Route 66

[DellStudio1720]

Here's a fun game: Look around where you live VERY carefully. How far could you go before you got to a bridge- even a small one? You might be surprised at how limited your life would be (will be) without bridges.

Excellent point.

[Chip Haynes]

I live in the middle of Pinellas County, Florida. This place is, for all intents and purposes, a series of islands. We have one 940' strip of land conecting one million people to the continent. (Does that make us incontinent?) Everything else is reached by bridges- and the entire southern half of the county (St. Petersburg, Florida) is one big island. Few people know or understand that. Few people here understand how many bridges they drive over every day- and that those bridges are aging as we speak. Bridges age. Bridges fall.

Got boat?

 

[DellStudio1720]

I counted how many bridges/overpasses I drove over when I went to the grocery store earlier... 4 that I knew of on one section of an elevated highway, then 4 more just around town....

this is the coolest bridge I have ever driven across...  the water was up to the axles of my car

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Lake_Floating_Bridge

[Chip Haynes]

What's going to bite us are not the big bridges we all see, but the small, level-with-the-roadway bridges we roll over and never even think about- or really see.

And there's plenty of those- everywhere.

I remember when the Point Pleasant "Silver Bridge" went down, and they immediately closed an identical bridge up river from it- near where I lived at the time. It was really spooky to walk across that big suspension bridge in the winter with no one on it but three guys and a layer of snow.

Broken bridges are going to hamper our travel.

No matter where we want to go.

[Frost]

Higway overpass bridges are also tactical targets, because collapsing the bridge at the central pylon blocks traffic in all 4 directions.

[Chip Haynes]

Yeah, an overpass is just another bridge, and they age like all the rest.

I'm not really worried about them being targets, just about them getting old and falling down.

[golddust]

I guess back then there were no interstates as we know them. Denver is sort of at a crossroads so I-25 and I-70 would be the "new Route 66" in these parts I assume. I'd guess really that any interstate will be preferred over back roads simply because people may feel safer on them - and if there's national guard posted along them that makes sense....

I wouldn't bet on I-70. Maybe I-40 or I-80 because I-70 west is rough travel. Even in a car all the twisting canyons and high elevation can suck in terms of gas usage, sunburn, altitude exhaustion, extremes of temperatures.. and then you get out into Utah desert and it gets "fun." Which is code for barren and totally isolated.

I-70 at the top of Vail Pass is 11,000ft and Eisenhower tunnel is also about 11,000ft. It's basically on tundra and stays cold most of the year... 9 months out of the year it's frozen and snowy. So is Vail Pass. Mot people have never known what it's like to try and breathe in those elevations. I'm athletically-inclined and I get breathless pretty quick. Most of the lowlanders got altitude sickness and I had to shorten our trip. It doesn't help the wind is blowing at tropical storm force and is always cold, half freezing your lungs. Even in August that wind up there is cold. I think people trying to do anything but drive over I-70 is going be in for a HUGE surprise.

They have to spend alot of money at CDOT to keep up maintenance on that interstate because the temps and ice just snack on it. It will be dirt in a year without routine maintenance. And all these people with the little cars will wish they had my 4x4! LOL. 

It's gorgeous though. The Arapahoe and Ute were one TOUGH bunch of natives.

[kaykay]

There is a strong regional pride in route 66 here in AZ....plenty of road maintenance...all geared to the tourist trade and the nostalgic happy days of cars and open roads bullshit.  Winslow AZ just had their annual Standin on the Corner celebration, complete with mural and a flat bed ford.......from the Eagles song "Take it Easy".

[Air Colorado]

Yeah I spent a day or so in Winslow AZ about the time the Eagles song came out.  Couldn't get that song out of my head!  Then again the 'shrooms may have just been kicking in... :-)

[kaykay]

Yeah I spent a day or so in Winslow AZ about the time the Eagles song came out.  Couldn't get that song out of my head!  Then again the 'shrooms may have just been kicking in... :-)

 

[Chip Haynes]

I went over Hoosier Pass (11,542') on a bicycle in 1976. I was younger then, but I made it. The air was so thin, you could read a newspaper through it. Travel without the benefit of oil is always interesting.

[redeye]

There's only so much you can do to "maintain" a bridge: Keep painting the metal parts, mostly. That helps a little, but not totally. All things change, Grasshopper. All things break down over time. Some slow, some fast. Bridges are, no pun intended, the weak link in our road system.

Here's a fun game: Look around where you live VERY carefully. How far could you go before you got to a bridge- even a small one? You might be surprised at how limited your life would be (will be) without bridges.

I'm just sayin'.

True enough.  I live next to the Merrimack River here in NH.  Tons of bridges in my area.  I don't know if this is the case in other parts of the US, but a number of the towns up and down the river have sections of town with names that end in the word ferry (i.e. Reed's Ferry and Martin's Ferry in Merrimack, NH).  I wonder if this will come back into play. 

[Chip Haynes]

Yeah, but the ferry still needs maintenance, too.   

I said it before and I'm saying it now: The oil crash will allow mountains, oceans, deserts and rivers to go back to doing what they were meant to do in the first place:

Keep us apart.