Bypass justification is 'Lost in the 50s'
I’d like to propose a new name for the Sand Creek bypass. I think it should be called “The Bridge to the 20th Century.” Back in the 20th century, bypassing First Avenue, Cedar Street, and 5th Avenue might have had an impact on traffic. Here in the 21st century, what needs to be bypassed goes from Dufort to Selle roads, and from Dover to Shingle Mill Road.
As long as we have as many cars on the road as we do now, traffic will be bad from Careywood to Colburn, and from Dover to Kootenai. You have to be pretty “lost in the 50’s” to think rerouting a dozen blocks worth of U.S. Highway 95 will keep you from waiting for three lights at Dubs.
But, what is really 20th century about that project is to think there will still be as many cars on the road in 30 years as there are now. The 20th century was the age of expanding energy use, and the Sand Creek bypass is our local monument to the idea that energy use will keep growing.
The 21st century will be an age of energy contraction. There are two really good reasons for this. One is that oil is not a renewable resource. It must eventually be used up. The simplest explanation for the expansion of the U.S. economy over the last 100 years is that we learned how to use more energy, and that energy came from oil. Cheap, easy to extract oil at that, and that type of oil is obviously gone.
If there is to be any growth in the U.S. economy in the next 100 years, it will be because we learn how to use less oil. In the U.S., it takes, on average, 80 calories of energy to put 1 calorie of food in our mouths. That is not efficient or sustainable. The solutions to that are less food transportation, less energy-intensive farming, and less travel by consumers. Less driving, in other words.
The second reason less energy will be used in the 21st century is often called global warming. Unless you think good climate scientists come from oil companies, or that your information and analysis is better than that used by actual climate scientists, you probably accept that C02 in the atmosphere is changing the weather. Food and water are widely predicted to become scarce as the weather becomes more extreme. Actions encouraging carbon emissions, like the bypass, indicate an ignorance of or insensitivity to the effects of these emissions.
The U.S. is the world center for climate change deniers and North Idaho might be the world center for people who couldn’t care less about the rest of the world. This is still, after all, the only place where I’ve seen “Nuke Iraq” bumper stickers. I know this is probably a really difficult concept for people like that, but building the bypass says that we don’t care about climate change, or don’t believe in it, or don’t care if other people suffer because of it.
Everything about the Sand Creek bypass is small-minded. It’s scope is too small for today’s problem, yet the problem it fails to solve is short-lived. There will be more train traffic and less truck traffic. People will drive fewer miles. Fewer people will drive. Instead of paving Sand Creek, we should be spending the money on low-emission public transportation.
But this is Sandpoint, and Sandpoint is lost in the 50’s. Our local politicians and business leaders seem to have learned everything worth knowing back when oil was less than $10 a barrel, and atmospheric C02 was under 350 parts per million. They seem bent on building a bridge to that time, a “Bridge to the 20th Century.”
I think our tax dollars are going to be building a 21st century parking lot.
? Jon Waldrup is a Sandpoint resident