Building Walls

Nobody asked but …

It has been a while since I have driven along interstate highways in urban residential areas.  I had forgotten that the suburbs are shielded from the hubbub of the expressways by 20-feet high walls.

A few years back, I was  reading in one of our fine dailies in Kentucky how our venerable Senator, Mitch McConnell, was aiding some property owners in getting new isolation walls built.  The costs were not adjusted for today’s values, and, even at that, were estimated to be $100,000 per subdivision lot that bordered on the right-of-way.  I believe that it would be generous to estimate the length of those individual plots at 100 feet.  That means that a mile of wall, on both sides, would cost about $10,500,000.  Ten miles of same would be about 100 million, and a hundred miles would cost more than $1 billion.  Would a city such as Chicago or LA take a hundred miles of walls?  Easily.

We can’t keep up with our infrastructure needs, yet we are committed to building thousands of miles of walls on highways and along borders.  Your tax dollars at work.

— Kilgore Forelle