Wednesday, May 21, 2008

2.5 more miles brings the May total to 30 and 2008 to 113. Since I play too much with numbers in my head, I'm going to see if writing gets them out. 42 more days until July 4 to cover 87 miles, so need to average about 2.1 per day. I'll probably walk (at most) 36 of them so that brings me to just over 2.4 miles every day I walk, which is OK seeing as how I'm almost always walking at least that far. But little room for slippage.

Some of you readers are more conservative than me, so I'm curious on feedback. What about a major national program to improve infrastructure? We desperately need to fix/maintain roads and bridges, so we could start by adding jobs that are impossible to outsource for the most urgent needs. Some money would also go into research to reduce costs for bridge engineering, road materials, and even tire materials - anything that makes the national infrastructure easier to sustain will pay back hundredsfold, and could help the environment. It might be worth investigating bundling other infrastructure needs (water/sewage, telecommunications) into the research and construction as well. Yes it will cost money, but it would seem to improve many lives and impact almost all taxpayers by improving the daily transportation experience, and I can't imagine enough progress ever being made piecemeal. Oh and we might avoid needless disasters like the Minneapolis and Tulsa bridges - that's always nice too. In all fairness, I got this basic idea in a Newsweek column, although I'm not sure who wrote it, and built on it a very little bit.
posted by Unknown 11:18 AM | 1 comments