Road Construction and Infrastructure Repairs? Not Now, Bad Move
By: Lance Winslow
Some politicians are calling for up-grading and repairing our infrastructure. Indeed that is a smart idea, as any time you improve the flows of your civilization you get back 10-fold in efficiency. But in the interim you often cause bottlenecks during construction and actually harm the flows and efficiencies of the civilization.
Now then the worst time to do construction, create bottlenecks or up-grade infrastructure is at a time when the flows of transportation are in crisis. That would be now with oil barrel prices approaching $85.00 as we move into our peak Hurricane Season and march off to war or a major showdown in the nuclear crisis with Iran. High oil prices along with over-regulation has put our Transportation Sector in a major crisis and this is no time to add delays or bottlenecks to the flows of civilization. But lets flash back to the recent past in 2001 one with similar conditions. High oil prices, over regulation and too much construction. Here is an excerpt of an article I wrote back then;
“With the construction and the hours allowed to drive reduced, more trucks are needed yet cannot be afforded as trucking companies consolidate and resort to hiring parolees as drivers due to the fact there is no drivers. No rest stops to hold the trucks either due to the increase. Many cities rebelling with no trucks allowed on city streets such as in New Jersey. Stay on the freeway and keep driving even though it is now against the law to drive more than eight hours and traffic is increased due to number of trucks, increased permit regulations, down sizing of state staff to issue permits, reduced hours to issue permits. What is going on here? OFR, over-friggin-regulation, on top of fuel price increases. By messing up Americas distribution system we are crippling America, and I would not be surprised if there is a nation wide truckers strike. You want to see this nation fall to its knees. It would take less than 6 days. There would be rioting in the streets, runs on what was left at the grocery stores, no power, nothing.â€
Now then is this really what our nation needs right now? Or do we need to temper our push for new infrastructure projects until we can bring oil prices under control, build more refining capacity, increase the use of new fuel efficient technologies, solve the Iranian Crisis and their OPEC trade war efforts and remove much of the over regulation killing the industry now? I hope you will think on this in 2006 and stop our government from making anymore asinine linear decisions on the flows of our civilization.
Lance Winslow