Chinook Pass damage

WSDOT maintenance crews apply sand to try and absorb the oil due to unraveling from excessive heat on State Route 410 at Chinook Pass.

In a time of uncertainty, the Washington State Department of Transportation is trying to take the high road.

But keeping $200 billion worth of roads, bridges, ferries and rail systems running on a $2.9 billion budget means that high road needs some patching, Secretary of Transportation Roger Millar warned during a spin through town last week.

Stopping for a visit with the Yakima Herald-Republic on Friday, Millar and WSDOT’s regional administrator, Union Gap-based Todd V. Trepanier, emphasized the importance of maintaining the state’s existing infrastructure as traffic demands grow.

WSDOT has come up with lots of ways to be more efficient and extend the lifespan of existing infrastructure, Millar and Trepanier said. Among other things, they’ve used technology to reroute traffic, ease congestion and reduce wear and tear on certain routes at peak times.

However, they’re still losing ground.

Before long, Millar said, WSDOT will be prioritizing projects like road repairs in ways that will likely be noticeable around the Yakima Valley.

For instance, for the sake of safety, crews will focus on state roads where speed limits are 45 mph or faster. While workers will continue to inspect slower routes, they’ll only fix hazardous problems. If the problems are too expensive to repair and pose safety concerns, WSDOT will simply lower the speed limit on affected roads.

“We’re at a point as a state where that’s starting to happen,” Millar said.

If you want a local example of this Band-Aid approach, take a drive through Selah, Trepanier added. The four-lane stretch of State Route 823 on the east side of town needs an asphalt overlay. The state can’t afford it, though, so it’ll have to get by with a chip-and-seal job.

Follow the road out of town, and you’ll come to some orange cones on the bridge that crosses over the railroad tracks, Trepanier said. Those cones direct truckers to avoid the center girder of the bridge, which engineers say looks dicey for heavy equipment.

“That’s our fix,” he said.

Is there a better fix for any of this?

Well, sure: money. No surprise there. But where would it come from?

The state gas tax is already 49.4 cents a gallon, and new taxes are always a hard sell.

Federal help might be possible — especially with Congress working on that trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. Millar said the state estimates it might get in the neighborhood of $1 billion from the plan, but allocations, of course, would be up to the Legislature.

Meantime, Washington has the second-highest percentage of electric vehicles of any state, and in especially crowded areas, state officials are increasingly supportive of transportation strategies that de-emphasize individual vehicles.

The future is getting here, but it hasn’t made it too far up the Wenas Valley, north of Naches or out to Outlook yet. Around here, we still like our big trucks and SUVs, and there isn’t a bullet train to whisk us back and forth to work anyway.

The day is coming, though, when we’ll have to make some hard choices. Is a reliable, efficient and safe transportation system worth paying for, or are we willing to settle for tiptoeing across shaky bridges and dodging potholes on crumbling roads?

For now, guys like Millar and Trepanier will just have to endure the bumps and keep both hands on the wheel.