Our roads are getting fixed, but …

It seems as if everywhere I turned today that I was met with road construction.

Beaumont has long had street problems as well as drainage problems and sometimes the drainage problems have caused street problems. I have long advocated that our city fix our ragged-ass roads before they turn the town into the next wannabe San Antonio or New Orleans. I use those two cities as an example because our City Dads and Moms, as well as our forward-looking city manager, have envisioned our downtown as potential tourist traps Meccas centers.

So now it seems our streets are finally being fixed, the problem is they are all being repaired at the same time. This all happens when, or so it seems, work is perpetually under way on Interstate 10 between US 69/96/287 and the Neches River.

On my way downtown this morning I found the center and right lanes of I-10 closed before you get to the eastbound Downtown exit. While all seems finally clear on Calder Avenue between Main Steet and Martin Luther King, the rest of Calder all the way to I-10 is a crap shoot as far as finding the street unimpeded from construction. Only blocks South of there you have Fannin Street to the east of Gateway Shopping Center in a state of being torn up and put back together. A few blocks South of there you find College Street, another of the city’s major thoroughfares, undergoing repaving from 11th St to the East. I finally just said, screw it, and headed back onto 11th Street then made my way to Laurel (or is it Liberty? One goes one-way toward West Beaumont and the other goes one-way to Downtown.) At the moment, these two streets seem the most reliable way to traverse between Downtown and the city’s West End.

Oh, I tell you, I bitch about the roads because they are not helping my 12-year-old Toyota Tacoma age gracefully. I read a story today about a man who is suing the city because he said the potholes allegedly caused him to have a head-on collision. This report to which I link comes, by the way, from The Southeast Texas Record. It is one of the newspapers so thoughtfully established by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with hopes of fighting what they call lawsuit abuse in an area that has been called a “judicial hellhole” because of the sometimes friendly plaintiffs’ juries. But if this case is found to have merit I don’t think I would call it abuse but rather a public service.

If you want to go anywhere else in Beaumont these days, I suggest you have a full tank of gas and a butt-load of patience because, why? That’s right, you can’t get to there from here. So I guess we should just shut up, count our blessings and let our idling automobiles increase our ozone levels, as if those levels need help.