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.

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