Front Page
THE HIGHWAYS TO AND FROM HELL
Why is it that a small local newspaper has to memorialize incompetent and unsafe highway projects currently under construction around Lake Geneva? The road from Elkhorn to Lake Geneva and back is simply a safety travesty. It is almost impossible to control a vehicle at night in the rain. The orange barrels are badly placed and the single lanes, each way, are too narrow. And then there’s the road running back and forth toward Kenosha on Highway 50. That highway is in worse condition than the Elkhorn Highway 12 mess.
There is a ‘runnel’ that is right in the center of the only lane available for travel. Last weekend, on the only rainy night of that weekend, it was nearly impossible. Visibility is nothing, the road is slick, and that runnel makes cars and trucks jerk back and forth across the road. The only good news is that the opposing lane is a good twenty feet away so the likelihood of having a head-on accident with another vehicle is fairly slight.
What can be done? This kind of road work is set to go on well into the summer and the traffic is only going to get worse. Twenty-five miles per hour was all that could be accomplished on the trip into Lake Geneva from the Kenosha direction. That’s a bit over an hour for a one-way visit.
Why is it important for this kind of data to be written in the newspaper? Memorialization and for monetary claims. If a person has an accident on that stretch of road, then that person, reading this newspaper and archiving it, will be able to reach back and not allow the communities ordering the work or the contractors performing it to say that they didn’t know. They now know so people involved in accidents can go ahead and sue the municipalities and the contractors and collect very large sums of money because those entities should have known better and have been formed of that. They might argue that their faulty and incompetently established work zones are not that dangerous after all, but by that time they’ll be in court where the attorneys and judges can work out settlements.
What is to be done with this kind of road work? The only two decent highways that have been constructed in the last twenty years in the entire area of Southern Wisconsin are I-94 and the 120 Bypass around Lake Geneva. Those two highways, for some reason or other, remain as they were built and not this patchwork of country road highway robbery. Every three years these broken-down roads must be rebuilt with the same substandard asphalt and re-worked and re-installed by the same substandard contractors.
This is America, for God’s sake, and all of us living in rural areas need to start paying better attention to what’s going on. The amount of money being spent on these projects is in the tens of millions. Why is it that the outrageous amounts of money spent on renting orange barrels does not include proper placement to protect the driving public? A grade school class could look at the situation and do a better job of laying out the areas allowed for vehicles for safe passage. The Lake Geneva area deserves better and it’s about time that the courts decide how much pain is going to have to be applied to get some rationality into the system.
