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.
The key passage in this article is this section — I’ve added the boldface — it’s precisely what I see in my area. It’s not the amount of money — it’s the *allocation* of that money to projects that the State has no business pursuing, while it ignores the projects that the people actually want it to pursue.
[blockquote]The Stutsman highway department, which gets the bulk of its funds from local property taxes, state fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, let the road fall into disrepair [b]as it juggled other projects[/b]. Every year without major maintenance, the road became more expensive to fix.
Judy Graves of Ypsilanti, N.D., voted against the measure to raise taxes for roads. But she says she and others nonetheless wrote to Gov. John Hoeven and asked him to stop Old 10 from being ground up because it still carries traffic to a Cargill Inc. malting plant. She says the county has [b]mismanaged its finances and badly neglected roads.[/b][/blockquote]
Gravel roads are more than we need for transportation in our impending post-petroleum, green economy.
And we will need more horse drawn transportation and Model Ts.
sarah, how do you know that is true? i read the article and it looked like she was just stating her opinion of county finance mismanagement.
#2 and #3, i don’t really understand the green bashing, seems a little unkind.
Long ago, I learned that driving in Illinois can be dangerous to one’s physical well-being. Potholes were everywhere, and I had to swerve to avoid them. I wonder how towns would like it if they had to reimburse insurance companies for the cost of front end alignments and frame damage repairs?
RE: “sarah, how do you know that is true?”
Hi, Magnolia — I do not have any controlled laboratory one-variable experiments for quantifiable and verifiable certainty that what she said is true. All I can go on is that I am observing the same misallocations of funds over in my state. for one thing — and as we all know — many states have highway and gas taxes — and spend those moneys elsewhere on things that have nothing to do with roads. That’s simply misallocation and further, it’s lying to people by pretending that what they’re paying taxes for is going for one thing. Then when the roads go, they complain that they don’t have the money. For another, I’m watching my state pursue the Federal matching grants for new road projects and construction, rather than spending their precious dollars on *maintenance*. That also is misallocation.
Eighty percent of most every state’s budget is spent on education. It would be a lot cheaper to have vouchers and no unions. They we could afford to have roads.