And on the seventh day...He created a market.

With this article I venture into what may prove one of my most overtly political topics ever, possibly against better judgment.  Yet I wade into these waters as a deliberate challenge to myself, since I strive to separate the intensive political controversy that this tourist attraction elicits from what I think is more interesting and ultimately more cogent: the sustainability of its business model.  Despite being relatively new, this attraction has already lured millions of visitors.  Although tens of millions more have not visited (and have no intention of doing so), the heated debate generated from its opening in the summer of 2007 has inevitably foisted it further in the limelight than its conceivers had ever expected.

I’m referring to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in the outer reaches of suburban Cincinnati, just ten miles west of the Greater Cincinnati Airport (CVG) and also a two-minute drive from the I-275 bridge over the Ohio River that leads to Indiana.  The museum is (at this point in time) the highest-profile project of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a non-profit Christian apologetics ministry that principally advocates for a literal interpretation of Genesis.  Both the museum and its parent organization, now housed at the same address at the museum’s campus, owe a great deal of their size and influence to the tireless efforts of Ken Ham, who first founded a creationist organization in his native Australia in the late 1970s.  After several acquisitions and reorganizations that eventually whisked Ham across the Pacific to an American agency, Answers in Genesis was born, bringing together a smattering of creationist enterprises from the US, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand under one umbrella, all under Ham’s directorship.  In the intervening years, Ham has achieved national recognition for his tireless fundraising, which culminated in the $27 million of private funds to build the 70,000 square-foot Creation Museum—a goal of AiG since its inception.

Even among other Biblical creationists, the Creation Museum has aroused controversy.  It largely serves as the visitor-friendly, public relations arm of Answers in Genesis, which in turn concords with Ken Ham’s theological views.  Ham is a Young Earth Creationist (YEC), meaning that he believes that God created the earth according to the account in Genesis, approximately 6,000 years ago.  Not only does this defy fundamentals to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, it also boldly contradicts most geological or cosmogonal studies of the age of the earth and the origin of the universe.  Thus, when compared with competing perspectives such as Old Earth or progressive creationism, whose proponents have also publicly debated Ham and AiG, the Creation Museum is probably the most at odds with contemporary scientific inquiry.

AiG’s creative team could have tried to accommodate other creationist views to expand its audience base, but they wisely decided it wouldn’t be necessary: Young Earth Creationism aligns with the views of a sizable portion of American Evangelical and conservative Christians.  According to a 2012 Gallup Poll, 46% of Americans surveyed believe that God created humans within the last 10,000 years—a percentage essentially unchanged since the polls began 30 years prior.  Thus, the Creation Museum did not need to cast a wide net in order to find its demographic base.  Initial speculation was that the Museum would see 250,000 visitors in its first year, but it ended up achieving that number within five months.  Almost immediately, AiG began planning to double the size of the parking lot, along with a retention pond to capture stormwater runoff, preventing it from flooding or polluting a nearby creek.  By the end of that first year, the Creation Museum welcomed over 400,000 visitors.

The photos featured throughout this article are no longer all that current; they’re from the summer of 2009, when the museum was about two years old.  The Creation Museum seems to be operating on a trajectory that involves steadily expanding its programming and amenities, though it already seemed extensive during my visit.  A few paragraphs back, I consciously used the word “campus” to describe the site, and while the word may be an overstatement, the museum is more than an isolated building.  The park-like grounds are extensive.

Aside from the outdoor seating, the museum’s property features an huge garden, a rope bridge, and a petting zoo.

Though I’m hardly well-versed in landscape architecture, it was obvious that AiG had invested considerably in both the design and the regular maintenance of these grounds.  The results were, at the very least, pleasing to my own two peepers, but I have no idea if Ken Ham and his team intended for these grounds to feature plant species indigenous to northern Kentucky, or an approximate recreation of prelapsarian Eden, or something else.  There was no way I could know.  The entire garden lacked any signage referring to plant species, Biblical relevance, or anything that would explain context or rationale.  It ostensibly existed simply as a treat for the senses, adding to the attraction for a museum that, thanks to the combination of the exhibits and the outdoor amenities, could easily consume an entire day for visitors.  Since the museum sits in the middle of former farmland, with no other commercial presence nearby, it needed something for its patrons to eat during their visit.  And, characteristic of the largest children’s museums, it offers an entire food court.

Since my 2009 visit, Answers in Genesis has added 20 zip lines and a network of 10 sky bridges to the museum, making it the biggest course in the Midwest. http://www.wcpo.com/news/zip-lining-among-new-attractions-at-the-creation-museum

Inside the museum, the curators have added a new section on dragons, based on the supposition that the Bible’s reference to “behemoths” might not just be describing the museum’s much-celebrated dinosaurs but also other mythical creatures that could have existed before the flood.  But these newest features only further beg the question: what do dragons and dinosaurs (not to mention zip lines) have to do with the story of creation, or anything explicitly referenced in the Bible, for that matter?  These inclusion are entirely within AiG’s right, but its hard to see them as corresponding with the organization’s ultimate ministry.  If visitors pay for the museum’s outdoor element and spend all day on zip lines, how are they having anything but a secular experience?  Instead, the attractions outside of the museum’s walls are ostensibly new goodies to enhance the museum’s ambition as a day-long (or even multi-day) destination in an of itself, rather than a museum that amuses the kiddos for 2 or 3 hours.  Ken Ham smartly located the Creation Museum sufficiently close to several important metros: besides Cincinnati, we have Lexington, Louisville, Dayton, Columbus, and Indianapolis within a two-hour drive.  But when I visited, the license plates often came from much greater distances than the tri-state region.

