U.S send $381,000 per minute overseas while
domestic infrastructure remains severely underfunded,
said T. Boone Pickens
(AP/Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
With more than one third of U.S roads and interstates congested and poorly maintained Americans spend an extra 38 hours per year in rush hour traffic not only adding to greenhouse gas emissions, but also putting pressure on the world’s scarce oil resources.
“America’s dependence on foreign oil is streaming revenue away from domestic projects and into other countries, many of which are our enemies”, said Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens at a news conference in Houston, Friday. “Oil rich nations are reaping the benefits of this great transfer of wealth to build state-of-the-art roads while the U.S struggles on congested roads and collapsing highways and bridges”.
The U.S sent nearly $17 billion overseas in January, importing about 408.7 million barrels. Money, Mr. Pickens said, that instead could have been invested in infrastructure and roads. In Texas, where the population has increased 57 percent since the early 1980s, state road capacity has only grown by 8 percent at the same time as many big-city projects aimed at relieving traffic has been underfunded.
Not so in oil rich Russia. The country has announced plans to build 2,500 miles of new roads annually by 2010 and to invest $437.9 billion in its rail network by 2030, and Qatar has allocated $8.4 million for roads in their 2008/2009 budget.
Mr. Pickens: “My fear is that domestic traffic will worsen while nations abroad zoom down glistering, brand new highways unless we act now to become more energy independent and stop the transfer of wealth”.
Comments
People do not realize that funding is a problem, and then you get a stink like the one we had locally, last week. Highway construction comes to a halt due to lack of funds for a project. Though the funds will be alloted in the next quarter, some roads will sit unfinished until the funds are available to that county again. My husband works as a lab technician for a major road construction company that has faced both the oil crisis and funding problems in the past year. Getting people to listen to the real problems is difficult when they are inconvienced by a slow down in traffic flow.
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