I am struck by news that the I-95 road collapse in Philadelphia “could take months to repair.”
This, despite our Governor Josh Shapiro declaring a disaster so as to dispense with customary governmental red tape.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Butt(whatever) rushed to social media if not to the scene to promise all needed federal aid to get the major highway up and running.
We’re supposing someone awoke Joe Biden to alert him, just for the record. But, since it was a weekend and all that, Joe would wait until his normal few weekday business hours to do anything substantial.
But months? Can we not rush the cleanup, the arrival of repair materials, and around-the-clock labor to reopen a road said to carry a reported 160,000 people per day according to state Department of Transportation data?
It’s not clear if that traffic data has had the Biden vote-multiplier applied to it.
Even if it had, that’s still likely 40,000 or so a day, which is a lot of traffic to be rerouted for “months.”
Even more questions abound.
Will this motivate an even greater number of migrants from Philadelphia to Johnstown public housing to avoid this daily inconvenience?
Will this make it tougher transit for them to our Friendly City?
Will road re-construction be done around-the-clock to speed the process instead of the customary daylight only construction with which Pennsylvania drivers are so familiar?
Will I-95 be restricted to one-lane travel 100 miles or so from the site in both directions, if only to enrich the provider of orange traffic cones?
Will anyone get around, after-the-fact, to quantifying how much this reconstruction cost and how much of that money went to construction firms who are large Democratic election contributors?
Just asking.
Sam Ross Jr's site 