It would seem that the Creation Museum has succeeded overwhelmingly in its aspirations; after all, by April 2010 it was celebrating its millionth visitor.  But a closer scrutiny at those numbers suggests that all is not well.  After all, if it attracted over 400,000 after one year in operation, which equates to May of 2008, shouldn’t it have reached the one million point at some point in late 2009 if those numbers continued to surge?  The fact is, after a booming year one, the attendance has dropped in each subsequent year. http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-26546-creation_museum_atte.html The year ending June 2012 reported attendance at 254,000—barely over the original expectations.  The museum blames the persistently weak economy, which surely does have something to do with it—except that the museum opened just months before the Great Recession, and its most successful first year transpired while we were watching Lehman Brothers and Countrywide Financial collapse.  And AiG’s response to sagging sales was to raise the ticket price in July of 2012: from an already steep $24.95 per person up to $29.95.  It seems like some of those new attractions may reflect AiG’s realization that the Creation Museum is in serious trouble if it keeps moving along this path.  It’s declining faster than a Mainline church.

The response?  Answers in Genesis boldly announced its latest project: a $73-million replica of Noah’s greatest achievement, in the Ark Encounter, under construction about 40 miles away from the Creation Museum in Grant County, Kentucky.  In addition to the ark, it will apparently feature a replica of the Tower of Babel, the life of Abraham, the plagues of Egypt, and the birth of the nation of Israel—all as part of a seven to eleven-minute ride.  But it’s facing a few snags: the project is years behind schedule and has only raised about one-fifth of its budget, and the delays are pushing the estimated total budget up to $150 million—almost six times the cost of the Creation Museum.  The situation is so dire that the neighboring City of Williamstown has issued $62 million in bonds in an attempt to salvage the initiative.  Fortunately the city won’t have to repay these bonds back, since anticipated revenues for Ark Encounter will do the trick.  But these bonds aren’t rated, making them little more than junk.  Among the risks to investors: sicknesses transmitted among the ark’s many animal pairs; lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of a religious project receiving tax breaks; those persistently declining attendance figures at the Creation Museum.

None of the aforementioned news featurettes fully underline why the Creation Museum and perhaps Answers in Genesis are possibly in such serious trouble.  The ministry’s current struggles ultimately foreshadow a cultural misalignment.  When news of the Ark Encounter made its way to some of the Evangelical Christian newsmedia outlets, it understandably elicited reaction, both favorable as well as a fair share of atheist catcalls.  One quote caught my attention: an anonymous commenter who I have no way of finding or reaching; otherwise I would give credit.  I simply copied and pasted the comment.  Here it is:

“What I find so amusing about this whole project is that... Christians don't seem to realize that by giving their Bible stories a Disney like experience... they are essentially highlighting the very mythological basis of their faith. In my opinion for most Christians the [Old Testament] is an out of sight out of mind type thing (because Christians don't actually read the bible) so by bringing focus to these stories in a modern scientific context... only the extremely delusional are going to find the encounter "spiritual" everyone else will gauge the experience by the entertainment value for the dollar...the same as visiting any other cartoon based amusement park.”

Obviously this quote isn’t lacking in condescension toward Christians in general and creationism in particular.  I don’t condone it one bit, nor does it reflect my own sentiments.  I would experience no Schadenfreude if Answers in Genesis were to go bankrupt; it’s obvious the Creation Museum had quite an impact on the tourist economy of northern Kentucky, and it has generated hundreds of jobs for the region.  It would be callous to wish all of this to fail, no matter how dubious the museum’s attempt to reconcile contemporary scientific inquiry with the first book of the Old Testament.  For all the criticism lobbed at the Creation Museum for branding itself as science/history, it suffers no shortcomings as a religious museum, and my philosophy is overwhelmingly laissez-faire when it comes to addressing what matters of faith parents wish to impart on their children—in contrast with what our tax-supported public schools teach.

That said, the comment above nails it in the in the final sentence or two.  Answers in Genesis may have sealed its own demise by embarking on this basic undertaking.  The more goodies it crams into the overall experience and the more it blurs sacred and profane, the more obvious it become that the business model echoes that of Disneyland, regardless of the original intentions.  And if it becomes just another amusement park, even in the eyes of its most ardent Evangelical Christian supporters, it’s not going to be able to sustain itself, because the museum really will end up competing with places like Disneyland (or King’s Island in the Cincinnati area).  Meanwhile, since it does give “their Bible stories a Disney-like experience”, it will make new believers out of exactly nobody.

The other major aspect of the Creation Museum that I think hints at its questionable long-term viability is a simple display sign that, at the time of my visit, was poised strategically near the exit.

