By M. Scott Carter
The Moore American
September 17, 2008 02:22 pm
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It’s no secret that roads and bridges are not sexy.
You don’t hear too many communities hyping their new overpasses, or putting out four-color brochures about their smooth, straight, freeways.
And it’s rare that you get to see a ribbon cutting for a new stretch of pavement — sure, it does happen, occasionally, but not often.
Nope, fact is, there’s little drawing power about roads and bridges. They are not sexy.
Until something goes wrong.
Nobody thinks about these expanses of concrete and steel until a bus load of kids dies because of poor construction, or as in the case of both Oklahoma and Minnesota, an overpass folds up causing death and destruction.
Then we all sit up and notice.
And that’s stupid.
Because right now our infrastructure is falling apart.
It wasn’t that long ago that former state transportation secretary Neal McCaleb spearheaded a group which spent more than $1 million trying to convince the rest of us we should increase our gas tax to fund road and bridge improvements.
McCaleb was practically booed off stage.
His proposal crashed.
And little has been done since.
With funding for the Oklahoma Department of Transportation stretched to the breaking point, high gas prices pushing down gas purchases, and Oklahoman’s wonderful “keep my taxes low but my services high” type of attitude, it’s no wonder our bridges and roads continue to suffer.
Just a couple of months ago my Republican friend Kyle Loveless tried to get the voters of Senate District 45 to pay attention to his ideas about improving transportation in Oklahoma.
He tried to talk about roads and bridges.
The problem was nobody listened.
And Kyle got beat.
Sure, he had the right message, it was just at the wrong time.
We’re back to square one; we limp along, and watch the Crosstown Expressway fall apart piece by piece, the roads become more pot-holed and the bridges rust.
And then, in the not-to-distant future, the unthinkable will happen and a bunch of innocent people will get hurt.
This is not good public policy.
Somehow, somewhere down the line, the voters of this state are going to have to suck it up and realize that the cost of living — which includes having good roads and bridges to drive on — continues to increase.
We need to develop the attitude that infrastructure may not be as sexy as having an NBA team, but good roads and bridges are pretty damn important.
Or, we can sit around and do nothing and wait until people — our friends and loved ones — get hurt.
And if that happens each of us should hang our head in shame.
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