To hear the squealing from the Left - led by Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid and University Chancellor Jim Rogers - there just ain’t a dime to spare anywhere in anyone’s budget to cut anything. Every penny is being spent of absolutely critical government “needs.” Really?
Do you know what a traffic circle, sometimes called a roundabout, is? Well, it’s pretty complicated to use…if you’re an idiot. As you’re driving down the street you come to one of these circles/roundabouts. You drive into the circle, then drive around the circle, until you exit onto the street you wish to take to get where you’re going. Real rocket science, right?
Well, Reno has one of these new circle/roundabouts at the intersection of Kietzke Lane and Neil Road. It’s been up since September. And guess what? Drivers have figured out how to use it all on their own. They drive into the circle from one street and exit out of the circle onto another street. In two months, not one driver has gotten into the circle/roundabout and not been able to get back out. Go figure.
Now for the punchline.
“The Regional Transportation Commission recently made available an instructional video on their Web site to help drivers better steer through roundabouts,” reported the Reno Gazette-Journal on Saturday. The cost to produce this “must see” video for all the drivers who can’t figure out how to steer through traffic circles themselves? $4,000.
Priceless.
RTC officials, however, are bragging that the video was “customized” from an existing Washington Department of Transportation video, “saving the RTC about $46,000 in production costs.” Which is like the old jokes about a wife who comes home telling her husband how much money she “saved” him by buying some absolutely useless item because it was “on sale.”
But this time, the joke’s on us, the taxpayers.
We constantly hear this relentless moaning and groaning about how critical traffic construction and road repair is throughout Nevada, and how taxes need to be raised to pay for it all because we don’t have enough money. Yet the transportation geniuses at the RTC somehow found $4,000 to produce this ridiculously stupid video that no one but the most brain-dead of drivers in the state is gonna watch? I mean, if you have to go to an RTC website to watch a video to learn how to drive into and out of a roundabout, how in the hell did you get a license in the first place?
Folks, this is exactly why there should be (a) NO talk of raising any taxes of any kind on anyone for any purpose at this time, and (b) why it is absolutely essential that government at every level - state, local and even school districts - be required to post every expenditure of taxpayer dollars on a public website so we can more easily find these kinds of outrageously stupid uses of our tax dollars.
Sure, $4,000 is just a drop in the bucket. But it’s also just the tip of the iceberg. Bring on the transparency!
Posted on November 27th, 2007 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada
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