Jeff Whitten
Columnist
An old friend called me the other day.
“What is it with the traffic anymore?” he asked. “I’ve been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for about an hour. Probably going to be late for my appointment. May never see home again.”
I commiserated. Me and traffic don’t get along. Not having much of it was one of the reasons this part of Georgia was such a great place to live.
“Yeah but that was 40 years ago,” my friend said. “Back before this place got bought and sold into whatever it is now. And it’s still happening. I passed by a place recently that I swear last month had the prettiest stretch of trees you’ll ever see. They were gone, and there were about 100 houses there and it looked like every single one of them had five or six vehicles in the driveway.”
There’s your answer on the traffic, I said. “Yep,” he said. “Every mile of new road seems to come with half a dozen new subdivisions and convenience stores attached, and that’s not counting the warehouses or the 40 million trucks that come with them.”
I heard a horn honk and some expletives deleted and something that might have been a snarl.
“Oh man, I’m starting to wish I lived about 1,000 miles from the ports, and I was born and raised here,” my friend said. “Now we got the fastest growing port on the East Coast. Whoopee doo. All that means to me is I can’t go half a mile without being covered up in big trucks with surely drivers. Heck, I can count 10 of them stuck here in this terrible traffic with me.”
It’s not going to get better anytime soon, I said.
“I know,” my friend said. “And you know what else I don’t like? Traffic is almost 24-7 anymore. It’s almost like a permanent high tide. You remember how 20 years or so ago maybe you had your morning and afternoon rush hours but in between if you had to go somewhere you could get there and back pretty quick? Not anymore, unless you got to go somewhere at 3 a.m.”
And even then you probably find folks trying to beat rush hour to get to work.
“Yeah, and probably half them folks and the houses they live in weren’t even here five, 10 years ago,” my friend said. “They were just a gleam in some developer’s eye.”
Don’t get me started on developers, I said.
“I won’t,” he said. “But think about this: what’s going to happen if everybody in, say, Pooler, Richmond Hill, Chatham County and Rincon all happen to flush their toilets at the same time? I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. A giant sinkhole. Let that sink in for a minute.”
I did. “It’s going to suck all the water out of the Floridan aquifer,” my friend said, “and the weight of all these subdivisions and convenience stores and warehouses and people and cars and trucks is going to cave in the whole area. It’s going to make the biggest Florida sinkhole ever sunk look like a pothole.”
Man, I said, that wouldn’t be good.
“Heck no it wouldn’t be good,” he said, but used five or six words in place of heck that have no place in a newspaper. “And think about this. Where’s all this new trash going? I saw one house must’ve had three big trash cans down by its mailbox and every one of them was overflowing. Multiply that by say 800,000 cans and then times it by 52 weeks a year and what do you get?”
I don’t know, I said. Math was never my strong suit. It gives me the hives.
“I don’t know how much it is either but it’s a lot of new trash on top of all the native trash, which was already a lot, and it’s all got to go somewhere. Unless you’re a redneck and you burn it in your backyard or go dump it on somebody else’s property.”
I hate that sort of stuff, I said.
“Me too, me too,” he said. “But we both know it happens. Some people just have no respect for others.”
He continued. “I bet I must spend an hour a week picking up trash from the ditches in front of my wife’s property. You’d be amazed at what all gets thrown out there. Heck, within a week of us finally getting a Chick-fil-A I was finding chicken sandwich wrappers and cups with their name on it. I can always tell when a new fast food place opens in town.
Its trash winds up in the ditch “ I wish I had an answer, I said.
“Yeah, me too,” he said. “I thought about going to city council and county commission meetings to fuss and tell them to quit letting every slicked up Tom, Dick and Harry with a cell phone and pickup build these giant mixed use developments, but I ain’t got enough time to go to all of them - there must be, what 20 local governments between Rincon and Richmond Hill and Pooler and Savannah and whatnot and they’re all busy looking for ways to spend your taxes.”
You could call your Congressman, I said.
“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer. Heck, he wants to buy Greenland. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Maybe it’s no wonder things are so bad, I said. We get what we vote for, even if we didn’t vote for it.
My friend considered that for a minute.
“Nope, I blame the Democrats,” he said, and hung up.
Now retired, Jeff Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News.
