Diatribe: Bouncing down the highway like a rubber ball

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Updated: January 17, 2012 4:16PM

Talk about being ahead of one’s time. There was a hit song in the 1950s by Bobby Rydell called “Rubber Ball.” The background singers would sing the words, “Bouncy, bouncy” during the chorus. Where am I going with this, you ask? I think of this song quite often as I drive through the flak-laden concrete we commonly refer to as our nation’s roads.

There was once a time when you could count on one thing — driving to where you wanted to go and arriving with your kidneys intact. As traffic experienced tremendous growth and money set aside for road construction and repair was hijacked for Congress’ pet projects, the roads took a definite bump backward. I’ve lost track of the tax increases on gasoline that were “earmarked” for road repair and strangely disappeared.

Coincidental to our roads veering into gross disrepair was an increase in the designing of tires and suspension that kept pace with the deterioration. Where once you could figure on about 10,000 miles use on a set of tires — providing you didn’t hit a pothole (not necessarily a jaw dropper, either) — now you can look at about 50,000 miles on an average set of tires (unless they’re low-profile tires, which as far as I’m concerned is a giant leap backward when it comes to pothole survival) and the majority of a lifetime of unbroken suspension.

I don’t know how many of my readers have ever flown through flak but I would hope the Air Force doesn’t waste money on digital electronic simulators that have that scenario built into the software. It would be a horrendous waste of money. Instead, let flight school cadets drive on a typical Michigan road (other than a freeway); no aircraft-under-attack simulator on earth can match the intensity of a vehicle experiencing Seven Mile Road.

Getting back to the subject of suspension design, I am constantly awed by the structural integrity of a modern vehicle’s underpinnings. You can get some feeling for it with smaller, less-costly vehicles that, for obvious reasons, haven’t had an influx of dampers and devices for lessening the impact of traversing potholes and rough and tumble highways.

I recall that years ago Chrysler put out a press release with the title “Looking for the Perfect Pothole.” The gist was the manmade potholes Chrysler had at its proving grounds that were used to test suspensions of new vehicles. And that was long before our roads became as dysfunctional as they are now. I’ve made craters on bomb ranges when dropping 500-pounders while flying B-52s that didn’t leave as bad a hole as thousands of 18-wheelers can make.

Occasionally I’m asked my advice by younger people about what would be a good occupation to go into — one that would offer not only security, but pay well. The first thing I do is steer them away from journalism. In many cases being a journalist allows one to travel the world in style at somebody else’s expense. The trade-off is the ability to earn salaries in the high four-figures, after several decades of apprenticeship. Driving as much as I do on the nation’s roads, my first suggestion is they go into some sort of medical therapy or bite the bullet and become a kidney specialist. Or perhaps design and manufacture a new type of mesh screen like those used in hernia surgeries that will hold one’s intestines in after hitting a succession of jarring potholes.

There’s no point suggesting a career in road repair — as open ended as that would be. Standing behind a dump truck filling up coal shovels loaded with asphalt and tossing it into holes so deep it would give a Navy SEAL shivers does not seem like a plan, either.

Just as the recent phrase was “shovel ready projects apparently weren’t ready,” so, too, is the truth that America’s secondary highways are not “kidney ready” either.

Al Vinikour is a Midwest-based freelance auto writer. Proving a mind is a “terrible thing to use” he sometimes sits in traffic and ponders about things — generally auto-related — that make him mad. Believing the “pen is mightier than the sword” (and generally results in a whole lot less jail time), he vents his anger through a word processor and produces the Driver’s Side Diatribe column. E-mail him at vinikour@comcast.net.