Some American cities have buses.
Some use trams and trains. And there's one...
that uses golf carts.
- My name is Vanessa Fleisch
and I am the mayor of Peachtree City, Georgia.
It's a small city of about 35,000 people that is about 20 minutes south of Atlanta.
It's asphalt paths, we have over 100 miles of them.
They range from 8 feet to 10 feet wide in some places.
They're used for golf carts mostly.
We have over 11,000 registered golf carts in the city.
Obviously, pedestrians, bicyclists, all kinds of traffic is on these paths.
Morning!
- You do have to register them? - Yes, you do.
The people in the city do register them.
- There's someone else approaching us now. I assume it's like regular roads.
You pass on the right and...
- Correct.
- Yeah?
- Yeah. - It's a parallel road network, basically.
- The majority of the city is accessible by carts
and that's a huge attraction because parents
can pick up their kids at school if they want to.
- And some of the kids can drive themselves?
- Yes, the younger kids or the sophomores at the local high schools are allowed
with their learner's permit to drive their carts to school.
- Wow. - It's very quiet...
- It's a bit of freedom that they enjoy.
- And I guess if it's limited to 20 miles an hour,
there's less of a chance of a bad bump.
So, this is the high school.
- This is.
There's parking at the high school for 615 carts.
- That is a lot of golf carts. Do all the students leave at once here?
Is it just a traffic jam of golf carts?
- It is a traffic jam of golf carts and it's not always pretty.
- Some of them have a limiter?
- They do, but sometimes they can be removed
and they go faster than they should, which isn't good.
- No, that's exactly what I'd have done at age 15 with my own golf cart.
I would have removed the limiter on it.
- Some of the carts have heaters inside them and radios.
You can soup them up as much as you want really.
After they saw the popularity in the '70s what they did
was they required, whenever there was a new subdivision of houses built,
that they connected the paths.
For the most part, the cart paths are laid out
at the same time they lay out the roads.
- So, what are the road rules here?
It's like you're in a regular vehicle,
you've just got more paths that you can go on?
- Yes, and if there is no path,
you are allowed to be on the road, but that's why
we've expanded the paths because we're trying
to keep people off of them as much as possible.
Sometimes people who have never been here have been caught
on cart paths with their cars
thinking that that's the right thing to do. - Wow!
- I wanted to take you through a drive-thru. So up here is McDonald's.
- I'm still getting over the fact that I'm in a drive-thru in a golf cart!
- Thank you.
- Should point out, not sponsored. This is not product placement.
- The brakes on this are very good. I'm sorry, it's very abrupt on them.
- Better than the alternative.
Peachtree City was a planned community, right?
- How did it go from "we're gonna build some houses here"
to we're gonna have something that
that I don't think any other city in America has?
- It got started originally as a lake retreat for Atlanta residents.
And the people who were here, basically only on the weekends,
they started taking their golf carts on the roads leaving from playing golf.
This whole separate network came up as a result of that
to get them off the roads on their way home.
- So, this was founded in the 1950s.
- 1959 by Joel Cowan.
He was a college student when he designed and founded this city.
- Wow. - It's very quiet...
See what I mean?
- Death wish, good grief!
- Along here, this is Lake Peachtree--
- Sorry, I got distracted by ducks.
- The Founder, Mr. Cowan and his cousin were the ones
that put up the dam and spillway originally
that made this lake.
100,000 gallons a second goes over this.
People do pay taxes to pay towards these roads.
It costs us $1.8 million a year to maintain what we have
as well as the 29 bridges and 29 tunnels.
- This is a pretty affluent city, which I guess is one
of the reasons that the golf cart paths work,
but there are a lot of cities like that in America
and I'm trying to work out why it's worked here
and it hasn't elsewhere.
- Most mayors when they see or hear about us and they think
"oh, we can do that", well, they've got older cities,
so they really can't.
- And I guess part of it is cost.
Part of it is you need a huge amount of upkeep and tax
and everything to make this work, but it's also because
you need to set the whole thing up or it doesn't work.
You can't have a quarter of a cart network
because no one will buy a cart and no one will use it.
You need to connect everything or it's not worth it.
- Right.
- Lovely! Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- You can find out more about Peachtree City in the links in the description.
I've just realised there's no seat belts on this.
- No.