Following the last time I drove through New York City, my aunt asked me how I liked those awful New York roads. “Er, what awful roads,” was my perplexed question to her. To her disbelief, I told her that roads in the Charlotte area, especially primary roads, are much worse. Of course, when she’s driving through New York, she goes into neighborhoods that I never visit, but as far as I could tell they’ve got it pretty good when it comes to pothole-free travel.
Not so in North Carolina, according to a new report card. I could have told them this, since heavily-used I-77 through southern Iredell County is downright dangerous, in both lanes, with even the patches threatening to throw cars off the roadway or into another lane. You can read the full story here. N.C. dams and roads each got a grade of D from engineers. The state gets a B- for rail transportation, and considering we’re the nexus of the new Southern high speed rail project, that’s a good sign. The scary part is that the nation overall got a grade of D, while N.C. got a C-, meaning that we’re actually somewhat better off than most poor slobs out there. I pity them, because if they have to deal with worse conditions than we have, it’s truly sad.
State legislatures have, over the decades, borrowed a little bit here and a little bit there from the highway fund, usually to meet an urgent need. It’s a good plan. It’s also a plan that assumes somebody will pay the fund back when there’s money to do so. What about the (rare) years when there’s a state budget surplus? Instead of spending it on pork — and I’m talking political here; I don’t want to bilk the pig farmers out of anything — why not slap a few hundred million or so into the highway fund for a rainy day? But no, politics is politics, and surplus funds always get used for nonsense, after spending a tiny bit of it on giving state employees and teachers a decent raise to make them forget that they usually end up with the short end of the stick.
North Carolina has historically been called the Good Roads State. That’s because N.C. was building four-lane highways between its major cities back when everybody else was wondering if they should really go to the expense of paving all the roads. They were leaders in building and designing an enormous highway network, and today has the second largest state maintained road network in the U.S. (only Texas has a larger network). Now it’s time to pay for all that convenience, and it appears we don’t have the funds.
The recently created North Carolina Turnpike Authority will help with building new roads by finally allowing Tar Heel toll roads. I suppose the idea is that the funds freed up by a road that generates its own income will allow those funds to be used to maintain existing roads. That’s nice, but as I understand the NCTA, the toll road becomes free once it has generated enough funds to pay back the “loan” it took to build. This means that maintenance on the road once again falls under the same NCDOT pot of gold. Which means it will never get better.
Where, exactly, are all those flying cars that we were supposed to be using?
A textbook definition of cowardice
Yet another goosebump-inducing commentary from Keith Olbermann. Can we get this guy to run for President?