Wrong Turn: More and more expensive roads

I got home from the clean air protest in Salt Lake on Saturday (yes, I took FrontRunner), had a hot toddy and good nights rest and awoke to find the Sunday paper full of the news of a brand spanking spiffy new road in Davis County.

Three miles (click) long, it cost $70 million to build, but as we know, cost is no object with building roads in Utah. The normally fiscally conservative Utahns who hate teacher unions because they demands living wages for educators, decry waste from programs that feed the poor, and generally want pennies pinched en masse, have no problem blowing $70 million on a stretch of asphalt a piddling 3 miles long that will probably need resurfacing in ten years, or less and won't return a dime of revenue to anyone.

Rant: Why is it politicians scream that things like FrontRunner need a "subsidy" to operate, but never talk about the subsidy that roads require? Sure, roads enable commerce, but so do trains. OK, I know: Roads are built by contractors who make campaign donations, and roads make sure those contractors have  years and years of maintenance work to do, too. Jobs for all!

That's why roads don't need "subsidies." They just need millions of dollars in repairs every year. Trains? Not so much. Rails don't develop chuckholes.

This same rant applies to Amtrak, by the way. Congress makes all of us pay billions every year for highways for car drivers to use, and governments on all levels massively subsidize airports and air traffic control (Salt Lake City puts $50 million a year into running Salt Lake International), but passenger rail traffic is derided for it's massive "subsidy."

<Rant mode> <Exit>

No clue how many folks driving that spiffy new road in Davis complained about the bad air they were driving through as they took their kids to the doctor or asthma clinic. Ten percent of Utahns have asthma, so some certainly did.

The sad thing about the story is that it praises former Clearfield Mayor Neldon Hamblin for his foresight in planning the road, and working for it, when what he did was plan and push for what is essentially, as we are starting to see, dead technology.

No, seriously. Oil, despite the current apparent boom in drilling in the US, is an 8-track tape energy source. The Wasatch Front, as we can see any day the sun shines on all that air pollution, is being literally choked by cars. And cars themselves, at least those powered by internal combustion engines, are old school, slowly being replaced. Sure electric cars have their issues, but those issues are being solved.

I still say, if employers in Utah had any brains they'd be pushing for alternatives for their workers to using cars. Cars are expensive, forcing employees to demand better pay and getting grumpy when they don't get it. If employees could avoid using their cars to get to work every day, they'd have more money to spend on fun stuff and be happier. When I was working at the Standard my car was my single largest living expense, costing upwards of $100 a month.

Nothing against Hamblin, but if he'd really had foresight 25 years ago, he'd have pushed for more developments around his city that were planned to work better around mass transit, and more mass transit, not more roads. Housing projects clustered around transit stops, for example, and
bicycle and walking paths so folks could get to those transit stops more easily and naturally.

A more promising story is the one about Clearfield's current mayor and council working to build a $120 million development adjacent to the city's FrontRunner stop. (click) The idea is to have housing and businesses adjacent to the FrontRunner, both to let folks get to the train easily, and to attract folks from other cities who want to get to the shopping by train.

Which is exactly what sponsors of mass transit promised it would do.

A development near the train also won't need any $70 million roads to get to it. If the planner and builders have proper foresight, they'll figure out a way for people to walk.