Government Is One Big Traffic Jam

Late Sunday night, my wife and I drove from Sacramento, Calif., to Los Angeles. We figured that it would be wise to leave Sacramento in the early evening to avoid traffic. At 7 p.m., we climbed into the car and headed for Interstate 5, the major highway connecting Northern California and Southern California.

For the first five hours of the drive, things went as planned. The highway was relatively clear, and we sailed along happily at 80 mph.

Then we saw it. A sign. A large orange sign reading: Freeway Closed Ahead, 11 p.m.-4 a.m.

It was too late to get off the freeway; it was too late to turn around. There were no turnoffs, no exits, no restrooms. We were stuck an hour from Los Angeles, bumper-to-bumper, moving less than 1 mph. Literally. During the next three hours, we moved a grand total of 1.6 miles. Families were pulling onto the shoulders of the highway to catch some winks. One creative fellow actually attempted to drive off the freeway by cutting through some wire separating the freeway from an adjacent road. The cops immediately arrested him.

Three hours is a very long time to sit in traffic, particularly when your radio is broken. My wife was nodding off, so there wasn't much in the way of conversation.

So as the red lights of stopped cars twinkled far into the distance, I began to understand road rage. As I drove, at the pace of a turtle, past signs notifying me, "Traffic Slow Ahead," steam began to emerge from my ears. By the looks of the other drivers, I wasn't alone.

One thought kept running through my head: The government is completely incompetent.

I assume there were liberals in the traffic jam; after all, this is California, where liberals dominate both the halls of government and the voting rolls. And I wondered what those liberals thought of the government's handling of road repair. I wondered whether they smiled at the idea that they were paying the state of California up to 10.3 percent of their income. I wondered whether they were glad that the state of California allocates more than $13.8 billion to the California Department of Transportation each year, paying 22,000 full-time employees -- and that not one of those employees had the common sense to post signs notifying drivers to take another route.

And I mused about broader questions. I wondered why the liberals in the crowd hadn't considered that if the government can't handle paving roads, it certainly shouldn't handle the health care system. I wondered why liberals never stopped to think that perhaps the government isn't built to stop purported global warming; this little traffic jam alone was burning carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at an enormous rate. I wondered why liberals believe that the people best qualified to handle the education, Social Security and welfare systems are the same folks who left the office at 4:59 p.m. last Friday thinking that they had done a good job with construction on the I-5.

Most of all, I wondered why liberals are so worshipful of government in the face of all available evidence. If this had been a private toll road, you can bet that customers would have been notified upfront of the major delay. But because the government is free to tax and spend as it chooses, there is no incentive to treat drivers decently.

The same holds true more generally. Private industry has a stake in efficiency and customer service. The public sector has no such stake.

Here's the most ironic fact: As we drove by the construction area at 3:30 a.m., we didn't see a single construction worker. The delay accomplished nothing, other than the illusion of improvement. But that's what the government traffics in: illusions of solutions. Which is why my wife and I reached our home at 4:30 a.m. Monday morning, tired and grumpy, our gas tank empty and our patience gone. May all liberals sit through such traffic before they vote big-government Democrats back into office.

Depends upon the situation, process and where in the work this was observed. If asphalt, there are specifications for a minimum curing time for tack and prime coats of what appears to be an oily tar applied to the surface prior to placing pavement, sometimes as long as 48 hours. If concrete, depending on the mix, another wait period is required prior to loading.

I believe the story also read that construction was scheduled from something like 11pm -4am.

In scheduling the work in that type of closely coordinated construction effort, construction crews are frequently scheduled to move out of the area 30 minutes to an hour ahead of time, to ensure public safety once the roads are reopened to public traffic adjacent to the site. Depending on the work of that day, one might not see everything disturbed or freshly built out, or construction crews on site.

Typically the design of highways focuses on a design which is functional after construction. Some execution direction or industry standards might be discussed in specifications in all aspects of work, but method is generally left alone so that the contractor is responsible for the work and profit margins.

Highway construction, though, is heavily dependent on horizontal construction, which favors larger equipment in earthmoving operations and continuous processes. Most of the effort in early stages of the project might be simply to get the site ready for continuous unimpeded operations.

Everything I read in the story indicated the project had recently commenced and traffic patterns had not yet adjusted to the impedance of the construction effort.

One aspect which is notable is that the contractor and government may not create a situation which endangers public safety. Public notification of the impending project is sometimes difficult to fully achieve. Signage might be placed weeks in advance of construction to notify those mist likely to be effected by the work, i.e. commuters who use that traffic route. Other public notices are usually placed, such as in a newspaper, town or city meetings, maybe even local news reports, but still a sizable percentage of those effected might not receive or recognize the communications made.

If access wasn’t maintained for emergency vehicles to access a stalled vehicle or a heart attack patient caught in the traffic jam, then insufficient planning or improper decisions had been made.

I’ve seen a fair number of construction workers and inspectors who finally adopt an attitude that no matter what efforts are made to make the site safe to the public, people will still be inconvenienced and tempers will flare. Unfortunately when they accept this attitude, they also tend to place higher priority on their interests than on the public interest and phasing plans are thrown out the window due to budget overruns. IMHO, that’s when the situation may get out of control.

I don’t know all the details of this particular project, but I suspect frustrations from unanticipated events arise when people continue to model in their thinking how the world behaves and it isn’t always so compliant. When this happens there are two options. One is to react, another to respond.

There is nothing wrong with demanding justice when unrighteous behavior is observed. Righteousness requires the execution of justice in a right way.

If public officials allowed the project to proceed with unrecognized public costs, there might be proper recourse to hold those public officials accountable if the sum of those costs exceeded their spending authority. Thay might also be held accountable at the ballot box, or at least those to whom they report might be dispatched for failure to uphold the public good.

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