Road damage, the environment and resources. What a waste.

April 30, 2009 by Curt Siters

I was traveling home last night. As I often do, since I live close enough, I travel on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It gets me away from the hustle and bustle, the need for speed highways. I can travel slower and enjoy the ride. I got to thinking about why I like to drive the parkway and one of the things that struck me was the smoothness of the road.

I then wondered "why was the road so smooth?" 

After a few moments of reflection it struck me. The reasons I enjoy driving on the parkway are the reasons the ride is so smooth...

• Low traffic
• Low speed - limited to 45 miles per hour
• No commercial vehicles
• No big trucks

Another thought hit me - have you ever noticed that interstates almost always seem to be under repair somewhere? I believe that the interstates, as nice as they are for driving long distances quickly are nice, but they are money pits. Pot holes and uneven surfaces seem to define the interstate system (as well as many local roads.)

Conversely, the parkway almost never seems to be under repair.

I think we should look at the roads less traveled that are maintained to help us reduce our consumption of resources. We need to look at how they are constructed and used. We need to look at our life styles to see how it impacts our transportation system negatively.

If we don't do this we will run out of resources to maintain our roads and they will then become unusable and our way of life will be forced to change quickly with a lot of pain and suffering. Instead why not change a little day by day and have what we do now a little bit longer?

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Curt Siters is an Independent Associate for Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. He is also aYoung Living Essential Oils Independent distributor and publishes articles on YourWebReference and at TheVeryEssence. He also does web work such as website design, website maintenance and SEO for websites.

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