TRAVELING THE INTERSTATE

The following article:"Memories of the Interstate" is reprinted fromwww.TheBurningPlatform.com by ReverseEngineer

JimQ's thread on Nucler Energy brought up another marvel of the modern world, the US Interstate System. Held forth as a great example of how building a magnificanet infrastructure like this could develop commerce and your nation. And so it did, for so long as the oil was cheap and the bulldozers and back hoes could cut the roads through some remarkably tough territory. As I spent my years driving the Big Rig over those miles of interstate, I often was astounded by the sheer magnitude of some of the road building.

There are spots on the I-15 going into Utah that are cut through canyons of unbelievable beauty, same is true going into Chattanooga TN on the I-24 or on the I-90 crossing the Rockies in ID heading for Spokane. The I-68 cutting accross the Appalachians in West Virginia is amazing, and scary if you are driving a Big Rig. The grades are incredible, and 600 HP worth of Caterpillar engine strains to pull you up, and you cross your fingers your brakes will hold up on the way down. The power consumption is enormous for every truck running those roads, but beyond that, the roads themselves consume power just to keep them open.

I got caught once on the I-80 when it got shut down outside of Cheyenne, WY by a snowstorm. I was two days in my freightliner, fortunately I made it to a Truckstop and didn't totally get caught out in the middle of nowhere, but still no fuel got in or out of that truckstop at all for those couple of days, and no food either. To clear the roads, it took 48 hours of the biggest heavy equipment you can roll down a road to clear out the snow. And it happens ALL the time, every winter really.

Every summer the spring thaw comes, and the roadways heave and crack. New asphalt is always needed, and heat to melt it. Periodically, the entire road bed has to be torn up and regraded. Again tons of new asphalt and concrete. All this in some of the most inhospitable terrain possible, and frankly where few people even live. There are no off ramps or on ramps for miles, you just have a ribbon of road going from one population center to another.

All this structure built mainly because as a young Lieutenant in the early 1900s, Dwight Eisenhower drove a military column across the US on the then "Lincoln Highway", mainly a connected series of local roads, mostly unpaved. It took months to cross the US. In the dawning years of the mechanized army, the realization was that you couldn't move your military machine without the roadways upon which to drive your logistics vehicles. Sure Tanks can go (slowly) over unpaved territory, but the trucks pulling the fuel for the tanks cannot.

As we invested and borrowed from the future to build the interstate, around it we built the culture of the Automobile, and Trucks replaced the Railroad as the means to move the freight around. Cities like Indianapolis and Dallas-Ft Worth were designed with enormous Ring Roads, and all movement within those types of cities must be by automobile. They didn't evolve before the auto as NY or Chicago did. They are all spread out over many miles, and every day for people to work they have to jump in their cars and drive miles along that interstate, wearing and tearing down the road surface every day and every week and every month and every year. The money is never there in the budget to pay for the constant maintenance, and Big Goobermint haters refuse more taxes to pay for the cost. So it decays further each year.

This is true of all the infrastructure built since the age of oil, the electrical grid is no different. Society mmortgaged the future to build such infrastructure, but it has never been able to Pay as You Go on the maintenance of it. So each year, Bonds are issued to pay for road repair, sewer repair, electrical conduit repair etc. These are ongoing costs, but they aren't ever paid for with ongoing revenue, rather bonds are issued with Interest charges loaded on them, a few Banksters get rich and everybody else gets poorer each year we try to keep the system runnning. Its not economic, it never has been except for the brief period when Oil bubbled out of the ground practically for free and in apparently limitless quantities. that day is over, and so also is over the time of the Interstate, and the electrical power grid as well. Building a Nuclear Power infrastructure is beyond ludicrous as an idea, we can't afford it, and we can't afford to maintain the transmission grid we already have either.

The decay is everywhere to see, from the industrial heartland in Detroit outward the decay is obvious everywhere. We reinvented a country of Malls strung out along the Interstate, and McMansions strung out in suburbs, and now we are running short of the energy necessary to maintain such a structure. Nuclear power can't ever replace it, and locally produced power won't either, not enough to maintain miles of roadway cutting through the Rocky Mountains, keeping roads open through the winter snows. Those roads will grow over, as the roads of the Roman Empire grew over. It would be beyond foolish to try to build another such infrastructure we can neither afford to build nor maintain after we build it. What we built on the back of a vast reservoir of Oil which changed life for human beings for a little more than a couple of centuries is all going the way of the Dinosaur now, and we will go that way also if we don't Reverse Engineer our way back to a simpler and more sustainable way of life. That is the only Green Solution. Moreover, its the ONLY solution at all short of extinction of the Human Race.

With Love and Kindness,

THE HATMAN