78 comments on My Last Long Road Trip
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78 comments on My Last Long Road Trip
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very interesting. I enjoyed because i have taken similar trips through the mid west on a number of occasions. one thing you did not list as a future problem was the road maintenance. my guess is in the near future traffic loads will not warrant basic road maintenance. You may have just took a trip that will very soon not be possible to most folks reading your missive.
"my guess is in the near future traffic loads will not warrant basic road maintenance."
I share similar ideas about this. What I found interesting on my recent trip (described in a post below) was the number of major highway projects underway. Of the projects I encountered, one was a large operation to smooth out the sharp bends on I-84 between Baker City and Ontario, OR. This is a huge undertaking, as it requires the removal of large amounts of hillside.
My Dad just got back from a Seattle, WA-->San Antonio, TX, road trip and mentioned some major highway projects underway around Phoenix and in other parts of the desert southwest. Complete rebuilding of the road in some cases.
Looks like BAU continues in the highway maintenance sector.
-best,
Wolf in YVR BC
I have seen many stretches of totally rebuilt highway projects either underway or completed along I-90 between Chicago and Central Washington State. I-90 over Snoqualmie Pass going to Seattle needs rebuilding. It is the crappiest Interstate I have every driven on.
In short, these rebuilds can't last forever. They basically subsidize our reliance on the long haul trucking industry.
Say good-bye, Gracie.
I just drove I-90 through Snoqualmie last week and didn't notice any problems (actually, I went up to Snoqualmie Summit from Seattle and then drove back). I certainly don't think it's nearly as bad as I-20 between Ft. Worth and Abilene. Road conditions there are perennially terrible, at least for the past five years. Maybe as the volume of traffic abates, repairs will last longer.
Here in the UK too - £65m on a new junction for M4 at Reading. Partially this is for bus and cycle lane priority but the majority of the spend is to ease traffic flow to the clusters of business parks along the M4 corridor.
The fact that most of these are friggin empty and have been since they were built 4 years ago has obviously not troubled the planners.
In their defence they have stuck up a freakin huge windmill - 122m and 2MW. Magically this is now 'Green park'.
There is a really long leadtime to get these types of projects planned, approved and funded, so the projects we see being built today might have been first hatched a decade ago.
Roads like US183 might be the ones that actually do continue to get some maintenance. Those are the roads that farmers use to haul their harvest to the nearest grain elevator, and to haul back fertilizer and seed to their farms. Once all the freight has moved back to rail, the interstates will eventually be down to single lanes each way under perpetually unfinished maintenance, then detoured forever.