Rural socialism

I live in a very rural area.  It’s about fifteen miles from where I live to where I work, and my preferred route has about ten miles of back roads where I’m more likely to see deer than cars, with the final five miles on a main road.  Where I live is also very red.  I believe 80% of my county voted for Trump in 2020, which was a few points higher than in 2016.  I don’t see as many Trump flags as I used to, but I don’t know if they’ve finally been taken down or were just put away because of winter weather. 

Anyway, a few months ago as I was going to work, I wondered how many people actually live on these back roads.  And it’s hard to say because there are numerous little roads going off into the woods and I don’t know if there’s one house back there or ten.  There are also numerous camps in the area and when you just see glimpses of a building through the trees as you drive by it’s hard to say if that’s a camp or a house.  To make things easy, I’ll just say that there’s 100 people living along those ten miles.  There’s probably about the same on the five miles of main road, but that does bring you in to the business side of town, not the residential side.

Since these are Pennsylvania back roads, they’re … okay.  I’ve driven on worse, I’ve driven on better.  But I was wondering how much it costs to pave these roads.  Now, I started looking online, but it seemed every site I found gave different numbers, from a few hundred thousand dollars to over a million.  The high end were for actually building roads, but even just simply repaving an existing road is expensive, especially since these roads wind around and over hills.  Without finding an actual bill – or driving an expert along the roads so they can calculate how much it would cost – there’s no firm way for me to know how much it would cost to repave these back roads.  For simplicity sake, we’ll take a low end of $100,000.  Oh, that’s per mile.  So for the ten miles of these back roads, that would be $1,000,000.  Of course, maybe we only repave it every decade, so that means the 100 of us who live along these roads need to come up with $100,000 every year, or $1,000 each.

That’s just for these roads I said are my preferred route.  When the weather gets bad, I take another route which is five miles of back roads and ten miles of main road.  I don’t normally take this route because it brings me to the other side of town which I then have to go through.  So that $1,000 a year is just for the decadal repaving of this one ten mile section of road and doesn’t include stuff like plowing in the winter or any other maintenance.

So how do these roads get paved?  Well, the government takes taxes from heavily populated areas and redistributes it so that us rural folk aren’t left with the whole bill.  Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my neighbors used these roads to go to some “Taxation is theft!” rally where they scream that the tyrannical government never did anything for them.