Interstate highway conditions

Grit dog wrote:

wing_zealot wrote:
So the question is, how much are you willing to pay to fix them? Gas tax revenue keeps getting less and less, You willing to pay a tax per mile you drive. Or maybe we should just keep on putting it on the credit card and hand the bill to our kids and grandkids like the infrastructure plan under consideration now proposes.

This might be part of the issue, but the larger issue is the revenue that should be for infrastructure maint and improvement being re-directed to "other" things.

Having been in supervision and management of Heavy civil, heavy highway general contracting since I got out of college, and having performed work in about 10 different states, from my standpoint, alot of the country is in a lose lose scenario. Many states are so far behind now, that even in the best of times, they cant even keep up, much less get ahead.

The appropriation of funds is astounding, how much of the "transportation" budget gets used for other things.
We have a large project going on in Seattle currently. $450M project reconstructing the last part of the SR520 approach onto the Lake Washington floating bridge. Of that total contract value (design and construct), almost $200M of it is being spent to effectively improve the Montlake neighborhood and provide a sprawling park/nature experience for the peds and pedal pushers, by way of building yet another lid over the freeway that is about 1000% larger than it needs to be to simply convey vehicles and all other multimodal traffic over the freeway.

Talk about corruption....essentially the City of Seattle gets a free, massive, capital improvement project for it's residents and the transportation department and FHWA is footing the bill!

With all due respect, this must not be a real problem because the same people making these decisions keep getting re-elected; for 20, 30 even 40 years.

Keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result and see how that works out. The infrastructure plan in the works now being a prime example.