The Road to Hell Is Being Resurfaced

It is a primal need that dwarfs mankind’s drive to keep nourished, hydrated and carnally satisfied. Entire communities capitulate under the sheer force of its will.

I am talking, of course, about street construction--and the human compulsion to crush, to jackhammer, to repair, to widen, to distribute orange cones, to lay asphalt and to paint and repaint lane lines so as to demonstrate our tax dollars in action. The three most dreaded words in the English language: “Road Construction Ahead.”

Forget about the entertainment industry. Our region has evolved into the road restoration and improvement capital of the free world. Build it and they will wait. In a single lane. During rush hour.

Anyone who has tried to drive along Santa Monica Boulevard through Hollywood and West Hollywood over the past few years knows about this civic urge to merge and purge lanes, this obsession with fixing and altering and diverting and (so we’re assured) improving.

The men in hard hats started work on the ambitious Santa Monica Boulevard improvement project about four years ago, emboldened by grand watercolor renderings of a thoroughfare amplified by lush green walkways and bike trails and populated by children, dogs and merchants free of scaffolding and rubble.

A couple of years later, the workers and equipment began to disappear. A full complement of lanes was reopened and free of debris. The street looked roughly the same as it had before the onset of labor, but at least the street was no longer Can’t-a Move-ica Boulevard.

Within two months, however, the men were back, hard hats and lunch pails in tow. The bulldozers and pulverizing equipment reappeared, along with those pesky orange cones.

It’s been two more years now, and they’re still there. The city says it will all be done by mid-summer. Meanwhile, Santa Monica Boulevard still looks pretty much like it did four years ago, aside from those chunks of concrete and rocks and stuff.

Fixed. Unfixed. Refixed. Is there an on-site supervisor who motivates the troops by telling them, “Well, that was fun. Now let’s put everything back and do it all over again!”?

This not to imply that Santa Monica is the only restoration-clogged major traffic artery in the area. In fact, road repair personnel have grown as multitudinous as have those tranquilizing “To Cross Street, Please Press Button” buttons that give pedestrians the impression they control their own destiny.

Are our streets in such disrepair that we need to rip up and resurface every other block? What is the shelf life of a freshly paved driving surface, anyway? If we don’t attend to all of their cracks and imperfections, what’s in store? Could we be facing an intersection dip epidemic?

Even those who subscribe to the better-safe-than-sorry school of street maintenance must wonder about this stuff once in a while, particularly while driving our constrained, constricted and confounded streets.

Perhaps the perpetual inconvenience of living in the equivalent of a construction zone someday will look like a snap compared to the power crisis about to hit us once those blackouts start to roll.

Until then, it’s clear that we have turned over control of the city to power generators of a different sort, the ones wielding jackhammers and shovels.