Okay, so the kids love those dinosaurs, and you can never go wrong with letting people pet the animals on display.  But is that enough for people to come back—let alone multiple times in a single year?  It would be interesting to know how many annual passes the museum sold even in its wildly successful first year, and, for that matter, how many families actually used those passes.  Color me cynical, but my suspicion is that low sales on the annual pass should have offered the early warning sign.

Over its six years in operation, the Creation Museum has expanded its programming.  But it has never reported any change to its exhibits—a huge contrast with most children’s museums (which are typically heavily science-themed) or most amusement parks.  These attractions recognize that exhibits must come and go all the time in order to keep the overall experience fresh.  Sometimes children’s museums will simply update their exhibits to reflect breakthroughs in scientific discovery.  But the Creation Museum is based on the unchanging Word of God.  It cannot evolve; pardon the pun.  Thus, what incentive do parents have to go back and see it all over again, especially when the museum is trying so hard to serve as a destination for families coming from hundreds of miles away?

When Answers in Genesis opens its Ark Encounter (if it opens), the whole enterprise very likely will benefit from a surge in attendance.  But how long before the Ark Encounter replaces the Creation Museum as the premier Biblical attraction of Northern Kentucky?  Can AiG sustain both, especially with those prices?  And what adult or child is seriously going to want to return within the year, just to experience the exact same spectacle all over again?  All of this ministry’s herculean efforts—and colossal spending—may just become the next incarnation of Heritage USA, the largely forgotten South Carolina Christian theme park that exploded in popularity in the early 1980s, then crashed almost as quickly after America learned of the peccadilloes of its founder, Jim Bakker.  I would never want to analogize Ken Ham to a convicted felon.  But barring a tremendous shift in American culture that has little to do with growing percentage claiming “religion: none”, the quixotic Australian’s empire may prove even more short-lived.

Surgeon General’s warning: “It’s Mail Pouch Tobacco. Treat yourself.”

I’ve gotten in the habit of dropping the word “meme” into blog articles as though it has become a part of common parlance.  (Come to think of it, I probably overuse “parlance” too.)  The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “meme” is that it is “an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means”.  The Merriam-Webster  includes the abstract nouns “idea”, “style”, and “usage” in its definition, but otherwise it says more or less the same thing.  A meme seems to be an inherently sociological phenomenon—the iterations that it encapsulates are antithetical to biological means of transmission.  As of yet, the word seems to evade most thesauruses; as recently as fifteen years ago, social theorists and cultural critics bandied the term around freely, and, inevitably, journalists, who have long perused the corpus of this coterie, picked up the term.  From there it proliferated wildly, almost mimetically, to couch its Greek antecedent.  My guess is that while not every Boomer and Xer is acquainted with the word, it is rare that a Millennial would graduate with a liberal arts degree and not learn to use it correctly.  A meme is not necessarily the same as afad, though most fads originate as memes.  A meme is less temporally ephemeral and rarely as ubiquitous—much like the word itself, most people could remain oblivious to a meme, provided they don’t engage with the specific milieu in which the meme has both spawned and flourished.

If the word still seems shadowy after this definition, allow for a photographic illustration that many Americans have seen even if they haven’t overtly contemplated it.

On the side of a building in the two-block main street of tiny St. Elmo, Illinois is a faded advertisement for Mail Pouch Tobacco.  To someone from Maine or Mississippi or Montana it might seem like no more than the vintage bric-a-brac you’d see along the walls of an Applebee’s, but most adult residents of the lower Midwest, Appalachia, or the Mid-Atlantic have seen one in person.  The Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company, founded in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1890, initially resorted to advertising on the walls of commercial buildings such as the one above, or this one below, in Findlay, Ohio:

Pretty faded stuff, and this Ohio variant most likely sat behind an adjacent building for many years that eventually faced the demolition ball.

The crisper iterations of the Mail Pouch Tobacco ad—the ones by which it has been immortalized—grace the roofs and sides of wooden barns across the countryside in about a dozen states.  I haven’t come across a good vintage one recently in my travels, so I will have to crib from another source:

Other angles of this same barn are visible at the Vintage Log website. 

Bloch Brothers Tobacco shifted its focus toward the barns and away from brick buildings a little after 1900.  It doesn’t take a doctorate in economics to guess the reasons: rented advertisement space on rural barns is much cheaper than urban centers (even if many were small towns), and barns are ubiquitous.  Most of the good chronicles of Mail Pouch advertising (such as Jack Goddard’s account of its cultural importance in Beaver County, Pennsylvania) recognize that the rate paid to barn owners of about $1 or $2 a year wasn’t even much by early 20^th century standards.  (In the earliest days, they were rewarded with tobacco or subscriptions to The Saturday Evening Post.)  The bigger incentive was that the barns would receive a fresh coat of paint every few years, helping to resist moisture intrusion and extend the lives of the barns themselves.  The relationship between landowners and Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company proved symbiotic: as the program peaked at the halfway point of the century, historians estimate that the standardized Mail Pouch Tobacco advertisement graced the faces of over 20,000 barns.  Other companies such as Burma Shave and Beech-Nut quickly caught on to the effectiveness of this carpet bomb approach, but Mail Pouch Tobacco remained pre-eminent.  The campaign suffered a setback with the passage of the Highway Beautification Program of 1965, which seriously restricted the proximity of billboards or other mounted advertisements along federal highways—a policy that tacitly acknowledged Mail Pouch Tobacco ads as visual blight.  Many proponents of the barn painting no doubt saw this as an elitist gesture, prompting officials (at the behest of West Virginia Senator James Randolph) to adapt a 1974 amendment that exempted Mail Pouch barns from the restrictions, by classifying them as “folk heritage barns”.

