If you want to drive between the North Country's two biggest cities, Watertown at the far west and Plattsburgh at the far east, it's a toss-up on whether it's faster to take state Route 3 through the Adirondacks or U.S. Route 11 through the northern dairy-farm country.
Either way, you'll drive through some beautiful landscapes and some small towns that we consider wonderful. You'll pass some mom-and-pop-owned restaurants with delicious, home-cooked, cheap food, and you'll drive through downtown main streets lined with century-old buildings that have seen better days, sure, but still have that old upstate New York dignity clinging to them.
Also, either way, you won't encounter much traffic. If it's in the middle of a winter snowstorm and you get stuck, it's a legitimate concern that you may not encounter another vehicle for a while.
Even on the busiest weekend of the year, you probably won't find yourself thinking, "Boy, it's getting on about time that they widen this road," except maybe on a few tight turns in the bigger villages of Tupper Lake, Potsdam or Saranac Lake. And these are only an issue if you're driving a big rig.
Yet some in the North Country still are under the delusion that we need to put a full-on, controlled-access interstate highway where Route 11 is now - and at a time when our federal government is embarrassingly in debt.
I wonder how many of these same people gripe about high taxes and government spending - hypocrites, all.
The project formerly known as the "rooftop highway," which they're now calling I-98, would straighten out a few tight intersections and widen a highway that doesn't have the traffic to justify widening it. That's it.
It will not bring industry to places like Massena and Malone. Why would it? It wouldn't lower businesses' costs, making this a cheaper place to locate. Their trucks will still have to drive the same routes and spend the same amount on drivers and gas. And they'd still have to pay the same old high New York taxes.
It will not add to tourism, either. Tourists want destinations. Unless you're adding attractions, you won't draw tourists. Lake Placid has a huge amount of tourism, by North Country standards, and it's only accessible by three narrow, two-lane roads, two of them squeezing through tight mountain notches.
An interstate here wouldn't just be expensive and useless; it would be an ugly concrete monstrosity that would take the drivers we do have on the roads away from our local businesses. It would do much economic harm and no good. Small business is the North Country's main business.
The only reason this bad idea is still around is that federal politicians want to throw the North Country a bone and can't think of anything else. That's why the feds spent $75 million last year just to study the idea. The final cost, if this thing goes through, will be obscene.
It's humiliating to see local officials begging for such a huge and unhealthy slice of pork. It's embarrassing that a St. Armand town councilman proposed a resolution supporting this boondoggle Tuesday night. It's a good thing the rest of the board knew better. They should have resolved to oppose it, since it would route traffic away from Route 3 and the town's main hamlet of Bloomingdale.
Few catch phrases have been more abused than "If you build it, they will come," from W.P. Kinsella's book "Shoeless Joe (and, more famously, the movie "Field of Dreams"). Build what? People won't come for a road that replaces another road that was doing just fine.
How about this? "If you quit spending so much, get your financial house in order, reduce taxes, maintain your local quality of life and think about what else people want to come to, then maybe - just maybe - they will come."