Dear editor:

According to the Transportation Construction Coalition, there are 22,000 road condition-related fatalities every year. A lot of these are caused by problems with old roads, in which they are built to twist around the contours of the land instead of going through them. Several roads were also built in horse-and-buggy days, which means that several of the routes we might drive on now weren’t originally built with cars in mind.

One such route that has this problem is Highway 155 in Jemison. There is a very narrow bridge that is a danger to the people driving vehicles, and it needs to be widened or an entirely new one built.

I drive on this road almost every single day in my commute to college. While there are several problems with this road, the main problem is the narrow bridge that is in between mile 1 and 2. This bridge frightens me every time I get near it because whenever I am passing another car while we cross the bridge it feels like we both can’t fit.

I drive a decent sized truck, and while I haven’t crossed any yet, I know that two big trucks wouldn’t be able to cross at the same time. There is also the problem that the bridge is around a corner where you can’t see ahead, so if you needed to slow down or stop to let another person cross, then you wouldn’t know until it was too late.

The amount of fatalities and damage to the roads caused by an out-of-date road or bridge is unreal. Widening a bridge or building a new one is a huge undertaking and requires a massive amount of money.

A solution to raising this money would be to go around asking people who would want this to be done, and if enough people raise support for it, then surely someone would find a way.

If we could get a majority of people to give donations to the building of a new bridge, then surely that money could be used to hire a company for the construction.

While we can’t do anything to bring back the 22,000 people we might have lost, we can do something to stop more tragedies, and this might just be the first step.

Austin Penton, Verbena