In the second half of the century, the continued survival of Mail Pouch barns depended heavily on a single individual: Harley Warrick of rural Ohio, who, by his own estimations painted and re-painted over 20,000 barns.  The logo for mail pouch, Spartan but assertive, depended on versatility because the “easel” wasn’t the least bit standardized; no two barns are identical.  Warrick and his team averaged over 200 barns a year and could, at the height of his productivity, complete two full ads in one day.  This most famous barn-painter retired in 1992, and the Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company (after decades of merges and acquisitions, called Swisher International Group, but still based in Wheeling) suspended the barn painting campaign at this point.  Warrick died in 2000, but his legacy survives through American primitive/folk art expositions hosted by theSmithsonian and other globally recognized institutions. 

Unfortunately, in the near future, it’s possible that museum exhibits may be the place to encounter Warrick’s oeuvre.  Time hasn’t exactly been kind to the Mail Pouch campaign; even in his lifetime, Warrick estimated that less than 1,000 barns survive.  Lacking an organized restoration initiative, their numbers are even fewer today.  Passive decomposition is probably a greater culprit than active demolition; anyone driving across a 100-mile stretch of the rural Midwest or Northeast will need more than fingers and toes to track all the collapsing wooden barns.  Mail Pouch Barn Stormers groups are doing their utmost to preserve this endangered piece of Americana, and this initiative proves more than ever that its cultural ascension to the status of a meme: it permeated enough of the collective consciousness to foment a widespread emotional connection.

No example that I have seen better conveys Mail Pouch’s expressive power and resiliency than this barn on a rural road not so far from Tiffin, Ohio.

Yep, it’s a bona fide ad poking up from over the field.  I got a little closer so I could appreciate it.

Hardly a Mail Pouch aficionado, I could still tell that something wasn’t quite right about this.  The colors were legitimate, including the pale blue stripes to the left and right of the sign.  But the letters were too tall and skinny, each row was spaced too closely to the next, and the centering for the “TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST” was off.  And the colors just looked way too bold and fresh for it to be even from Warrick’s final years on the job in the early 1990s.  Was it a hack job?  Not even.

Nothing so insidious.  Though the red paint is already widely chipped, the lettering is still in its toddler years, dating from just 2007.  It might not be polished, but it’s a tribute if there ever was one.  Clearly at least a handful of folks in north-central Ohio want to keep the Mail Pouch legacy from fading into extinction, even if its at the expense of the logo’s typographical fundamentals.

Perhaps Mail Pouch Tobacco barns aren’t as an legitimate of a meme as even some contemporary fads.  After all, the campaign was hardly a bottom-up effort; the Bloch Brothers clearly saw a brilliant promotional opportunity and took advantage of it.  It didn’t emerge organically.  But it surely owed at least part of its repetition and proliferation—and it owes virtually all of its continued survival—to a certain “contagion” with humble origins: Landowner A saw what Landowner B was doing to keep his/her barn in tiptop shape, so why can’t I do it too?  Paradigms of contemporary life would suggest that urban settings are the best crucible for the dissemination of memes: after all, they flourish when an agglomeration of people can lubricate them, so to speak.  But billboards continue to thrive in both urban and the most rural of settings; in the age of information, a cultural artifact can “go viral” without having any physical incarnation.  Sites like Youtube spawn digital memes almost every day.  Mail Pouch Tobacco barns are a commodity (I cannot verify if the tobacco is even available for purchase these days) that owes much of its contemporary stewardship to its increasing scarcity.  Though rural in origins, a small-town folk historian and an urban hipster who bought a shirt at Zazzle.com most likely share a core emotional affinity for the advertisement, and who am I to judge the sincerity of their fondness for the meme?  Both depend on the Internet to perpetuate their admiration of this iconic cultural gesture.  I suspect the barn painters outside of Findlay used an online photo as their source of inspiration too.

Not all interstate highways are perpetuated equal.

While transportation infrastructure has long elicited a highly politicized debate in the US, particularly in regards to government funding of alternative methods (Amtrak and rail, supporting the persistently ailing airline industry), only in recent years have the discussions migrated more heavily toward inadequacies in road and highway infrastructure.  The collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis in August of 2007 helped stimulate the Federal Highway Administration to probe into the quality, level of maintenance and fundamental stability of some of the nation’s most heavily traveled bridges, while it prompted the Minnesota Department of Transportation to increase the state fuel tax mildly to fund bridge maintenance appropriately.

