Public Roads Create Traffic Jams of Public Money

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – I wonder, 500 or 1,000 years from now, if the planet is still here, how future historians will look back on this and stare at footage, if it survives, of these things called traffic jams and what they’re like.  Why do people suffer through them?  Why would you do that?  I’m always thinking about that.  I always wonder: Am I the only one that does this, goes out of their way just to get around traffic?  Who was it that created this?  Whose idea was it to create the byways and highways that would so torment us?  It’s almost like the question of government.  You create governments to torment you and you’re always on constant guard against because they’re always trying to steal your stuff, lock you in a jail, imprison you, confiscate your wages?  Or did you create them to have a simple, more peaceful life?  It seems to me we’re creating the antithesis to simple and peaceful. Check out the rest in today’s transcript…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  What is it that unites people?  You would like to think that there is a devotion and a uniting force that is behind all our affairs, which is that most of us agree that we want to live near one another in and under a government that secures our liberty and protects our property.  Leave the rest to us in little communities here and we’ll take care of it, as our foreparents once did.  You’d like to think that but that is not the case.  At almost every turn, at almost every opportunity, we are told and encouraged to get out of your rural or distant locations and move to where the action is.  You don’t want to be out there on a farm, man.  That’s where all the squares are.  You want to be where the action is.  You want to be in the city.  I was thinking about this just the other day while I was traveling about ten miles to go around a small traffic jam.  Young Eric, you live up there in a very traffic-laden part of Maryland.  Do you go ten miles out of your way, even though it might take you longer, to avoid having to sit in traffic?

Eric:  I do it every day.

Mike:  You take a rural route around the beltway or interstate just so you don’t have to sit in the traffic?

Eric:  They’ve put up about two shopping centers now in five years right across the highway from my house, so the road nearest to my house is now a constant traffic jam.  Yes, I take the old routes that only residents of my town know.

Mike:  Because our city planners, our city parents, our parish fathers out here where I live have failed to take note that if you put these ginormous big-box shopping centers up all over hither and yon you’re going to create all manner of traffic problems, and if you allow the building and development of all these developments, subdivisions and neighborhoods hither and yon without a firm eye on what kind of traffic problem that’s going to create, again, you’re going to create the traffic jam.  All one needs to do is look at I-95 in between Richmond, Virginia and Baltimore, all the way to Mordor and immediately after Mordor, for evidence that it is impossible, unless there is a market force behind it, to build enough roadway at public expense that will handle traffic.

There’s an old saying out there, if you’re a collector of these adages, that stuff expands to space available.  Have you ever heard this?  In other words, you say: I need to get a bigger house because I’ve got all this stuff.  Well, you get a bigger house and all of a sudden that’s filled with stuff.  Stuff expands to the space available.  Traffic expands to roads financed at public expense available.  That’s just the fact, unless you’re out in the rural areas.  I caught myself going — I am so averse to sitting in a manmade hell, which is what a traffic jam is, regardless of what I have on my radio at that time, that I will drive ten minutes longer and ten miles out of my way to go around that damn thing.  I only hope that everybody else doesn’t get the same idea.  Are you finding that, that other people have got your idea and now you have to wait in traffic because people are trying to avoid the same traffic you’re trying to avoid?

Eric:  Yeah.  A lot of traffic lights that were not designed to have that many people eat it are now becoming a big problem.  We have a highway, Route 3.  It’s three lanes wide and probably the main road that people use now to get north and south through the major area of Maryland where I live.  It connects to the other interstate roads but it’s also the quickest way south.  What happens is a lot of people who live in southern Maryland, which is where a lot of people are going because it’s getting very crowded in my area.  People are using that road now.  I know correlation doesn’t always mean causation, but all I’m saying is since the road has gotten more popular and they’ve added more lights without expanding the road because we don’t want to do that, that’s for the public to decide, we’ve seen a major increase in major accidents right outside my house.

I went to a restaurant that’s literally right down the street from my house and I ended up turning around and parking and we walked to the restaurant.  There was an accident at the intersection right outside my house and it was clogging the parking lot where the restaurant was because everyone was trying to get around it.  Once again, it’s a lack of preparation when they develop these cities that don’t have the infrastructure to support major shopping centers.

Mike:  But the roads are made for the public good.  The roads are there for the public good.  This is at least part of my problem with this.  Those roads were built so that you would enjoy life and so you would have access to Best Buy.  You don’t want to spend time at your house reading, playing games, checking on the turnips, in other words living an antiquated, fuddy-duddy, agrarian lifestyle.  You need to get out.  The problem with getting out is, how much time do you actually spend when you’re out?  You spend your time sitting in this thing called a vehicle, or riding this thing called a bus.

I wonder, 500 or 1,000 years from now, if the planet is still here, how future historians will look back on this and stare at footage, if it survives, of these things called traffic jams and what they’re like.  Why do people suffer through them?  Why would you do that?  I’m always thinking about that.  I always wonder: Am I the only one that does this, goes out of their way just to get around traffic?  Who was it that created this?  Whose idea was it to create the byways and highways that would so torment us?  It’s almost like the question of government.  You create governments to torment you and you’re always on constant guard against because they’re always trying to steal your stuff, lock you in a jail, imprison you, confiscate your wages?  Or did you create them to have a simple, more peaceful life?  It seems to me we’re creating the antithesis to simple and peaceful.

End Mike Church Show Transcript