This morning Kelly achieved a goal she’d been working on for months: she completed a triathlon! She raced in the Ramblin’ Rose triathlon at the Baileywick YMCA, in the pouring rain I might add. Her parents drove down to see her and we and the Battaglias cheered her on every time she passed us.
It was great watching her do this. Inspiring, even. I suppose there’s nothing stopping me from doing something similar.
My friend Billy posed a question the other day that got me thinking. I was surprised at how such a simple question could set off an hour’s worth of pondering. His question was this: would you be willing to trade the federal taxes on gasoline in exchange for paying tolls on every interstate highway?
My first reaction was to think well, who would want to pay tolls all the time? Then I thought, wait a minute – why should everyone play for highway construction and maintenance if only some drivers use it? This led to me to conclude that if highways all had tolls, drivers would be encouraged to make more local trips.
Since the opening of the I-540 Outer Loop around Raleigh I’ve been thinking about the problem of sprawl. Traffic engineers will tell you that new roads don’t solve traffic problems: they just shift it to another place. And it’s true. If 50,000 vehicles get on a highway all 50,000 are going to get off somewhere. The traffic jam is simply shifted. The Outer Loop caught my attention because its opening encouraged lots of development where there was none before, causing sprawl and stretching the limits of vital city services.
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