The Road to Perdition is Becoming Increasingly Rather Bumpy
As Hillary Clinton famously said in 2004, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”
Little things, like paved roadways, for instance.
This Wall Street Journal article from Saturday titled “Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement” sounds like something out of Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man book on the 1930s. And yet, in spite of FDR’s best efforts to make hash of the economy, there were still plenty of massive, forward-thinking construction projects such as the Hoover Dam, the TVA, the Triborough Bridge and assorted roadways that were built back then. But flash-forward to the era of the MSM’s would-be second FDR, and backwards runs the progress, until reeled the mind:
A hulking yellow machine inched along Old Highway 10 here recently in a summer scene that seemed as normal as the nearby corn swaying in the breeze. But instead of laying a blanket of steaming blacktop, the machine was grinding the asphalt road into bits.
“When [counties] had lots of money, they paved a lot of the roads and tried to make life easier for the people who lived out here,” said Stutsman County Highway Superintendant Mike Zimmerman, sifting the dusty black rubble through his fingers. “Now, it’s catching up to them.”
Outside this speck of a town, pop. 78, a 10-mile stretch of road had deteriorated to the point that residents reported seeing ducks floating in potholes, Mr. Zimmerman said. As the road wore out, the cost of repaving became too great. Last year, the county spent $400,000 on an RM300 Caterpillar rotary mixer to grind the road up, making it look more like the old homesteader trail it once was.
Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.
In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.
The moves have angered some residents because of the choking dust and windshield-cracking stones that gravel roads can kick up, not to mention the jarring “washboard” effect of driving on rutted gravel.
But higher taxes for road maintenance are equally unpopular. In June, Stutsman County residents rejected a measure that would have generated more money for roads by increasing property and sales taxes.
“I’d rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill,” said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman’s Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood.
Rebuilding an asphalt road today is particularly expensive because the price of asphalt cement, a petroleum-based material mixed with rocks to make asphalt, has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Gravel becomes a cheaper option once an asphalt road has been neglected for so long that major rehabilitation is necessary.
“A lot of these roads have just deteriorated to the point that they have no other choice than to turn them back to gravel,” says Larry Galehouse, director of the National Center for Pavement Preservation at Michigan State University. Still, “we’re leaving an awful legacy for future generations.”
Some experts caution that gravel roads can be costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed. A gravel road “is not a free road,” says Purdue University’s John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled “Back to the Stone Age.”
Funny how there’s a lot of that going around these days, isn’t it?
(Meanwhile, at the intersection of reprimitivization and automobiles in France, things are much worse, as those pesky “youths” are back for another round of car-b-ques; this time spiced up with automatic weapons.)
Update: Moe Lane runs the numbers.
Gravel roads do have some benefits in that they:
- reduce city expenses and taxes
- reduce vehicular speeds
- reduce vehicle accidents
- reduce injuries and deaths caused by vehicle accidents
- reduce use of and reliance upon petroleum, both in the production of the roads and in the slower, more efficient, speed of cars
- reduce roadway noise
- encourage alternate forms of transportation
Are gravel roads inconvenient? Certainly. Could they cut down on the 40,000 US roadway deaths each year? Absolutely. For me, that’s an inconvenience I would happily embrance for “the common good”.
Lastly, if readers click on the article’s link to Mr’s Clinton “common good” statement, they will find that she was addressing affluent individuals and referring specifically to eliminating some tax cuts that had been particuarly beneficial to the wealthy. While it was certainly a left-wing comment, it was not the sweeping marxist statement that the author implies.
I don’t know where liberals like yourself think that taking anything away from anyone in the form of taxes is for the common good, but you can keep it.
I haven’t ever been wealthy in my life, but I would love the life that America offered that I could be if I wished. People like you should move to Europe, or Canada. You know, all the failed experiments in doing that sort of thing.
That sort of thing smacks of everything evil. It is theft, greed and graft.The honest poor of the US want you to keep it.
Always wonder what “common good” is, and who got to decide what is “good”, what is “common”?
Who else but Mrs. Clinton would decide what Mrs Clinton’s “common good” was, no?
Mrs. Clinton would use the power of the Fed to take away from the “affluent” to buy votes from the more “deserved” for her own good. For a couple who have spent their entire adult lives doing common good, it’s a wonder that they could afford their mansion in Westchester and a Georgetown town home right after their stint in the White House.
Nonsense. I grew up in an area with a lot of gravel roads (one every mile, don’t ya know), and the vast majority of fatal accidents that killed neighbors, friends, and classmates were on gravel roads. In fact, the majority is so vast that I can’t think of one fatal accident that occurred on the highways in the area.
Going back to gravel isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it sure as shootin’ isn’t going to reduce the number of vehicle fatalities in the process.
1. Rural roads are generally not paid for by city taxes, but by county, state, and federal.
2. Although you have no evidence to back this up, gravel roads are much harder to drive on, more so in rainy weather. They also require maintenance, sometimes more than pavement, lest they become impassable.
3. See above – one of the reasons we have paved back roads is the carnage from the lousy roads
4. Slower is not always more efficient, cars, trucks, and all vehicles that burns fuel have speeds at which fuel consumption is optimal – poking along isn’t it.
5. Roadway noise – you are joking, right ? Obviously you have never spent a night in the country, nature is loud, a couple of cars on the road a quarter mile away are rarely heard.
6. Alternatives to hauling produce to market – horse and buggy ? $3000 tail bikes with trailers ? Zeppelins ? Right now there aren’t any, and until there are, you had best get used to bare supermarket shelves if you really want to go back to the past.
“For me, that’s an inconvenience I would happily embrance for “the common good”.” Well, that is mighty generous of you, as I watch my house burn down because the fire truck is stuck, or somebody dies because the ambulance can’t get through or just takes too long, or the price of your arugula goes up because of the spoilage during transit.
I’d just like to point out that there is a National Center for Pavement Preservation.
Of course, we won’t point out that Old Hwy 10 in North Dakota is parallel to…Interstate 94. We also won’t point out that all Mr. Zimmerman and his predecessors had to do over the last few decades was chip-seal the old road. Call it “poor man’s pavement,” if you like, but it does help extend the life of the pavement when the lack of traffic can’t justify resurfacing, much less rebuilding the road base.
And we really won’t point out that this sort of “regraveling” has been going on since at least the Great Depression in the Dakotas.
Our rural area has had gravel or rock roads since I was a boy. Its true they become rough after rain or when frost goes out of the ground or when grain trucks are on the move,but during dry spells, parts of the roads are packed to the consistency of asphalt.
They are dangerous and slick a few days after new rock is applied.
I have driven on packed gravel at 80 MPH and lived to tell the tail.
I’m sure this is all fine by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, pushing another aspect of Obama’s “livablity initiative” with the glee of a 21st century Luddite:
“This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”
Barack To The Future!