Villa Rica Working to Accommodate More Golf Carts

But the trails are not just for walkers: they are for golf carts, too. Villa Rica passed an ordinance last year allowing golf carts on city streets, and now a component of the ongoing debate on city spending priorities is where to create new access points for the carts.

City manager Larry Wood told WABE, “If you want to encourage the whole city to become more personal transportation vehicle friendly, then you need to start designing ways to get people around town so that somebody in an old section of the town can actually drive to the store to get their groceries like you already can in Mirror Lake.”

Mirror Lake is a 36-hole golf community and was the impetus for the city to put a focus on what are now legally called personal transportation vehicles.

But there are three state highways running through Villa Rica, and the challenge now is to find ways to help the golf carts cross those so their drivers can access other parts of the city. So far, state transportation rules have allowed only one crossing. To get more, the city will have to spend money to install new traffic signals.

But Wood says the city’s focus is on the long-term. There’s a 20-year plan for multi-purpose trails to circle the city, Woods says, to help Villa Rica grow while keeping its small town feeling even though its population has more than tripled since the year 2000.