Your Money's No Good Here

Jimmy Buffet's heading out to San Francisco. The white pants are being put away. Plaudits and platitudes about the heroism of the workplace echo throughout the land. It is Labor Day.

Here along one border within the nation, we are bowing to the supremacy of speed. We are allowing the bottom-line geeks who have somehow become transportation planners to determine that we need no hand-to-hand contact to float the Two Bridges Boondoggle. We shall, as those grandees determine, engage in the transportational equivalent of drone warfare. The over large Two Bridges plan has an over large price tag which must and will be funded by intermittent heists of the populace hereabouts. (Set aside for now that New Albany will bear the brunt of increased pass-through traffic of the cheapskates who don't want to pay an extra eight dollars to visit Aunt Ginny or buy something in Indiana.)

The  choice method of collection, which only the bottom-line geeks chose, is NSA-style gantries that collect photos of people travelling under them, and then sends a bill to the address listed on the license plate. Or it collects data on the number of trips and deducts money from a prepaid account. Or it gets a signal from a transponder carried by frequent bridge users.

The hands-free stick up is the next best thing to off-shoring jobs. It may even be more egregious than off-shoring jobs,  since no jobs were created in the first place.  The nation and the region  has a veritable army of unemployed persons who could benefit from a job as a toll taker. The nation has an actual army of discharged, damaged, and disillusioned veterans from its serial wars. On another National Holiday the land will echo with plaudits and platitudes about the sacrifices and heroism of those who served our country in the military. Why not put up or shut up, and allow dignified work as a toll taker to help these soldiers reenter society? Why are these jobs seen as something to be so assiduously avoided?

Speed. Efficiency.

At one of the recent events held at the Marriott in Clarksville by the meme troupe of the Bridges Project, I asked why there are no toll booths. Why, in light of chronic unemployment, and in light of re-assimilation problems for veterans do we not, at least, have the prospect of getting some jobs out of the deal? Since the project has been force-fed to the locals, designed and built according to those on high, why not, as Mary Poppins would say, just a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down?

I asked the questions of a member of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. His response was that in the interest of speed and efficiency toll takers are passé. They are an unnecessary impediment to people barreling through the region. Those unemployed are of no concern in the grandee scheme of things. In yesterdays Courier-Journal an article about IBM quotes a professor of Law, "We don't build companies to serve Wall Street. We build corporations to provide goods and services to a society and jobs for people." Should not even a higher expectation apply to publicly-funded, publicly-owned projects?

The Transportation Cabinet representative said the gantries are needed to promote efficiency in transportation. I wish someone had thought of that when the discussion involved light rail.