Normally this is the point in the winter where I go completely off the edge complaining about the traffic on Highway 248. For the last few years, traffic backs up all the way to Highway 40 on a clear sunny morning. If there are clouds, it will back up all the way to Brown’s Canyon. The traffic back up has more or less doubled my commute time.
But something is different this year. Even during Sundance, traffic moved pretty well at times of day that I would expect it to be backed up. With Sundance gone, 8 a.m. looks like a Sunday in May. There is no traffic on 248. I was breezing through there the other day, listening to the radio station’s news about how the city hired a consultant to study the problem, and would be considering the recommendations this week. The whole idea of hiring a traffic consultant to look at 248 suddenly looked silly. It’s like hiring somebody to devise a grazing plan for the municipal unicorn herd.
So what’s up? The two new traffic lights installed over the summer should have made things worse on 248 (while greatly improving the situation for people crossing the street or making turns on to it). After driving unimpeded for most of the winter, I have a couple of pretty solid guesses about what fixed the problem. I finally noticed something that wasn’t there. There are no cement trucks. There are no dump trucks. There are no trucks dragging huge excavators.
When the lights change, the entire column of traffic accelerates at a more or less normal pace, and moves through the intersection. Last year, nobody could move any faster than the slowest cement truck, which falls short in the drag-racing category. The end result was that only the cement truck got through the intersection before the light changed again, and traffic gradually backed up all the way to Vernal.
So all it took to solve the traffic mess was the collapse of the world’s banking system. Building has more or less stopped. There are no cement trucks, no dump trucks, and a couple of hundred construction tradesmen aren’t coming into town to work. Maybe this “Not-Yet-Great Depression” isn’t such a bad thing after all. Unless, of course, you make your living as a dump-truck driver. Then it really stinks.
The city’s consultant and staff have come up with the obvious solution of widening the road to four lanes, but then stupidly suggest making two of them high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. Since the empty buses that will be running from the empty park-and-ride lot aren’t any faster off the line than a cement truck with an axle-breaking load, the end result will be two lanes creeping in each direction if and when things return to some sort of economic normalcy.
The council was set to act on this Thursday night. That’s after my deadline, so I don’t know if they approved the HOV proposal. I hope not. It smacks of doing something that sounds all “green” but doesn’t solve the problem. On the other hand, if the slow-moving buses were relegated to the same lane as the slow-moving dump trucks, the other lane would be open for traffic moving at normal speeds. What we need is a slow-moving-vehicle lane, not a special lane for slow, empty buses. During Art Festival or the half dozen other days that the park-and-ride lot might get used, an HOV lane might make sense. But for the rest of the time, neither the HOV lane nor the park-and-ride lot makes any sense at all.
Changing gears, I picked up a package of tax-preparation software the other day. I like to get an early start to see if my wild-guess “estimate” on my quarterly taxes was anywhere near close. If I have to sell a kidney between now and April 15th, it’s good to get started early.
There are several versions of Turbo Tax, from the cheap set for the most basic returns to more comprehensive packages for more complicated situations. There’s a chart on the back to help you select the right version. I noticed this year that there was a new version “Turbo Tax With Plausible Deniability.” The chart indicated that if you expected to be appointed to high office in the Obama administration, this was the package for you. “Help conceal hundreds of thousands in income” the box said. Since I’m not looking for a job in Washington, I bought what I used last year.
The Tom Daschle tax problem is worse than embarrassing. It really took all the hope of “Change we can believe in” and stomped it into the ground. “Change that smells like business as usual” is not what I voted for. Daschle said he “forgot” to declare income for the use of a limo and chauffer provided by a friend. It seems everybody who leaves the Senate quickly has friends like that. He owed $140,000 in taxes. That’s the tax. If he’s in the 35 percent bracket, he “forgot” something on the order of $400,000 in income. Must be some limo. I wonder what the driver looks like.
You “forget” $18 in interest on your checking account. You don’t “forget” a limo and chauffer that you get into every day. The man ought to serve some jail time. Obama stood behind him for far too long before admitting that he “screwed up.” Of course, there was Tim Geithner, now treasury secretary (and head of the IRS) who ” forgot” to pay his Social Security and Medicare taxes. Oops. And don’t forget Nancy Killefer, who was supposed to be Obama’s special agent to root out waste and fraud in government. She withdrew when it became public that she owed a modest $950 in state unemployment taxes on her housekeeper. I guess it helps to look for that sort of thing if you have hands-on experience.
But when the nation is falling apart in large part because of people playing fast and loose with the bookkeeping rules, we have a right to expect better.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.