Jeff Whitten

Local Columnist

Alas, in my neighborhood there are still some of us dumb enough to think we live on a residential street.

But that’s just because we live on it.

For everybody else it’s a shortcut, a half-mile straight-shot connector road linking two heavily traveled roads that have gotten even more heavily traveled as the surrounding area has gone to you-know-where in a hurry.

It’s not just here, where my wife and I and our neighbors live, either. The transition to you-knowwhere has happened and is still happening all over, from Springfield and Rincon and Guyton to Pooler to Richmond Hill and Pembroke, and it’s spreading like some kind of awful skin fungus.

Or a plague of warts and boils.

Some will disagree, of course, which is what makes us great as a country. We can all agree that other people are wrong.

For example, the economic developers and their cheerleaders in local government say that what’s happening here is progress, perhaps the greatest the world has ever seen.

But then they would, wouldn’t they? It’s what they are paid to do, and they want to keep their jobs, though just once I’d like to see somebody in charge of economic development try the opposite approach and tell the whole truth.

“The truth is, these 10,000 jobs will probably have to go to people who move here to take them because quite frankly we won’t be able to find 10,000 people already here willing or able to do them. Oh, and all these dump trucks are going to tear up your roads big time and we’re going to spend thousands in taxpayer studies to find ways to lure people down here to fill these jobs and when they get here they’ll start complaining about traffic. But hey, jobs!”

In the meantime, progress for us regular folks already here means doing things like making adjustments to our daily lives, such as leaving half an hour earlier to make sure we get to a doctor’s appointment on time even though he’s where he’s always been and so are we. And then having to sit in a waiting room an extra 45 minutes because he’s covered up in new patients who talk like they were extras in the movie Goodfellas Meets the Big 10.

Progress often means paying more in property taxes and getting back less in quality of life and wondering whether it’s time to try and sell a place you never intended to leave and move somewhere else, so long as it is not in the crosshairs of economic big shots trying to turn this place into the next Rust Belt, complete with hockey rink and Ohio State alumni bar.

Sometimes progress jumps out at you 30 seconds after you pull out of your driveway. That happened to me the other day when I hadn’t got 20 yards down our street before I got blown off the road by a woman with New York plates on her car.

Yep. Word has spread all the way to New York that our street is a handy way to get where you’re going in South Effingham, and never mind the speed limit of 35 mph or any locals that happen to be in front of you. Just go around them.

But that was so last week. Sunday, my wife and I spent the day enjoying the noise of traffic as hundreds if not thousands of drivers sped up and down our street because somebody ran into a power pole on a nearby state highway, causing yet another bleeping traffic meltdown.

I say another because it seems every day brings at least half a dozen new adventures in motor vehicle mishap and it’s a rare day when we don’t hear the siren calls of first responders – God bless ‘em – as they head out to clean up messes too many people trying to get to too many places while going in too many different directions on too few roads tend to make. Over and over again.

Hey, a couple dozen more strategically placed roundabouts will fix it, maybe.

Nope. I happen to like roundabouts, but what we really need is an army of masked vigilantes in the paving industry willing to sneak around in the wee small hours of the night putting in illegal speed bumps.

I’d be willing to help. The sad thing is the fallout from all this growth doesn’t fall on everyone equally. Some people, those who don’t live in gated communities well insulated from the bulldozer and the dump truck, get the worst of it. That’s up around Black Creek and Groover Hill and Blitchton, where the combination of the growth of Georgia’s ports in Savannah, Hyundai, warehouses and smaller scale manufacturing has turned what was once a quiet, peaceful, almost idyllic corner of rural Georgia into a grinding, dusty, dirty and loud example of sticking economic development down people’s throats whether they want it or not.

But you also could live somewhere in South Bryan or Richmond Hill, where those “gardens that grow people” in places that once grew timber are growing people and the vehicles they drive like kudzu, and changing the community forever in the process.

So are warehouses, which have popped up in every direction, many within about a three-mile radius from home. This in an area that until the late 1990s was largely fields and woods and if the spirit moved us my wife and I could cover the 33-mile distance from there to, say, the beach at Tybee Island in a little over half an hour if we left early enough on a Saturday morning to beat the rush. And that was even taking a minute to wave bye to the cows that lived across the street.

Not anymore. Now you’ve got a better chance of seeing a data center or an airport than a cow, and as noted earlier, you better leave early to be on time because it can take half an hour to go five miles, and what isn’t busy being covered up in warehouses or convenience stores or strip malls is overgrown with Dollar Generals and subdivisions.

And here’s a thought: If the new subdivision name includes “wood,” or “forest” or some form of tree like pine or oak, chances are whoever moves in will have to bring their own trees or go without shade.

To me, that says a lot about where we are, and where we’re going.

Jeff Whitten is a whiny old semi-retired hack but doesn’t have any warts or boils at the moment.