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Interstate is to mountains what drilling is to the gulf

By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published July 31, 2005

WAYNESVILLE, N.C. - Mountain people don't often ask for outside help, but now they need yours. Otherwise, the trucking lobby and some pork-happy lawmakers are going to ram a $50-billion interstate highway through the Southern Appalachians of northeastern Georgia and far western North Carolina, where no such boondoggle ought to go.

It looks greased. The pork - excuse me, transportation - bill Congress was poised to pass Friday authorizes $2.64-million to study the "feasibility" of that and another dubious interstate. That's three times what the House initially proposed.

"If this stays a local issue, we're going to get a highway through the mountains," warns Norman "Buzz" Williams, executive director of the Chattooga Conservancy, which is fighting the proposed Interstate 3.

But outside of Savannah, Augusta and Atlanta, whose boosters are very much for it, no one else seems to have taken notice. When I telephoned John Stone, press secretary to Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Georgia, he sounded surprised that anyone elsewhere would care. Why, he wondered, would a St. Petersburg newspaper be interested?

One reason, I told him, is that my wife and I own a home in western North Carolina. It's not in the endangered area, but it's near enough to sensitize us to the environmental consequences. If that's a conflict of interest, I hereby declare it.

Another reason has to do with who would pay the bill for a $50-billion shortcut from Savannah to Knoxville. That money belongs to all of us taxpayers, some of whom might prefer to see it spent more wisely than on gouging great craters through beautiful mountains and befouling wild rivers like the Chattooga.

And then there's this: We're running out of oil and clean air. Highway transport is the costliest, dirtiest way to move freight. Are the railroads as overloaded as the interstates?

The pretexts vary depending on who's talking.

Some of the boosters contend the project is pro-environment; it would relieve Atlanta's notorious traffic congestion by diverting a lot of trucks. Less congestion, less pollution, less fuel consumption. Or so the story goes.

The trouble with it is that urban sprawl, not interstate cargo, is the primary source of Atlanta's infamous traffic jams. Cars are much more of a problem than trucks. Moreover, the Savannah-Knoxville bypass would not relieve any of the Interstate 75 truck traffic.

"What this highway is about is feathering the nest of the constituents putting money in their campaigns," Williams contends. "Their constituents are Georgia Power and the big box stores that want to move their containers from Savannah into the Midwest . . . They're sacrificing our mountains."

I promised Stone to print Norwood's side, so here it is.

"The No. 1 reason is that it's badly needed transportation equity in east Georgia," Stone said. "There are areas of the South that have been absolutely overlooked in interstate highway development . . . that have seen a real lack of growth due to lack of economic opportunity and unsafe highways. If you try to travel today between Augusta and Savannah, the second and third largest cities in Georgia, you're still driving two-lane Highway 25 behind log trucks, the same as the 1950s."

Augusta, he said, is the second largest city with no north-south interstate access. He insisted the study would include all options.

Equity could be satisfied, however, by ending the proposed interstate at Augusta, where it would join Interstate 20. Whatever convenience would come from pushing it further north through the Georgia and Carolina mountains could not be worth the immense cost and drastic environmental consequences.

Floridians, and especially our congressional delegation, should see it this way: What oil drilling in the gulf means to Florida is what that interstate means to the mountains.

Rep. C.W. Bill Young, the senior member of the delegation, sounded properly skeptical on the telephone the other day.

"My thinking as I looked at the proposed route is that it would be very, very expensive. You don't really go over mountains on interstates; sometimes they go through mountains," he said.

But the study is in the pork bill, which the president ought to veto but will probably sign. Has anyone ever heard of such a study finding something to be not feasible?

Remember the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, and how hard it was to stop. This boondoggle is as bad if not worse. And it will be harder to stop.

Martin Dyckman's e-mail address is dyckman@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 29, 2005, 21:49:02]