Normally, I don’t care much about the goings-on in Omaha, at least w/r/t Dallas. Honestly, unless the words “Saddle Creek” are involved, I tend not to think about Omaha at all. But given that Dallas’ streets have now regressed to the point where Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving would be hesitant to run a herd of longhorns on them, this caught my eye: Omaha, faced with streets it can’t afford to fix, is pretty much giving up trying.
As in many big cities, the infrastructure here is crumbling, a problem exacerbated by decades of neglect and a network of residential roads, including Ms. Amoura’s, that have never met code. But Omaha’s solution is extreme: grinding paved streets into gravel as a way to cut upkeep costs.
“I wouldn’t like it and neither do the residents that live on those streets,” said Mayor Jean Stothert, a Republican who is nearing the end of her first term. “We are about 50 years behind where we should be as far as resurfacing and repair. I can’t catch up on 50 years of neglect in three or four years.”
It sounded surprising at first — a city unpaving roads? — but, as with pretty much everything else every day now, by the end, my reaction was more like, sure, of course, why not.
