Monday, February 23, 2009

Madison Infrastructure

The State Journal is running a series of articles about the city's infrastructure. Today's portion focuses on the New Deal era sewers, roads and buildings that were built to try to stimulate the economy 80 years ago.

This has got me thinking about the way we look at infrastructure here in America. I think our our throw-away culture extends beyond our cell-phones and electronic gizmos to include our roads, dams, and sewer and water lines.

We build new roads to new subdivision, that are watered with new pipes, while we can't begin to afford to repair the roads to old rundown houses, with crumbling water and sewer lines.

But I guess this is just part of our economic cycle. We boom and sprawl, and then when our greed catches up with us, we give the government the permission to repair the infrastructure they should have been taking care of all along, and call it a stimulus package.

Without this economic recession, we couldn't afford to fix our broken sewer lines and would up to knees in shit anyway.

4 comments:

Adam Hinterthuer said...

Well said. (I know I pop up as my daughter on here) But still, enjoy the site. Thanks for yet another procrastination tool. And just to think Twitter led me here...

Anonymous said...

Maybe you've lost your touch. Why don't you get a respectable job like a Fire Fighter so you can actually help society instead of printing your garbage.

Anonymous said...

Why are you making fun of the firefighters they are good people? Who do you call when you need help?

Anonymous said...

Why are you making fun of the firefighters they are good people? Who do you call when you need help?