have set the highway to travel over I-85 and deposit drivers on the right side of the highway.

While that was a necessary change, it also showed everything that is wrong with Gwinnett and metro Atlanta in terms of transportation planning.  I don’t think there’s a city besides Los Angeles that loves its cars more and is utterly dependent on gargantuan sized roads to keep the traffic from being at an utter standstill 20 hours out of the day.  With the new configuration of lanes and additional lanes thrown in for good measure in this area, it appears that there will be NINE lanes of traffic each way on I-85 at that intersection.

Here’s a newsflash for Gwinnett and metro Atlanta – if you have EIGHTEEN lanes of traffic and you still have overcrowded roads, perhaps it’s time to revisit public transportation options?  I know that metro Atlanta isn’t set up the most logical way and since there are five distinct, major work districts, we might be at a point where suburban trains will now never work but it’s worth looking into.  Legislators down here are actually proposing a TWENTY THREE lane swath of I-75 where it intersects with I-285.  I can’t fathom how they can’t grasp the utter absurdity of it all.  How could a driver possibly merge 11 lanes from the left to the right in rush hour without it taking them 5 miles to accomplish such a feat?  Is that really the solution compared to plopping a commuter train on one of those Precious Lanes of asphalt which could take hundreds of vehicles off the road per train?  Like I tell people down here, the best advertisement for mass transit in Chicago is seeing the Blue Line roar at 60 mph towards O’Hare Airport (or downtown) while you’re driving 3 mph in traffic soup.

I’ve never seen an area of the country that is so pro-business that also completely refuses to take its head out of the sand to address an area that will completely cripple this town in the very near future.  Potential companies are now opting for cities other than Atlanta to relocate their corporate headquarters here, knowing they would lose hours of productive employee time while they sat in traffic.

Meanwhile, Gwinnett County continues to repave I-85 every few years whether it needs it or not.  For those up you up north who are used to horrendous potholed roads and uneven patches of pavement, you’d be astounded at the quality of roads they deem appropriate to repave again.  Instead of appropriating some of that money to looking at other viable options, they cut down swaths of carbon-consuming trees along the highway until the concrete is about as far away from certain subdivisions now as a normal person could toss a computer keyboard (weird analogy - I know).

I understand that it’s not easy to adjust to a population boom in a metro area where more than 1 million people have descended on the area in the past decade (myself included).  There’s always inherent challenges to such an insane amount of growth (see our current water shortage as another good example).  But the shortsightedness of local and state politicians on this issue, in addition to resistance from politicians from outside of metro Atlanta who are loathe to earmark any kind of funding for our Godless Metropolis of Transplanted Yankees, is going to make Atlanta a cautionary tale for years to come when it comes to urban/suburban planning.