I overheard this recently. Though the words aren’t verbatim, they’re close. Guy #2 was actually starting to get a bit mad at Guy #1.
Guy 1: You’ve got a great location out here. It’s beautiful.
Guy 2: Thanks. We love it.
Guy 1: I noticed that this area passed a law saying that no more roads can be paved. You’ve got a nice long gravel road you live on. You must love it.
Guy 2: Yeah. We really love it.
Guy 1: I’ll bet. It’s great. I love gravel roads.
Guy 2: What? I thought you were kidding. We absolutely HATE it.
Guy 1: No, no, no. It’s wonderful.
Guy 2: What? Every time someone drives past, we get a huge cloud of dust all over our house and windows. If we’re sitting on the porch and a car goes by, we have to go inside for ten minutes or we have to take a shower and wash our clothes.
Guy 1: It’s so nice leaving roads unpaved. It’s a lot more natural, you know? Everything is getting so built up it’s nice to have something a little more rural. When I was a kid, almost all the roads were gravel and we loved it.
Guy 2: You’re welcome to it. We hate it. We’ve been hoping for years that they’d pave this. We have to wash our cars all the time. I was so mad when the council passed that proposal. I couldn’t believe it.
Guy 1: No, no, no. This is much better. I wish more places would pass laws like that.
Guy 2: Do you live on a gravel road?
Guy 1: No. I live in town. But I sure like the fact that I can go out and find places like this.
At this point, Guy 2 just shook his head and walked away. Guy 1 kept muttering to himself about how nice gravel roads were.
3 Responses to “Gravel Roads: For thee, not for me”
Reminds me of the Critical Areas Ordinance here in King County, WA. It was an EXTREMELY draconian ordinance that SEVERELY restricted property rights for rural residents. Not a little. *A LOT* However, it was passed by urban folks that wanted to make sure their Sunday drives in the country stayed as building-free as possible. Not by anyone who’s life was affected by it.
It lasted a while until thrown out, but not before causing severe financial damage to plenty of innocent folks.
Seattle residents (as a whole) couldn’t care less.
The walls that the country’s founders built to prevent the tyranny of the majority have slowly and deliberately been chipped away for a long time. When private property is no longer completely sacrosanct, there are a lot of awesome things that the elite can do with it, on your behalf of course. Sort of like the Supreme Court decision on Eminent Domain. This is obviously a case of public property not private, but for what reason does the government administer public property if not for the use by the private? I would expect at least a big refund on my county taxes for all the money saved not paving my street. Along with some Unicorn steaks and a nice perpetual motion machine.
Much worse than gravel roads are what we live on, a sand road! That is untill I got the local barber to scare the county judge into paving a strech in front of our house!