Study ranks July 4 vacation bottlenecks

[MGKrebs]

This was on CNN tv this morning too.
"Oregon, Virginia top list of U.S. trouble spots"
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/06/29/vacation.bottlenecks/index.html

Huh? Oregon and Virginia? That doesn't sound right. Then "the Amish country of Pennsylvania"? WTF?
Looking more closely, it's because they are rating the worst traffic but they excluded urban areas. So I wondered who did the study, and why would they exclude urban areas? They say they excluded urban areas because they can't seperate local traffic from tourist traffic, so they end up excluding Orlando? What's the point?

So the group that did the study is The American Highway Users Alliance,
http://www.highways.org/
and they seem to advocate safer highways, which is fine, but apparently represent primarily truckers, service station dealers, and highway construction firms. They oppose Kyoto and favor a "market solution". In what they call "America's Clean Little Secret", they claim that "America’s air quality has dramatically improved since passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970" but nobody knows it. One is left to assume what they hope to achieve by disseminating this information.

They are a member of the The Global Climate Coalition, which represents business interests in the global warming debate.
http://www.globalclimate.org/newsroom/nr-00-0602-highwayusers.htm

Haven't been able to track down the money trail yet except for one guy who claims AHUA as his emplyer and gave a couple of hundred bucks to the Idaho Republican party.

So I'm not saying these guys are totally evil, but they DO have an agenda. And CNN is not serving the public (as usual) by promoting an interest groups agenda without disclosure about that group.

[tanyev]

1. On the bright side, Branson, MO is also on the list.

You don't need to tell me to avoid that place. (shudder)