Our State Roads and Highways  --- Piney Woods Journal  2016

Our environment includes the social infrastructure through which we navigate our busy lives. There are serious threats facing this critical infrastructure as well as those threats confronting our natural environment.

Our transportation infrastructure is a vital inheritance and obligation that we can overlook in our headlong pursuit of life goals. We have greatly benefitted from some of the finest air, rail, and road systems that the world has ever known. Interstate and local transportation options, most created decades or longer ago, allow us personal freedoms and flexibilities that most second- and all third-world nations do not have.

This transportation infrastructure is affected, over time, by our political and social choices. Recent choices don't represent anything like the huge improvements that we saw about a half-century ago with air and ground transportation investments. Our interstate highway system is certainly one example. I can remember as a boy watching over many months the progress in construction of sections of I-20 between West Monroe and Ruston. I remember, too, how much easier it was afterward to travel through our larger cities. It seemed to take forever before to travel by auto through all of the east-west stop lights of cities such Birmingham on summer vacations.

One state newspaper recently carried a letter to the editor from a reader complaining about the condition of Louisiana highways, in contrast to those that he had driven in other states. Certainly, oil industry slowdown, state budgetary constraints, and extensive flooding damage in north and south Louisiana have negatively affected the quality of our state roads and seriously delayed some bridge maintenance and repair projects. Prospects in the short-term future do not offer promise for much positive change of these overall road conditions. Some have proposed higher gasoline taxes and more toll roads to try to generate needed funds, but these options are hardly popular ones.

Given existing road conditions with more potholes, cracks and erosion, Louisiana drivers can expect increased tire wear and replacement expense, as well as need for more frequent front-end auto alignment. How we drive our state roads makes some difference in tire and alignment expense. There seem to be two types of drivers -- those who seem generally unaware of potholes and road obstructions and hit these often and those who try to navigate carefully around most of these hinderances.

I wonder if there aren't a few lessons in life regarding what we notice and then focus our attention and what we ignore and just accept. Sometimes ignoring and just accepting obstacles might be OK; other times we pay a big price for these attitudes and behaviors. Some of us focus more attention on changing environmental realities and think more about their life-impacting consequences. Actually doing something meaningfully about our changing environmental realities is a huge challenge. We seem to have gridlock often between activists and those apparently attuned to other values and considerations. Finding common-sense compromises and even a few creative solutions shouldn't be too much to expect. The low public rating of national and state legislators suggests that they are not meeting public expectations though.

One hundred years ago in our state, perhaps the most common political slogan was we need "more good schools and good roads." Huey Long and other populist-minded leaders fully recognized the ballot-box appeal of responding to these voter sentiments. Louisiana transformed itself from 1915 forward through more and better paved roads and with road graters to make its many dirt and gravel roads passable after heavy rains. These improved roads particularly helped state farmers get their crops to market quicker and more reliably.

Good schools and good roads are a vital part of our social infrastructure. The state of our schools (K-college) and our roads seems among the best measures of our overall social health and well being. Let's hope we have more bipartisan support for strong investments in both.