Five years later, the debate on the adequacy of transportation infrastructure funding persists: the most comprehensive current authorization of funds is the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, better known by its acronym SAFETEA-LU.  First signed by President Bush in 2005, it expired in September 2009, but Congress has extended it more than a half-dozen times since then.  The latest (ninth) extension expired today (June 30, or yesterday, depending on when this blog makes it to post), and while Congresshad long aimed to pass a final reauthorization bill, it seemed more likely, in this heavily fractious political climate, that it would simply settle for one or two more extensions until the November elections.   However, to many people’s surprise, President Obama was able to sign into law a bill that at least for the next week (until July 6) assured that no interruption to federal highway funding would take place.  It now appears most likely that a new bill will emerge in the next week, rather than yet another short-term extension.  For most Americans, none of this is particularly earth shattering news: only institutions with strong ties to lobbying are likely to follow the development of this bill on a day-to-day basis.  My suspicion, in fact, is that over 90% of Americans would not know what SAFETEA-LU is.  Does this seem strange, given our overwhelming dependence on the interstate highway system for traversing this mammoth country?

It may be premature for me to accuse Americans of prevailing complacency in this matter, but obviously there is a far greater confidence that the legislature always will do something about this, and the impact of that decision is not going to cause widespread polarization among the constituents.  Compare the passage of this bill to the results of the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act: everyone has been glued to their TVs!  The “complacent” label may seem snide, but it was certainly a word Minnesotans heard a fair amount in the summer of 2007, and it wasn’t targeted at residents of that state: negligence and indifference toward infrastructural needs was a nationwide problem back then, and it remains so today.  After MnDOT devised alternative transportation routes during the reasonably fast paced (13 month) reconstruction of the I-35W bridge, did we resume our blithe disregard?  Was the loss of 13 lives during that collapse simply not significant enough to confront the problem the same way we have confronted the funding of health care?

Looking across the recent improvements in our highway system, it’s hard to conclude that improvements in the Federal Interstate Highway System operate under a consistent authority—most likely because they don’t.  I-65 as it runs through Kentucky offers an excellent example.

As the image above indicates, this stretch of the 887-mile highway weaves between Kentucky’s undulating hills and limestone beds.  Just a few miles later further south, the landscape is virtually unchanged.

Perhaps a little flatter, but not much different than before.   This is how most of I-65 in Kentucky looks: with few exceptions, the interstate passes through overwhelmingly rural countryside.  Kentucky in general is not a terribly urban state: only one metro, Louisville/Jefferson County, ranks in the nation’s Top 50 for size, and only four cities (Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green, Owensboro) claim populations over 50,000.  The state ranks 22^nd inpopulation density, but at 110 persons per square mile, it is less than a tenth as densely populated as some of the crowded northeastern states such as New Jersey and Rhode Island.  While traffic volumes for I-65 through Louisville are undoubtedly high at peak hours, the only two other communities of reasonable size (populations over 15,000) with exits along the I-65 stretch of Kentucky are Elizabethtown and Bowling Green.  These are the only communities outside of metro Louisville along the interstate that offer a choice of services (gas, food, lodging) beyond the bare minimum—quite a few of the already sporadic exits along I-65 offer nothing at all.

In short, Kentucky is not a particularly crowded state.  But most of its share of I-65 would suggest otherwise.  Through much of the Midwest and South, six lanes is reserved for more urbanized areas.  The only portions of I-65 in Indiana (a state with nearly double Kentucky’s population density) that are more than four lanes are the Indianapolis metro, NE Indiana around Gary and Merrillville, and the Louisville suburbs in southern Indiana.  Ohio, the tenth most densely populated state in the country, also claims huge stretches of rural interstate highways that are only four lanes wide.  But in recent years, Kentucky’s DOT has overseen the widening of nearly all of I-65, with the exception of a 43-mile segment south of Elizabethtown and north of Bowling Green, and the Governor articulates proposals for an upgrade there during the FY 2012 – FY 2018 Highway Plan.  Before long, all of I-65 in Kentucky will be at least six lanes wide.

Another noticeable feature is the superior lighting of I-65 in Kentucky across its exits.

Streetlights are numerous at the exit ramps, even if the intersecting street does not host a great deal of services or traffic.  In Indiana and Ohio, only the busiest of rural intersections get streetlights, and their number often depends on the traffic volumes: those with a variety of hotels and restaurants may have a dozen streetlights, those with only one or two gas stations may have a half dozen or less, and those that are the most rural will have none.  Conversely, in Kentucky, virtually every interchange on I-65 is now fully saturated with lights—urban or rural, and most are still resolutely rural.

When passing near Bowling Green, where the exits are often quite a bit busier, the streetlights are even more numerous.

