If I were to visit my elementary school again, I would check the balance beam for teeth marks.
Mine are bound to still be there. I don’t think I could have dug them in any deeper as they broke my fall from grace when I was about 7 years old. It was supposed to be a simple jaunt down an 8-ft stick of lumber, but the difficult 6 in. of footing is what got me. To this day I don’t know how it happened, I just remember looking at Kevin Fabian, who was in line at the opposite end, in a downward visual motion. My gym teacher, Mr. Bedford, ran over and gave me an initial estimate of the damage.
His next action probably went a long way in shaping my mental physique. With just a trace of blood coming from my mouth, he told me to go into the bathroom, take a few minutes to wash up, and when I was ready to come back out. It seemed harmless enough, and it kept me off that dental death trap. However, the second I walked out of my recovery room, Mr. Bedford put me at the front of the line and told me to walk across again. My nerves objected fiercely to this maneuver, but despite every speck of my being shaking uncontrollably, I made it across the balance beam. Mr. Bedford showed me how important it was to face fear with a stiff upper lip.
As soon as the I-35W bridge tumbled into tragedy, several relatives and co-workers hinted they were going to swear off crossing spans forever. Their balance beam was becoming just too intimidating. I sent every one of them to their calming corner with this bit of information: Bridge collapses are still a rare occurrence. To complete the recovery, I think what this country needs is the construction of more bridges.
We can start with I-95 in Florida. With congestion teetering on the brink of uncontrollable, officials decided it was time to dump the underused high-occupancy vehicle lanes and replace them with electronically tolled express lanes. Fertilizing this idea was a $62.9 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration. South Florida was one of five metropolitan areas to receive a piece of an $848 million package geared toward accelerating plans that aim to use technology and free-market principles to reduce congestion.
Some of those high-tech measures, however, appear to be fresh from the time I took that nasty spill. Officials plan to tighten existing lanes from 12 ft to 11 ft by using what the Miami Herald is calling “rubber candlesticks,” or what we would like to call “traffic attenuators.” The plot thickener to all this is the fact that personal injury protection auto insurance might cease to exist as a requirement in the state of Florida.
Now, I think attenuators certainly have their place as being an effective measure of traffic management, but the concept is not dripping with those Styrofoam peanuts from the fresh idea box.
I say pull a new bridge out from all this commotion. It has worked in Tampa, where the elevated Lee Roy Selmon Expressway is a smashing (er, antismashing) success—almost 370,000 hit the stretch in June alone, creating $550,000 in additional revenue. More traffic-fighting spans need to spring up all over the U.S. as part of a permanent answer to congestion. It also will turn this heightened bridge phobia into a stumbling, bumbling toothless monster.
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