Valley roads resemble war zones; let’s fix them before those abroad

Valley roads resemble war zones; let’s fix them before those abroad

I have lived in the Mahoning Valley for only a few years. I also have lived in many other states in the Union, many places infrastructurally poorer than this area. Some places had higher tax rates; some did not. At no point have I seen anything as disgraceful or Third-Worldly as I have with the state of the roadways in Ohio.

As I dodge giant craters down Canfield Road or Glenwood Avenue on my way to work, I can’t help but wonder, “Is this what it’s like to drive in Eastern Ukraine?”

Now, I’ve done this for three winters now, and I understand that the salt, plows and ice are more severe here than, say, Kentucky. But Glenwood Avenue is a travesty. When I was a teenager and I visited my dad in Boardman, coming from Florida, the roads were not this bad. Granted, we as a country hadn’t gutted our own infrastructure in favor of foreign follies for a dozen years back then.

However, even in the midst of getting lost in the sandbox of Iraq, the awfully dysfunctional state of Florida, with no income tax and a penchant for messing up a cup of coffee, could have an entire stretch of road wiped out by a storm surge or sinkhole and within 96 hours, completely relaid or repaved and repaired as if it never happened.

Meanwhile, three years into watching the Beirut side of Glenwood become almost impassable, I saw a crew feebly attempting to put tiny little patches into the moonscape of the road as it stands today. That’s death by a thousand cuts.

How about actually fixing the road in its entirety?

It is time to put people back to work fixing our crumbling, Cold War-era roadways. It is time to stop wasting billions of dollars rebuilding other nations’ roadways when our tax dollars can’t get roads repaved here.

Dave Fasano, Youngstown