Pillory: MDT

Punishing our dopey, dawdling highway department.

It’s Friday afternoon and the mountains are calling. After a pit-stop for gas and ice, you hit the I-90 on-ramp and point the rig east, to the land of open prairie, towering mountains, and endless opportunity. But what’s this? Bumper-to-bumper traffic as far as the eye can see, and an army of orange construction cones lined up in salute for miles and miles... without an excavator, pickup truck, or construction worker in sight.

In recent months, the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) has been ramping up their “cone work” on I-90, and to what avail? They compress miles of traffic—semis, SUVs, and everything in between—into a narrow gauntlet of highway, squished between two lines of neon pencil-sticks, all while the other lane sits empty—perfectly paved, clear of all obstructions. And even in the few places where there is evidence of actual work being done, as often as not, there’s nobody actually working—just a walled-off lane or bridge, collecting road-dust for days on end.

If MDT was a private business, you can bet your bottom dollar they’d roll things out and wrap things up a heck of a lot quicker—and with a lot less standin’ around, shootin’ the breeze.

What’s more, this new cone-it-and-leave-it paradigm is pushing more and more traffic onto Kagy, between Sourdough and Bear Canyon—a stretch of road popular among cyclists. In a relatively bicycle-unfriendly town—just two years ago, two cyclists were killed by motorists—we should be doing everything we can to keep traffic off the backroads of Bozeman. Not increase it! Shame on you, MDT.

Don’t get us wrong—we know that some of Montana’s highways need work. But we also know how much pork our elected officials procure, as evidenced by all the extraneous projects: installing pointless cables in medians, re-surfacing perfectly good sections, and emplacing cones days, sometimes weeks, before construction actually starts. If MDT was a private business, you can bet your bottom dollar they’d roll things out and wrap things up a heck of a lot quicker—and with a lot less standin’ around, shootin’ the breeze. Instead, we end up with endless cone work, intractable dillydallying, and active construction sites that look like ghost towns. All this sucks money and time away from other projects that need it more—say, wildlife crossings?

Let’s talk about that. Instead of prematurely, excessively, endlessly demarcating construction sites on our biggest highways, and paying a bloated staff to loaf and lollygag, how about a few overpasses and underpasses, along with some fencing to help animals safely navigate our 80mph roadways? Heck, maybe just use some of those two million cones to mark key crossing spots, so drivers slow down and watch for deer? Somehow, Wyoming and Colorado have figured out how to install wildlife crossings—maybe MDT could learn a thing or two from our fellow Rocky Mountain states.

Wyoming and Colorado have figured out how to install wildlife crossings—maybe we could learn a thing or two from our fellow Rocky Mountain states.

Now, imagine a visitor from another country driving down I-90, trying to comprehend our cone-burst clusterfuck—the inevitable conclusion being that MDT workers get paid not by the hour, but by the cone, and by the amount of time those cones are in place.

When will the madness end? When will these projects be finished and free of superfluous cones? Or at least be inhabited by road workers, so that the cones appear to serve some ostensible purpose? And how much longer can our blind obedience to the omnipresent orange twigs be expected to continue? There must come a day when enough is enough, and we demand that our autistic roadway administrators clean up their mess and move along to some other location. Maybe that’ll give some different Montana businesses a boost in nicotine & caffeine sales, as drivers in those areas gear up for the drudgery of their own incalculable cone-zones.

In the meantime, though: to the pillory, MDT! And while you’re in there, we’re taking all the damn cones and building a labyrinth outside your headquarters in Helena, one that the top brass must navigate to and from work every day. And be warned, we can make a mean maze! Good luck, road-rats.