Your Tax Dollars At Work

I was told once that Minnesota had two seasons: Winter and Road Repair.  While I laughed at the time, living in Tulsa has given me an appreciation for the challenges faced in a region that gets extreme weather.  Potholes become a way of life.  They have to be repaired--quickly--and often over and over again.  One of my dearest friends drove to QuikTrip, loaded up a carrier with four cups of blazing hot chocolate and just pulled up to the pothole filling crew and handed it out the car window.  We're that glad to see the roads fixed.

When I was a kid, we lived in a three story house with wood floors and two long staircases linking the three levels.  When my mother deemed it time to redo the floors she cordoned off a room at a time and redid the finish on her knees, rolling polyurethane thick and shiny.  On the stairs, she used a rather low tech approach.  We had to go up and down, so on one day, she did the even treads.  She gave them a day or two to dry well while we skipped up the stairs.  Then she did the odd treads.  Never did we lose egress from the top floor to the main floor to the basement.  You just had to look at the note on the wall giving you the first free step arrow, then hit every other one and you were home clear.

The Tulsa road crews, with their 'shovel ready' road repair projects have not learned that same lesson.  As far as I can tell, all the roads that run North to South in Tulsa are ALL under construction at some point from Admiral to the Creek Turnpike.  I have tried jigging from road to road trying to find that one stretch of cross town street that is clear of the orange cones, barrels and signs.  But there isn't one.  Not one single street is free of a road construction project.

I want to go down to the city planner's office and grab someone by the ears and shriek, "What were you THINKING??"

My DH and I have been discussing why we think this is happening... there are some excuses that we've thought of that may or may not be true, but they sounded especially possible.  DH conjectures that all these roads were built at the same time, and they are all experiencing major breakdowns at the same time.  Another equally plausible idea was that half the projects are road repair (one department) and the other half are actually water main upgrades (another department) and that the two different groups are not communicating and coordinating their road closures/slowdowns/traffic stoppages.

The highway overpasses are state projects and lots of that funding is the Obama stimulus package.  Since the bridge collapse on I-40, the state has aggressively inspected all the overpasses and determined that LOTS of them need total replacement and repair.  Since that evaluation was complete, those projects were planned and estimated and ready to go when the stimulus money was offered.  "Shovel Ready" had to be Oklahoma's middle name.

The problems facing all the North-South connectors are not overpass related.  There might be construction at one or two of the overpasses, but the majority of these projects are where two lane hardtop is being replaced near intersections.  Traffic is squeezed down to a single lane, sometimes both directions.  And there is no other route available without its own issues.

Can I say, "bad planners, BAD!"  No cookies or cigars for these bozos.  I only did project planning for two years, but even I know that this is not the best way to do things.  Better to start at one end of town, working from East to West (or vice versa) and hit each North-South throughway one at a time.  Then complete one before shifting to the next... the traffic will find the newly completed avenue and avoid the one that's under construction.  But this is not the way it's happening in Tulsa today.

I once told everyone who would listen that I would always vote for every bond issue where the politicians used the words "schools" or "road repairs".  These are two areas that I feel Tulsa needs a great deal of improvement; however, I didn't consider that they'd all be under construction at the same time.

I can only assume that these are my tax dollars at work.  And quit my whining.

--Sandee Wagner