Highway Debate: Count The “Lane Miles”

My county has $35.00 Roads and Bridges maint. The detour signs almost rot down before the bridges get fixed. They love those low weight signs. It gives them a few more years to fix the road. When I was in Vietnam we rebuilt one bridge on QL 1 four times. IT AIN’T THAT HARD.

Spartanburg County has also taken more roads from the state over the years. At present 38% of the county’s roads are under state control, which is far lower than in most rural counties and many of those roads taken over should still be state because they are classified as collector. It can plainly be said that the county is NOT doing a better job than the state maintaining those roads. If the state is going to dump nearly 20,000 miles of roads on the counties and cities then they need to be raising the standards of those county roads. Nowhere have I heard any proposal like that, because they look to Georgia as if they are the bastion of highway perfection. Georgia’s road system sucks. Yeah their roads are basically smooth, but in terms of traffic engineering the counties do a pathetic job in most of the 159 little fiefdoms. There are not enough routes in Georgia, and the county roads are dangerous to drive at night due to inconsistent maintenance standards. Georgia’s state highway system is a mere 18,000 miles or 14% of the whole road system: the same ratio as SC’s primary state system alone. If SCDOT and the legislature was being fair, they’d offer a trade-off at least by taking over traffic control on most county roads, permitting cities and towns to contract road maintenance with the state and they would come up with more fair and reasonable ways to fund roads. A local option 1 cent sales tax and local option gas tax make a lot more sense than a $25 road fee. That $25 road fee should be going to pay for secondary state roads, not podunk county roads with their trashy standards.