On A Trip Across Country

Somehow this year we mis posted two essays that we wrote in a place where most readers could not read them.  Duh!  Here is the first:

This past week I had an opportunity to drive a rental truck from Atlanta to Colorado.  "Opportunity" might be a strong word considering that I hadn't ever before driven a truck.

The trip was done at a beautiful time of the year.  Fall has come and gone here in Colorado.  The leaves are off the trees. 

That isn't true in Kentucky and Tennessee where the trees are in full fall color.  The Interstate is built through a heavily forested area and the hillsides are a mix of different hues of yellow and orange.

While our Fall is a bit earlier and perhaps a bit shorter than in the southern states, our roads are much better.  My goal was to avoid rush hour when driving through the bigger cities, and I was almost successful. 

The Interstate in Illinois is a maintenance nightmare.  The speed limit for trucks over 4 tons (meaning almost any truck) was 55 mph.  The road was so badly maintained that it would have been difficult to go much faster.  Every 30 or 40 feet there was a concrete joint where one side must have been a good one half inch higher than the other.  Even at 55 mph, the ride was bone shaking.

We had hoped to hit St Louis an hour before rush hour Friday evening.  We failed.

St. Louis is part of our old stomping grounds.  The roads are still in the same place that they were when we were young (forty years ago), but there is much, much more traffic on them.  The St. Louis rush hour used to end miles before I-70 crossed the Missouri river.  It now extends 30 or 40 miles beyond the Missouri, and lasts until 6:30 pm.

The big lesson of the trip is that we in Colorado have been lucky.  Until recently, we have had a legislature and a governor who thought roads were important enough to keep well maintained and sized to fit the traffic.  Expect our Governor and the legislature to short change highway funds until one day they will compare less favorably to those in Illinois and Missouri.

Comments

[Jan]

It took a while for the author to get to the point of the essay--highway crowding and maintenance problems. We always avoid St. Louis when driving across country, because it's so congested. I suggest the author join www.numbersusa.com. The nation's infrastructure is showing stress, and over population is definitely a factor.