Thomas Wheatley of Atlanta’s Creative Loafing has an interesting post on the publication’s “Fresh Loaf” blog. In it he takes issue with a report on Georgia’s transportation infrastructure issued late last month by a non-profit organization called TRIP. Wheatley’s first order of business is to identify TRIP’s major source of funding as “businesses who have an interest in seeing more roads.”

Next, he questions whether TRIP’s recommendations are compatible with a future in which the mention of $3 a gallon gasoline will trigger nostalgia. Wheatley also brings up the important issue of induced traffic. More roads mean more cars:

“Something left out about the ‘we-must-build-roads’ philosophy is how planners and politicians are not addressing the issue of the price and supply of oil and how the added number of motorists will affect Atlanta’s notorious air quality problems. As more and more roads are built allowing more and more development of the city’s outer reaches, more and more people will be driving.”

While metropolitan Atlanta figures most prominently in the report, several Chatham County roads and bridges are mentioned in TRIP’s “Future Mobility in Georgia” report, which can be downloaded by clicking here.