Bowling Green is a moderately sized city of approximately 58,000 inhabitants.  Cities of such a size in either Ohio or Indiana are numerous, but in Kentucky, Bowling Green is the third largest city.  And between its three primary exits off of I-65, the segments of interstate remain consistently well-lit:

This stretch of highway deploys of stanchions in the median of the interstate, planted firmly in the Jersey barriers at short intervals.  Usually only larger metros of over 250,000 would integrate such a lighting technique, and exclusively when the interstate passes directly through the most urbanized area.  I-65 circumscribes the exurbs of Bowling Green, yet motorists still get some big-city lighting.  Indiana’s comparably sized cities—Anderson, Lafayette, Terre Haute, Muncie—only get lighting at the major exits.  Granted, the respective interstate does not pass directly through the hearts of those cities either, but the lighting is nowhere near as sophisticated.  Ohio shares the same condition as Indiana, with many lightly traveled interchanges remaining completely unlit.  Thus, Kentucky, despite being a significantly less densely populated state, has invested in highway infrastructure at a level that far surpasses that of its more urbanized neighbors to the north.  I have no doubt that I-65 through Kentucky receives a number of travelers passing through on this very important corridor that connects Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico.  But the fact remains that Indiana and Ohio also can claim significant trucking traffic in addition to their much larger population bases.  Both Indiana and Ohio, because of their proximity to other large cities inside and outside of the two states, have accommodated a significant ground logistical industry, suggesting that, in aggregate, their interstate highway segments will remain much busier than Kentucky’s for the foreseeable future, however well-used it may be.

This comparative observation by no means intends to criticize the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s transportation spending decisions, nor those of Indiana and Ohio.  It simply demonstrates the visible differences in states’ priorities.  Kentucky’s Highway Plan includes the proposal for spending Road Fund revenues appropriated in each new two-year period, which includes state and federal gasoline tax revenues.  This has proven a highly volatile source during the serious recession, due to reduced fuel consumption and purchase of vehicles.  The Federal Highway Trust Fund has been particularly unstable, not only because of reduced consumer spending but because Congress has not agreed on a suitable alternative to SAFETEA-LU since it expired; the series of resolution/extensions disburse about 20% fewer funds than before the act’s 2009 expiration.

Even if many fundamentals of a limited access highway (design, safety parameters) remain more or less the same from state to state, the “embellishments” will inevitably vary tremendously.  At least for now, Kentucky has some of the most luxurious interstates in terms of lane widths and lighting, particularly in relation to the fact that so much of the state is sparsely populated.  By contrast, signage is less developed in Kentucky than in other states: few—perhaps none—of the overpasses in Kentucky have any indicator of what the name of the road is, whereas in Indiana, most overpasses do.  And in Alabama, virtually every street has a particularly handsome sign:

These signs are relatively recently funded—probably simultaneous with the highway widening in Kentucky—and they closely approximate the Clearview font approved by the FHWA to phase out the older, splotchier Highway Gothic.  Notice this example here, with the new font on the overpass and the old one to the right of the road:

Alabama has the slickest signs I have seen among my own recent road trips.  And at this point, Kentucky interstate driving is about as comfy as you can get: roads as wide as you expect to see in Connecticut, but with a fraction of the population density.   Meanwhile, Ohio and the Mid Atlantic states have invested much more heavily in protective fencing to prevent injury when motorists on the overpass might throw objects out the car so that they could hit people below.  Ohio has these fences on almost all overpasses; Indiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have them on just a few; Kentucky has none.  Will we ever see a consistency among the states in all of the various infrastructural amenities?  I’m not holding my breath, and while I hate to end on a cynical note, it is clear that some states are devoting greater amounts of money to bridge maintenance than others—time will only tell where, amidst a decentralized transportation funding system, the next Minneapolis will take place.

MONTAGE: Curbing destruction by rethreading the button.

I'm back from a lengthy time away from Afghanistan and have been trying to plug away at another blog article that incorporates infrastructure from several different countries, as well as the implications on American energy efficiency. But, as is often the case, a shortage of good, specific photos has become my Achilles' heel. I will acquire the remaining photos that I need before too long, and that article is already more than halfway complete, but until then I offer a novelty for my blog: a montage in which I didn't take a single one of the many photographs. I must give heaps of credit to Nici English for providing me not only with the pics—taken hastily from her car through the driver's window, just as I would do—but also with the background information on a subtle but interesting subject: curb jumping.

Notice anything? I probably wouldn't have either. But our star photographer understands the trucking industry firsthand and can clearly spot what I would have completely ignored.

More than one vehicle has attempted to negotiate the turn into this Cracker Barrel outside Caseyville, Illinois, but it would take a heck of a heavy car—and a painfully inept driver—to cause the sort of skimming of the edge of the concrete that you see here. But for a trucker, it's much more understandable. The weight they support and the extensive spatial judgment that they require will inevitably result in some slip-ups. The truck parking in the background of the above photos indicates that the area consciously accommodates truckers; no doubt the property owner also expected the sharp turns would pose problems for some in the industry and paved a curb in order to minimize landscaping damage—which, in turn, results in a damaged curb.

Most corner-cutting and curbside damage comes from a single culprit: the inexperienced trucker, negotiating a space that is simply too small. Understandably, a trucker's ability to handle such a lengthy vehicle only grows through time and experience; more surprisingly, the vast majority of truckers do not last six months in the industry after an initial training. According to English, my online expert, even among the largest trucking companies (Swift, JB Hunt), it would be reasonable to assume that 50% of the drivers have less than half of a year of experience. The result? Lots of scratched curbs, stripped corners, and shredded landscaping.

Many property owners in high truck traffic areas have learned to anticipate these vehicular assaults on their pavement, grass, and landscaping; they have devised a sort of defense. Not surprisingly, a Motel 6, also in the Caseyville area, obviously has to contend with curb jumpers quite a bit.

