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Who'd have thought it? Could cows have a partial answer to our traffic problems? I may have received a vision...

Increasing congestion leaves no doubt that we're being swallowed by metro Atlanta. I'm sure many of us have noticed the growing similarity that driving on Highways 138 and 278 bears to running the gauntlet on the great Gwinnett county trio of Jimmy Carter Boulevard, Indian Trail and Pleasant Hill. Can Salem and Sigman, Almon and even Highway 11 be very far behind?

We seem to accept this growth of the lemming lines as inevitable. The DOT keeps designing new "solutions", and governors keep promoting massive transportation plans, yet the clogged arteries keep expanding. Is it simply time to give up hope? Maybe not.

Some years back, I lived in eastern Pennsylvania (yes, I'm just another reforming Yankee). While that part of the nation isn't exactly the sticks (Philly is little further away than Atlanta for us), I don't remember the traffic being so bad, especially off of the interstates.

Of course, such recollections could be unfairly shaded by time, so I decided to pay attention this summer on a visit north of the Mason-Dixon. Surprisingly, wistful reminiscence hadn't gotten the better of me. Traffic really wasn't as bad, which left me wondering why.

Some further observation eventually gave me a conclusion, and it has nothing to do with any condescension about superior Yankee engineering or road manners. Quite the contrary. Those observations also reminded me that Rocky Balboa and his neighbors are just as likely to slug you in their road rage as anyone from the endless freeways of LA!

The answer, I suspect, is more a matter of sheer dumb luck. You see, much of the road net for Pennsylvania's dense population was built 50 plus years ago, before the emergence of powerful state road departments: that is, before any central planning or control was applied to road building. To put it in the vernacular, they haphazardly paved every dirt track in sight!

This paving mania included many strange, convoluted routes that we laughingly assumed had started as cow paths. More sensibly, new neighborhoods were connected in with the extensive net of roads at many points — the single access subdivision is rarely found up there.

Point is, when the main drags clog up, there's always lots of little secondary roads for getting around the problem. Normally, only the interstates leave you in an endless, bumper to bumper fix.

Now I'm no civil engineer, and my conclusion comes from a mighty informal study, but maybe there's something to this idea. Shoot, Georgia's got just as good of cows as anyplace up north; perhaps we should just let them wander, followed by a paving crew...

Copyright ã, Douglas Holt, 2001