EDGEWATER -- I saw a recent report from ABC News' Diane Sawyer that I found troubling: Our 4 million miles of roads ranks us 20th in the world behind places like Malaysia due to deterioration and poor maintenance. How sad is that?
I was a bit taken aback that someone even had done a ranking of road conditions in the countries of the world, but was not terribly surprised to hear this country wasn’t doing very well. Most states I have been in have many poor roads causing accidents due to pot holes, narrow shoulders, fraying asphalt and other factors.
Rundown roads contribute to more than half of all auto accidents today in this country. One third of America’s roads are poor or mediocre according to Building America’s Future Educational Fund, which is a bipartisan organization of politicians dedicated to investing in infrastructure. Mayors from Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Mesa, Ariz., went to Washington to show Congress how to repair our roads. Their plans would not only do that, but also create badly needed jobs. They are supporting the passage of the Surface Transportation bill and Fast Forward.
These two programs would rebuild our roads, cutting the time for completion from 30 years to 10 years and creating 166,000 jobs. These mayors are not waiting for Congress. They have all passed either a quarter- or half-penny sales tax and begun the restoration process in their cities. Let’s hope Congress and the people of this country who would be footing the bill as their counterparts are in LA, Philadelphia and in Mesa are doing will pass this twofold plan and get on with rebuilding our country.
Although I cannot say that the high-speed rail proposed here in Florida is being planned for the right place in the state, I am happy to hear it finally being discussed. If they had gone ahead with the plans when it was first proposed it would have already been completed and at a much lower cost but as usual government dragged its feet.
The entire country needs to be connected via this mode of transportation. Some day it will be unless someone comes up with the Jetson-type flying cars powered by something other than oil. I’m sure many people would love not being stuck in traffic and not having so many rules and regulations to be hampered by because they would be traveling in their own vehicles.
Somehow I doubt that will happen anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime but it does seem the way to go. No more roads to repair just air corridors to maintain. But until such time, we have to rely on our roads so let’s start righting things in our country with the reparation of our main travel system.
Editor's Note: Darlene Vann is among the staple of original bloggers with NSBNews.net. The opinions she expresses are her own.
NSB News is a 24/7 Internet newspaper in New Smyrna Beach accessed through NSBNews.net and VolusiaNews.net, launched April 7, 2008, by award-winning breaking news and investigative reporter Henry Frederick and award-winning blogger Peter Mallory. It is the first fully-online newspaper in Florida and among the few in the nation with continuous editorial content picked up by Google News Directories.