Large rocks planted at the corner serve the same purpose that they do in residential neighborhoods—to deter motorists who make that turn carelessly. In some cases, these boulders do more than just preserve landscaping aesthetics; they save a valuable piece of infrastructure, such as the fire hydrant below.

The above photo shows the Motel 6 from a different angle—one with a visible drop yard for trailers in the background, which explains the need for such extensive fortification. On the other side of the street, the property owner has chosen a more aggressive—and, in my opinion, uglier—barrier for curb jumpers. They look like overturned bollards, and they seem to be safeguarding what is likely a fragile little wetland.

Not surprisingly, these rocks are particularly prominent at motels along highways that would prove popular destinations for truckers. Here's an installation near Grenada, Mississippi, where the more prominent positioning of the rocks suggests that they are not there just to deter curb-jumping but to alert truckers of a tight corner—which, I'll admit, pretty much amounts to the same thing semantically.

The absence of barriers can often prove more harmful than merely tearing up a patch of grass. A particularly clumsy trucker clocked this light post outside a Caseyville hotel while trying to turn a corner.

Viewed from a different angle, it is clear many other drivers scoured the grass along the curb before one took it an increment further.

Understandably, state and local governments have not improved every road in these often rural environments to the degree that it has a curb. The absence of one would make it difficult if not impossible for a trucker to notice when he or she has turned too sharply.

The example below, again from Caseyville, shows what appears to me like a more serious accident waiting to happen: a curbless street near a trailer drop yard, in which the drivers skimming over into the verge can come within a hair's breadth of clipping that thick yellow cable.

The cable could be stabilizing a number of tall objects—a power line among them. Bollards or rocks placed right along this curve would be a cheaper and most likely more effective solution than building a curb: the introduction of an unexpected obstacle is far more likely to attract attention than a continuous curb that a trucker could cross complacently.

Putting the alliteration aside (in a minute), the trucking technique that tries to terminate the tendency for curb jumping is known as button hooking. We've all seen it on the back of trailers: “Caution—this vehicle makes wide right turns.” The blog entry on Hub Pages by Omniscient Nomad illustrates this effectively:

As Omniscient Nomad explains, in Figure A, the driver did not allow himself or herself sufficient time and space to prepare for the right hand turn. In these instances, the fishtailing trailer may cross into three (if not all four) lanes in an intersection of two-way streets, forcing other drivers to back up to give enough room. Figure B shows a correct button hook, minimizing the likelihood of curbing or concurrent calamity by colliding with cars nearby.

The trucking industry may seem like it owns the road, but, as all of us have seen (even if we don't always notice) trucks are generally subject to many higher restrictions than conventional automobiles, whether it be through weigh stations, restricted tunnels, lower speed limits, or just outright prohibitions, such as this mildly ironic sign near Durant, Mississippi.

The owner of the gas station has determined the space is too constrained to allow for trucks—but not for livestock trailers, which are approximately half the length of a conventional 53-foot commercial trailer.

And another bit of near irony with trucks and signage rests outside Osceola, Arkansas:

Alas, it was a storm and not a curb jumper that took this one down. How do we know? The landscaping below it, while unkempt, is hardly mangled. Trucks are not exactly the most benign presence on America's roadways, but they would likely prove a lot more threatening if they could ascend, accelerate, maneuver, or halt with the same freedom and abandon as virtually every smaller vehicle can do. Rocks, curbs, and bollards are a modest remedy to a curbing problem that is equally modest, especially in light of trucks' capacity for both destruction and amazing productivity across American roadways. The gestures of trucks are big, so it is apt that something so comparatively simple could be explained metaphorically through a mere button.

These lumps are always benign.

This blog post may be the closest I ever get to a real-time narrative. It’s not purely real-time, of course, any more than this is an online journal. But everything that this blog features occurred within the past few days, and fortunately I was able to document it photographically as I was experiencing it, including the crucial revelation at the end. I was driving from Monroe, Louisiana toward Little Rock, and, as anyone from these two states could tell you, there is not a single limited access highway or interstate connecting Louisiana and Arkansas. But if part of the goal is absorbing Americana through a camera lens, who wants to take interstates anyway?


I was venturing northward toward Pine Bluff, Arkansas on U.S. Highway 425, across southern Arkansas’ flat and impenetrable pine belt, just south of the college town of Monticello. The photo above is hardly an anomaly for being devoid of cars: this was the norm, and ten minutes could easily pass before I confronted another vehicle. If my driving got a bit sloppy—as most of us are wont to do when the roads are this barren—I might skim over the yellow painted lane divider, when I would here the familiar pa-dump pa-dump pa-dump of those reflectors against my wheels.


