One way to erase "sprawl"?

Here's something for the conspiracy theorists (or just those like me with uncontrollable imaginations).

I just received an email about an interesting plan to take small towns off the map:

CHATTOOGAVILLE, Ga. (Dec. 9) -- Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Due West and Po Biddy Crossroads. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too.

A total of 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.

Erased from the map? I thought only Stalin erased communities from the map!

Relax. That's not meant as a heavy-handed moral equivalency analogy. When Stalin erased communities from the map, it was generally because they no longer existed.

In Georgia, they just want to end "clutter":

Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.

The state began handing out the new map at rest stops and welcome centers over the summer.

Gone are such places as Dewy Rose, Hemp, Experiment, Retreat, Wooster, Sharp Top and Chattoogaville, a spot in far northwestern Georgia that consists of little more than a two-truck volunteer fire department, a few farmhouses and a country store where locals fill up their gas tanks.

"We're not under obligation to show every single community," department spokeswoman Karlene Barron said. "While we want to, there's a balancing act. And the map was getting illegible."

That doesn't ease the snub to the people who live in those places.

"This gets back to respect for rural areas," said Dennis Holt, who is leading a community group that wants to restore the good name of western Georgia's Hickory Level, population 1,000, which was founded in 1828 and recently put up five new welcome signs. "I'm not sure we're going to accomplish anything, but I would have felt bad about myself if I didn't say something about it."

Respect for rural areas? Sorry, but in light of the new trend to discourage people from living in rural areas, "respect" for these areas would mean discouraging "sprawl." And what better way to discourage sprawl than to make it as difficult as possible for people to find charming rural communities?

Of course, I'm not sure the people who make maps are smart enough to think of this, so it might be an inintended consequence. However the new maps were prepared by the state's Department of Transportation, so I'm just wondering whether some of the bureaucrats there might be inclined to sympathize with the Sierra Club's view of their proper role in combatting "sprawl":

New highways are the number one cause of sprawl, according to American Farmland Trust. Build them, and the traffic will come. They may give short-term relief, but long term they just encourage more sprawl.
And later, an even better idea:
Tear Down a Freeway, Save a City
Taking rural communites off the map might not be much, but it's a start.

MORE: I can remember when the purpose of state Departments of Transportation was to build highways, and encourage transportation. Now, they're being targeted (and infiltrated) by activists who want to change their goal into one of discouraging transportation. I can't help but notice than in Georgia the Sierra Club is hot on the job!

posted by Eric on 12.09.06 at 09:32 AM





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