The Texas Queen
The San Diego - Fort Worth Highway
Some roads pay for themselves. The prominent problem (among hundreds of others) is the human standard preconception about roads. "I've been
working on the whale road all the live-long day", and so on.
I was shocked when I drove the Trans-Canada Highway. I mean it was little wider in most places than Paddy Hollow Road back in Claremont, New Hampshire. But in some ways of looking at it, yes. A good way to start your road that nobody thinks will pan out (the majority is almost always wrong) is to do a trans-cannade: a little two lane road with a high speed limit, route sixty-six style.
I was so wiped out this morning (02-12-04) that I took a tiny nap, just long enough to catch a dream. I
dreamt of a highway to somewhere in Texas, I assume someplace like Fort Worth, from California, I assume San Diego. Anyway, the road was called "The Texas Queen". I woke up staring at the wall. "Of course", I thought. Forget the states and their twisted concepts of
5-805 junctions and loosing half of the three hundred million to pay for it and build a two lane road, Paddy Hollow style, financed by private business concerns, giving them priority access to use of the road to transport, and charge the rest a toll on retail and wholesale increments.
What the states and the government would do would be to contribute minimal amounts
and to handle jurisdiction of rights of way and documentation. The toll revenue
would go to the construction of additions to the highway. First a paved shoulder on the right side since vehicular traffic drives on the right in the States, and both lanes of traffic would use only the shoulder on the right side. Then the
parallel two-lane road with paved shoulder to be used to transform the Texas Queen from a dirt-bag ribbon to a divided,
limited-access, multi-lane, full-blown highway.
Why the fuss over a potential, as of yet non-existent road? I have observed, with some distressing amusement, the futility of
extravagant, flowers-nobody-can-see-medianed, u-turn-only, dizneyworlditis, million-dollars-to-nowhere freeway system in Southern California built
apparently by some grownup who played with cars in the sand pile as a kid. I was in New Mexico as a kid and mom kept me out of the sandbox when she observantly noticed it was the playground for the blue scorpions. Nothing has changed, only now these scorpions are road-games people.
And it's not limited to San Diego County. Claremont, New Hampshire, is the only whistle-stop town I know of that is so trafically impaired it has a rush hour at four p.m. on Washington Street, the only way to get from East to West for miles around.
Wealth is not money, anymore than electricity is electrons. Electricity is the movement of electrons
along a conductor. Wealth is the movement of cash. The cash flow. And transport reflects that movement. It isn't the only aspect, but it is one we can do something about or at least begin to understand.
Look at Claremont, which while I lived there I noticed was struggling financially, and the prosperous West Lebanon, about twenty miles to the north. Claremont has a rail line going through, an airport, a river, and a cross-road area of two highways. The rail is limited and the part that had brought Claremont prosperity in the early twentieth century has been torn up. The airport is a
hobbyist and aficionado's landing strip with a few hangers for a few small aircraft. The river is certainly not navigable in any way unless you use a
kayak during the high water part of the year and portage around dams and rapids. The Highway crossroads is broken and has to run into that
notorious Washington Street through a series of traffic lights.
West Lebanon is across the partially navigable Connecticut River from White River Junction with it's dwindling but still viable rail yard and service for both passenger and freight. There is a clean crossroad area of highway twelve-a and an interstate highway leading to another crossroads in White River Junction between two interstates, one of which was the subject of a premonition I had and did a painting of before it ever existed on which my father-in-law worked, Interstate Ninety-One. The airport has regular flights by small passenger-freight jet aircraft to major international hubs.
This is the classic illustration of how movement of transport brings cash-flow and viability to an area. These things can be installed
deliberately by design in any area of the world and bring resultant prosperity. Just like a car is designed, engineered and built, and then rolls off the line into the lot, so the appropriate economic engine can function as long as you fire the spoiled children who are simply seeking to amuse themselves with pretty little roadways going nowhere fast.
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Copyright © 2004 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
Email: economics@paulhallart.com
Did you hear about the economist with a wig? He had to pay.