Wearing bright safety vests, the county highway workers followed the scalding, red tar kettle as it pumped out liquid rubber bandages, thick as melted butter, to cover the pavement’s worst gashes. From above, it looked like the flip side of skywriting — as if yellow cursors on the ground were carefully spelling out a message for unseen readers in the clouds.
The farmers, truckers and others who traverse these rural roads, though, could quickly tell you what the hieroglyphics mean: Help.
Like hundreds of other small agricultural counties and towns around the country, Trempealeau County in central-west Wisconsin is overwhelmed with aging, damaged roads and not enough money to fix them.There is so much to this story that commands our attention, including shifting norms regarding the weight of trucks hauling precious commodities--like food!!!--out of rural America and the impact those shifting norms have on the needs for maintenance and upgrades.
I'm thinking about the analogy to broadband, a 21st century type of infrastructure that's as critical to rural economies as this 20th century artifact. That said, Cohen's story makes roads seem much less artifact-y. Surely the ongoing relevance of rural roads, bridges, highways suggests that not everything has changed with the information age and digital economies. We all still need food, timber, and other products of rural extractive endeavors--and we have to be able to get those products to consumers everywhere or they don't do us any good.
I have written often in my scholarly papers about the challenges of rural transportation, but those musings have mostly involved material distance, much less often the actual condition of rural roads. This NYT story also reminded me that many rural roads are not paved, which makes getting dirt/gravel/unsealed roads graded of great importance. A related post is here.
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