Infrastructure

Many of us endure and/or complain about the constant roadwork that surrounds us when we endeavor to bridge two separate locations in our motor vehicles. It’s frustrating to us because we have become accustomed to speed and efficiency in all aspects of our lives. We’re impatient. We hate the delays.

The road pictured above was worked on for many, many months. A new bridge was constructed farther down the hill. Yet - like many roads I have noticed lately - it has been revisited by the road crews. The newly paved black top has been dug up, the orange cones set in place again, the heavy equipment hauled back into place. Is this a problem stemming from the age of the pipes underneath? Is it poor workmanship? Who knows? The temperature is now about 50 degrees colder than it was when these guys finished last month. It doesn’t look like too much fun out there.

Way back in the twentieth century I owned a house for a few years, here in Cincinnati. The antiquated sewer system beneath the street my house sat on was dug up and repaired three years in a row. Completely black topped and then torn up again. We in the neighborhood started an annual picnic in August that we named Sewerfest. It seemed better to find humor in the situation rather than defeat and despair.

America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling and, like the aging and crumbling empire that we seem Hell-bent on becoming, all signs point to increasing numbers of road-blocks, closed lanes, heavy machinery, traffic delays. The car has changed our social reality over the last century and now it lumbers on as a convenient but out-dated mode of transportation and one that increasingly makes
the trade-off much less easy to take.