Skip to content

Taylor: Road building for dummies

Road reconstruction parallels the way churches, political parties, community organizations operate
web1_170503-WIN-Taylor_1
Jim Taylor

By Jim Taylor

Canada has two seasons—winter and road construction. In some parts of Canada, the road construction season is short, the period between when the frost comes out of the ground, and when it goes back in.

Frost, you see, creates havoc with roads. When moisture in the soil freezes, it expands. That heaves the surface upwards, cracking the impervious blacktop. Cracking lets more moisture through. Which also freezes. Which causes more frost heaves.

When the frost melts, the process reverses. The frozen ground underneath turns into mud. The heave becomes a hollow. Under the weight of traffic, the road collapses. Not quite into a sinkhole, as sometimes happens. But deep enough to destroy automotive suspensions. And cause impact fractures in dentures.

Here in the balmy Okanagan Valley, winters are relatively short. Unfortunately, that lets the road construction season last longer. Crews don’t have to work around the clock to complete repairs before frost returns. So closures and detours can last for months.

There’s a self-perpetuating feedback loop to these detours. Traffic gets diverted off a main road onto side roads through residential neighbourhoods. The residential roads weren’t built for heavily loaded semi-trailers. They’re barely wide enough for two cars, let alone two trucks.

Under the extra traffic, the residential road disintegrates. Thus it provides employment for the next year’s road construction season.

Over some 60 years of driving all kinds of roads, I’m fascinated by the process of building a new road. Or rebuilding an old one.

Sometimes construction starts from zero. Everything gets cleared—trees, rocks, old paving. The foundation starts well below the surface, leveling the earth, compacting it. Then layers of crushed rock and gravel are added, to absorb impact and provide drainage. Finally several layers of blacktop go on.

Other projects simply pave over the old road. They bury its deficiencies under a fresh layer of blacktop. Like sweeping the dust under the carpet. Except it reverses the process—it’s more like laying a new carpet on top of the dust.

Road reconstruction seems to me to bear distinct parallels to the way churches, political parties, and community organizations operate.

Most social reconstruction follows the “pave it over” model. The old road—the old beliefs, the old ways of doing things, the tried-and-true constitutions and policies of the past—continue to exist under the fresh new face. Or policy.

In churches, the kind of organizations I know best, this means that a 2,000-year-old pre-scientific-age text continues to underlie all major decisions. Creeds almost as old remain untouchable.

Similarly, political parties elect new leaders, lay out new platforms. But old prejudices and ideologies still lurk just below the surface.

Occasionally, though, some groups try to start from zero, like building a new highway. But they first have to clear away any broken components of the former road. They have to dig deep to establish root principles. They have to expand that foundation with layers of interpretation.

Starting from zero is a tough road to take. Because there is always—always—opposition to losing something familiar. The old road may have been bumpy, twisty, slow. But it was “our road.” Even if it was no longer going anywhere.

Author Jim Taylor lives in Lake Country: rewrite@shaw.ca