Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement(America returning to the stone age?)

Wall Street Journal ^ | 7/17/2010 | Lauren Etter

[mick]

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.

[mick]

The wages of Fiat Money,Overspending,and Debt is decline in our standard of living...THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

[glorgau]

It’s called “devolution”.

[Sacajaweau]

How we sure we’re not talking about milling...and putting chips on the roads which does away with the old system of repaving.

[Nervous Tick]

In Texas, we don’t rip our roads up... we sell ‘em to Spain and they rent ‘em back to us. :-)

[Sacajaweau]

We've been doing this for years...

It's a great economical move on the part of the county. The new stones are loose for a while but get gound in after a couple of weeks.

Town of Webster Monroe County NYS

[ClearCase_guy]

A great deal of the early talk about the Stimulus Bill was that it would focus on infrastructure: roads, bridges, etc.

And we are, with a $1.4T deficit this year, and we can't afford to pave our roads.

Blows me away.

[SMARTY]

Yup...then pay unemployed for make-work jobs to build roads, etc.

Duhhh

[svcw]

I live a community where there are dirt roads........awful. Evey time it rains, culverts that could swallow a car. Dust, mud......

[junta]

Send in Shirley Sherrod, she will get those crackers rolling down the highway in no time.

[Sacajaweau]

We went to a little town in Canada for our fishing vacation.

The last 40 miles was gravel and dirt roads...Lotsa excitement...the car was all over the place. Occasionally, we'd see a grader making the road nice, nice again....

[Dogbert41]

Sometimes you have to chose what’s more important: paving the roads, or feeding, clothing, housing, imprisoning, medical for the illegal Mexicans who do the jobs Americans on unemployment won’t do.

[riri]

40 miles of dirt roads, I bet you swore you felt like the car was losing bolts and screws! After that long on dirt roads, it’s always a shock to get out and see the car still in tact.

[Nervous Tick]

>> Evey time it rains, culverts that could swallow a car. Dust, mud......

Keeps the tourist riff-raff out though... right?

[Nervous Tick]

>> feeding, clothing, housing, imprisoning, medical for the illegal Mexicans

Oh, BS.

We don’t imprison any.

(rest of it is accurate though)

[pallis]

People need to find non government solutions to the problems arising from government’s waste and mismanagement. The first step to making improvements and maintenance affordable is to get government out of the process.

[msrngtp2002]

So we all take what is written at face value? What is wrong with the old needs based assessment of spending of tax dollars. If a road has 10 cars per day drive down it then how is it fair that that particular road gets expensive paving? There are lots of road around where I live that are perfectly drivable as dirt roads - they are solid, have fewer pot holes than paved roads and are inexpensive to maintain.

I don’t think this portends some demise in our economy but common sense. We get all emotional about things like an article saying we are headed back to the stone age - come on!

There exists a concept I call “Good enough” - and it should be applied to everything involving taxpayer dollars. Is the school “good enough” or do we need it to be some palace? Is the road good enough or do we need it to be paved, lined, with a bicycle path alongside?

I applaud these states, cities and townships who make these difficult decisions. It’s way past time that we all look at any tax expenditure with an eye toward how many it affects and not just who it affects. If a rural road has 2 homes per mile their tax investment certainly can’t match that of a city street with 200 homes per mile - so we need to spend accordingly.

[Sacajaweau]

The old cars we had were amazing...3 kids, a dog, and mom and dad and a 80 lb Penn Yan on top of the car.

Nothing like a walleye from fresh Canadian waters!!!

[TheClintons-STILLAnti-American]

"It’s called “devolution”."

But if we just wait long enough the roads will rebuild themselves.

Afterall, that's how we humans got here, right?

Given the magic element of enough time, the Law of Entropy that says things go from order to disorder gets reversed by one of an infinite number of possibilities coming to fruition and evolution causing it to progress.

The eventual result of this anomaly of nature and reality is what we now know as the Progressive/Democrat Party.

So maybe breaking up the roads is really Progress, because it's providing something more akin to raw materials for time to work its magic on.

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

They know what they are doing. After a few months the taxpayers will be happy to cough up a few more bucks to pay for new roads.

[FrankR]

Being from Georgia, when I went into the Air Force in 1964 a lot of those "yankee boys" - whose only exposure to the South was reading "Tobacco Road", or watching Andy Griffith - would ask me if the GI issue shoes were the first shoes I'd ever had; or "do yoose guys have 'lectricity down there yet?". It was their automatic response to probably the first Southern accent they had ever heard.

Well, the truth is, I hardly ever went barefoot, I always had shoes; heck, we even had an indoor bathroom, electric lights, a telephone, AND a TV.

But, even though we had paved roads, there were still a lot of side roads that were not paved. I learned to drive mostly on those roads when I was about 14...no traffic much to worry about...or cops.

Sections of those roads would wash out and become "rubboard", or "washboard", roads, with series of ridges like an old washboard...they made you feel like the car was coming apart. Then there were deep ditches on either side, and when it rained...wow...slipping and sliding was not just a song lyric.

Once a month or so, the "roadscraper" would come through and smooth them all out for a while, at least until the next big rainstorm.

It was really hard to keep your car clean, especially if you lived on a dirt road; mud and that old Georgia red clay would cake underneath the fenders in the rain, and the choking dust would not only coat your car, but most everything in your yard and in your house (no air conditioning in those days, so the windows stayed up most of the time), if your house was close to the road.

But I really, really, don't want to go back to those days...dirt roads are a pain; gravel roads aren't much better. Where I lived in "town" and our roads were paved with a generous coating of tar, with pea-gravel embedded. Better than dirt, but a little rougher than concrete or ashphalt like we have today.

But tearing up paved roads, back to dirt, seems like some "spite" is involved. These people know if they make the roads terrible enough, then people will be open to TAX INCREASES to get the roads fixed...sort of in line with Emmanuals "never let a good crisis go to waste." mantra.

Our only answer is to create crisis for the dems in November, and in 2012...the loss of their jobs.