At any rate, it’s a familiar sound in a good part of the country, and apparently a common enough phenomenon that it approaches highway vernacular status. Facebook even has multiple groups devoted to people who try to avoid hitting them when they change lanes. I had learned several years ago that the patented design commonly employed in American highways is called Botts’ dots, after Elbert Dysart Botts, the California transportation engineer credited with their invention. However, this whimsical name often suffers from over-application, because Botts’ dots are a particular design rather than a general term—usually round and non-reflective, like the example seen in this photo. They serve as a purely auditory warning—for alerting motorists when they are crossing a certain threshold, usually a lane. Attempting to avoid them is fine—as apparently a few thousand Facebook users do—but it should not be done out of fear of damaging them, since the ceramic or polymer used in their construction can support the weight of a car. The square reflectors along this Arkansas highway also are made of a sufficiently durable material, meaning they serve a double purpose of providing both a lighted path at night and an audible warning at all times of day.

Despite the fact that US Highways and interstates receive federal funds for their construction and continued maintenance, not all roads are created equally. A major American highway can bisect several states and morph considerably along its trajectory—quite often these shifts are obvious when crossing into a new jurisdiction, such as a state or county line. Differences in soil quality, topography, climate, and jurisdictional road safety laws add variety to any transcontinental thoroughfare, and these pavement markers are no different. Departments of Transportation can clearly decide which safety features are most critical in their jurisdiction. In south Arkansas, square reflectors and Botts’ dots can protrude from the pavement:


As suitable as these devices are in an arid climate like southern California, they don’t work so well in upstate New York, or any part of the US that ever receives heavy snowfall: the plows would scoop these critters up. If they can exist at all in the North, they must be recessed in the pavement and further reinforced. I cannot provide a firsthand auditory comparison right now between protruding and recessed reflectors, because I haven’t been in the Frost Belt in awhile. But I suspect the trademark skip-thump sound would have to be muted if the device cannot protrude as much.

Later that same day from which the above photos were taken, I had to head westward from Little Rock along Interstate 40. By this time, it was pitch dark, and I have never felt so nervous about driving on an interstate in my life. I couldn’t pin it down at first, but something about this stretch of highway winding through the Ozarks induced anxiety. Eventually I realized that a number of features were missing that I often had taken for granted. This portion of Arkansas interstate does not in general use street lights at exit ramps. It has relatively few billboards--or, at least, very few of are illuminated. Only a few communities between Little Rock and Fort Smith have more than 10,000 inhabitants, so no ambient light from a neighboring community. But perhaps most critical, the center lane lacked any square reflectors. No reflectors in general—not on posts, not embedded in the pavement, and relatively few green reflective signs. It was dark. Clearly a driver’s headlights should compensate, but they only provide illumination for 50 to 100 feet or so. Driving that night through western Arkansas, I often couldn’t tell if the car in front of me was just turning to negotiate a curve or getting off at an exit ramp. These reflective squares critically promote safety because they show the trajectory several hundred feet ahead of the driver, allow him or her to prepare for curves. They only way I could anticipate curves that night in Arkansas was by turning on the high beams, which is arely permissible because traffic is much higher here than US Highway 425. Thus, a rarely traveled fragment of highway in the rural southern part of the state offers a better reflective environment than the interstate connecting Arkansas’ largest and second largest cities.

But why would the state’s Department of Transportation choose to use federal funds for reflectors on one highway but not the other more traveled one. Why snub interstates in Arkansas? My return trip during broad daylight (I wasn’t going to try that route again at night) provided the most likely answer:


In the near exact middle of the above photo, before the white stripe marking two different lanes, is a small indentation. I got as close as I could with my camera, given the high speed and frequency of cars passing by.


It almost looked like a scar where the reflector should be. But why is that reflector missing? Is it possible that the DOT, assuming that central Arkansas’ climate is warm enough, allowed the reflectors to protrude just as they might in Arizona or southern California? And could this have been the critical mistake that seriously deteriorates the safety of this Arkansas highway at night? Central Arkansas most likely does not endure heavy snowfall very often at all. But at one point, it did, and the necessity for making the road remotely passable by employing snowplows superseded the preservation of protruding square reflectors, Botts’ dots, or whatever they had once used here. They’re all missing. Just looking the other direction reveals the same scar where something clearly should be; it was snatched by a snowplow.


I could be wrong of course, but I can think of no other reason why this heavily travelled transcontinental highway would lack them. (The small patch of I-40 that I traveled in Oklahoma lacked them as well, but at least Oklahoma’s exit ramps had streetlights. Maybe the two states suffered from the snow pattern.) It would be interesting to determine if there is a comparatively higher crash rate on Arkansas interstates due to unsafe night driving conditions—if that would justify the cost of re-installing these reflectors, which apparently need to be recessed into the pavement to handle the occasional heavy snowfall that Arkansas might receive. The current state of the road’s safety hints at the broader dilemma: if the federally funded highway network required complete uniformity of design, with every state using its funds for the highest caliber safety infrastructure, this might not have happened. But a one-size-fits-all federal standard could scarcely account for the climatic and topographic diversity of this vast country, so it would elicit new problems for regions that simply defy any criterion. It would be tough to deny that Interstate 40 in Arkansas needs better visibility at night, but the means of achieving this through the federal funds allotted—whether routine improvements, transportation enhancement grants, or some other untested improvement—rests upon each state’s decision making authorities. Botts’ dots originated through one state’s pursuit of new solutions to localized road safety concerns. Perhaps those bizarre indentations on I-40 are the installation mechanism for a solution unique to the Arkansas Department of Transportation.