Curley: Washington’s roads are ranked 48th in the nation. At this point, let’s just go for 50th.

Last year, the Washington state highway system was ranked 47th out of 50 states for the worst roads.

And now — we are 48!

Yes, we’re 48, we’re there.

If you’re gonna have a crappy road system with great big potholes and all sorts of budgets that are way over whatever they predicted, and you’re not delivering on time, let’s be the worst of them all.

Let’s be 50th.

Alaska is 50th, and California is 49th, but we’ll never beat California. And Alaska is tough, too.

I should be happy with where we are. So apparently, the money is not there, or the money is there, but the money is not being spent properly.

Washington underfunded road maintenance for over a decade

Washington Policy Center’s Charles Prestrud was talking about this. He’s talking about the budget, a bunch of the different problems that go with it. So, a couple of serious problems come to maintenance.

“They had a couple of really serious problems to deal with,” Prestrud said. “One is they’ve underfunded highway preservation and maintenance for more than a decade.”

What? More than a decade? Because you have to put money aside for these things. But they hadn’t been funding it for more than a decade.

“It had gotten to the point where bridges were being closed because of corrosion and deterioration. One of them, the one on SR 165 over the Carbon River, has gotten to the point where it’s no longer salvageable,” Prestrud said. “They’re gonna have to tear down and build an entirely new bridge. That’s going to be very expensive.

“So the Washington State Department of Transportation … ” — which is a lot like Trump and Israel, if they’re just blowing bridges up left and right — “estimated that they needed about an additional billion dollars per year for more than another dozen years to get caught up on all the huge backlog of deferred maintenance and preservation projects,” Prestrud said.

Have you ever owned a condo, and they get the HOA fees? You got your condo fees. It’s like, oh, you get a $300,000 condo, oh my gosh, the mortgage is only $600, and then you’re like, “Oh, the monthly fees.”

You’re like, “What the hell?” The fees add up in that thing.

You’ve got to put the money aside, have the money ready to go. But apparently, either they rob it, steal it from some other place, or they never account for it. And then Prestrud said that large projects already underway are over budget.

“They have a number of very large projects which are already underway,” Prestrud said. “For instance, the north Spokane freeway, the I-405 project here in the Puget Sound region, and others, where they’ve had very large cost overruns. And so they needed to find additional funding to complete those projects, though, because they didn’t find enough funding for everything, they’ve pushed out some of those projects, so they’ll be completed a year or two later than planned.”

Washington’s road spending isn’t paying off

Yeah, because roads are not sexy and fun, and you can’t pay off a bunch of special interest things. Let’s face it, a lot of people there in Olympia really don’t want you in that car. They like the fact that you’re like the dog tied at a leash to a chariot bumping along through all the potholes.

And then the state of Washington has a little problem when it comes to return on investment.

“If we expect the state of Washington to be economically competitive and prosperous, then the return on public investment for transportation is vital,” Prestrud said. “And if those tens of billions of dollars go into things that cost us a lot but provide very few or no benefit … ” Prestrud said.

Let’s see if we can think of any of those. There’s a doctor in Spokane who, if you pay him $5 million, will cut off the genitals and mutilate prisoners who say they’re male or female or whatever they want to be. That’s $5 million. There’s a whole bunch of other ones that just didn’t come to mind for some reason.

“Then that actually weakens the state’s economic position relative to other states and other regions that spend their money in ways that make their transportation systems more efficient,” Prestrud continued.

Yeah, businesses do look at that like, “How long will it take us to deliver a bunch of boxes from here to there? What are the roads like? What’s the cost? Do I have to go around it? How much time did I spend sitting in traffic?”

All that windshield time adds up, and it’s to the bottom line. But as Charles points out from the Washington Policy Center, they don’t have the money. They don’t fund it. And now we’re 48th.

We have to try to beat Alaska. Alaska is the worst.

This post is a transcript of the video at the top of the post. It was edited for clarity.

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