DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour    

How many times have you driven through a construction zone and wondered what the area was blocked off for since nobody is working within ten miles of where you’ve been, while sitting in a traffic jam for the last half-hour?

I can almost understand having to start a construction slow-down area several miles before the actual construction because a high-speed, limited-access road like an interstate will have lots of traffic going relatively fast and even I can understand the feelings of some poor schlub standing there leaning on an asphalt rake as he witnesses a Buick headed towards his torso (though half the time there’s no danger of workers being hit or killed because they aren’t there!).

Last week I went on a 1,000+ mile round-trip drive to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin (from Detroit) for a Midwest Automotive Media Association (that’s right - MAMA) rally at the legendary Road America Race Course. Consequently, you have to drive through the Chicago area – including my beloved homeland of Northwest Indiana. In my lifetime I’ve probably made that drive well over 500 times and that’s a very conservative estimate.

There are few sections of road I’m not on intimate terms with when it comes to driving on I-94 and I-294 (the Tri State Toll way, home of the robbing you by the mile cash boxes). Without a doubt the worst and most unpredictable stretch of road on the entire route is the Frank Borman Expressway that runs from the I-94/Indiana Toll Road junction west to the Illinois/Indiana border. When things are humming along it’s basically about a 10-15 minute trip from end-to-end. However, the last time things hummed along was long before recorded mankind.

I’ve been driving the Borman long before Frank (Borman) entered astronaut training so he could someday have a stretch of road named after him in his native city of Gary (thus the tie-in, Einstein). There is always construction going on at some point of that run. Just what in hell would cause a major road repair to take place on the same stretch of highway an average of seven out of ten years for the past 4 or 5 decades? Is this some new Congressional Road Repair School Program that is part of a secret budget aimed at union workers? Just like a school, these workers are doing the same thing over and over and over again, but they are not getting it right!

In the meantime, the Borman carries one of the busiest numbers of tractor-trailer rigs in the United States. Besides destinations East and West there’s another major road (I-65) that runs south. (You can go north if you want to but I guarantee you that very soon you’d have a flooded engine and wet brakes).

My question is this: with gasoline price rumors of $5 per gallon this summer and people who would normally want to fly being nickeled and dimed to death by the robber-barons who run the airlines, why doesn’t my beloved home state shake loose some Federal funds and fix that road once and for all?

It would be damned expensive, but it’s like buying clothing; you can buy a three-piece suit from Saul’s Suits and Bagel shop and get off dirt cheap or buy a tailored suit at Hickey Freeman and pay a lot of money for it; years from now you’ll have gone through a bunch of Saul’s suits but you’ll more than likely still have more use left in your expensive suit.

Get some damn Federal help and mortgage the farm to completely repair the entire 45-mile stretch of the Borman so it will last the better part of 10 years or more. You’ll be the envy of the entire Interstate Highway Program, Mr. Hoosier Highway.

To paraphrase a famous quote from President John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what you can do for Rizzo Brothers Construction Company…”