The logic is simple, if perhaps a trifle simple-minded.
If Alachua County commissioners didn’t waste our tax dollars on homeless motels, phony-baloney immigration resolutions or, oh I dunno, maybe Flock cameras disguised as fire hydrants or such…
…they could afford to FIX OUR ROADS!
Judging by the explosion of Facebook complaints that have popped up, seemingly overnight – and just in time for the elections – the county’s dereliction of pothole-filling duty is The Hot Button Issue Of The Day.
And who knows, the folks behind Alachua County Road Watch might even manage to bag themselves an incumbent county commissioner for their troubles. Ken Cornell is on the ballot, although with his fund-raising advantage it’s not likely.
But dreaming the impossible road trip dream doesn’t make the impossible possible.
The math doesn’t work and it never will.
The county spends $26 million a year on road maintenance. But traffic engineers say we would need to spend more than $41 million a year just to keep up with the workload.
And even if the county was allowed to spend its “wild spaces’ money on roads, even if it could commandeer the money GNV is “wasting” on urban streets – even if all that money and more went into fixing the roads snaking out in the hinterlands…it still wouldn’t be enough.
The reason being simple.
Alachua County is no different than counties all over America that have for decades been industriously promoting the Great autoAmerican Ponzi Scheme.
The more single family homes we build out in the hinterlands, the more suburban families need to get into their cars to get to the jobs, shopping, health care and other services that are concentrated in cities.
But the taxes generated by that sort of low density sprawl can’t begin to pay to maintain the roads needed to support that daily back and forth flow of suburban commuters.
And listen, if you want to blame county commissioners for that, better start with their predecessors who, years ago, were rubber stamping plans to build thousands upon thousands of single family homes in and around the small towns to the west.
Towns like Newberry, Alachua and Archer, which had thoughtfully already inflated their city limits in anticipation of exactly that sort of autoAmerican economic boom.
It was a sucker’s game then. It’s a sucker’s game now.
Only now the bills are finally, painfully, coming due in the form of a $400 million-plus road maintenance backlog in our county alone.
Hell, there are far more sprawling Florida counties that would kill to have our modest road maintenance backlog. Having grown up in Broward County, I’ve always laughed about the hysteria generated over our traffic congestion problems.
Charles Moroni, President of Strong Towns, puts the benefits and costs of sprawl development succinctly:
But while the private sector gets the cash, local governments get the bill. Sprawling developments create long-term infrastructure liabilities—roads, water lines, sewer systems, schools, fire protection—that far exceed the revenue they generate. Local governments, which are really just collections of us acting together, are left trying to maintain and operate systems that are fundamentally unaffordable.
The autoAmerican Freedom Of The Road Dream was always going to turn into a traffic nightmare. And local elected officials – at the very bottom of the political food chain – were always going to get cast as the bad guys.
Oh, and if the experts are right, our road maintenance problems are only going to get worse in the coming years.
Predications are that more and more “climate change refugees” from coastal Florida will move inland. And many of them will settle here in Alachua County.
Some of those climate refugees will move into GNV for its urban amenities. But if past development patterns hold, many more are likely to end up in Jonesville, Newberry, Archer etc.
Because that’s the autoAmerican way.
Which is why I always advise commuters who are obliged to use increasingly pothole-strewn county roads to do the only logical thing under the circumstances: Drive more slowly.
Potholes being, if nothing else, great traffic calming devices.
FreeGNV 