DColeKC wrote: ↑Sun Dec 11, 2022 12:20 pm
Why am I not shocked that those opposed to widening or improving I70 have also been very vocal about climate change. Widening I-70 is seen as some kind of backwards progress to their end goal of less individual freedom to drive where you want when you want and do it safely and conveniently. Make things more expensive, more dangerous and essentially force people into things that’s better for the environment.
The common person pays the price over and over again. Gas prices, cost of vehicles and on and on.
This country drives. This country will always be a nation where people want the ability to jump in a personal vehicle and go. Make our roads safer and capable of handling traffic at proper speeds. Because life is short and we should be able to spend it doing things meaningful, not stuck in traffic.
There are many reasons beyond climate change to not want to encourage people into cars, including fostering vibrant and walkable urban environments. I think I post on a message board somewhere that is focused on that goal. If you want to talk about making things "more dangerous," 40,000 people are killed in car crashes each year, and adding extra lanes to facilitate higher speeds is not a safety improvement (though I don't have a problem with investing in actual safety improvements and already said in a previous post that if the highway needs to be rebuilt then rebuild it, but a rebuild doesn't have to entail new lanes). It's funny that you think
my position is somehow to blame for "the common person paying the price" in higher gas prices, cost of vehicles, etc -- I'm the one advocating for giving people other options so that they don't have to pay those prices at all. What you try to spin here as "individual freedom" is an economic prison in which people are forced into buying a piece of equipment that costs thousands of dollars up front and requires ongoing operational and maintenance costs of thousands and thousands more dollars. Car culture is not "freedom," it's a scam. We don't spend our lives "stuck in traffic," we spend them
being traffic.
They don’t want to take our cars, they want to make it harder and more expensive to use them.
No, I don't want to spend billions of dollars to make it
easier to use them. Nobody is saying to rip out the existing interstate and force you to take gravel roads all the way to St. Louis. But we are talking about spending anywhere from $5.5 billion to $9 billion (or maybe/probably even more, since MoDot hasn't actually priced out four lanes) to solve a "problem" that in this thread has been described as "having to wait three minutes for a semi to pass another semi" or "hours in 60mph traffic." These are frivolous complaints. I was apparently ignored when I pointed out in an earlier post that MoDot itself only attributes a cost of less than $35M per year to congestion on rural I-70 and advocates for solutions other than simply adding capacity (which, again,
does not work anyway). There's seemingly never enough money for the state to do anything that actually matters, but when it comes to an easy but actually ineffective solution to a problem that is practically imaginary in the first place, suddenly it's all just Monopoly money.