Dear Mahatma: Please check on the Arkansas 13 expansion, also known as the Searcy bypass. Work started at least 3½ years ago, yet is nowhere near completion. Stoplights were installed more than a year ago and the intersection is nowhere near complete. The whole project appears to be a fiasco. -- Frustrated in Searcy
Dear Searcy: We made like 60 Minutes and asked the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department the tough question -- Is this indeed a fiasco, or what?! -- although we're not nearly as well-dressed as the TV blow-hairs. Our suits are straight off the rack. Yes, yes, we have suits.
The Highway Department knuckled under and gave up the goods. The project, we are now told, is 90 percent complete. Traffic signals were installed early at the request of the subcontractor.
Two short sections of curb were indeed dug up and replaced. The problem was slumping of the curb when the concrete was poured by a machine that forms the curb as it rolls along. Curb slumping is something up which the Highway Department will not put up.
This is now a priority project and should be completed in the first few months of 2016.
Dear Mahatma: Is there a traffic light in the future for the intersection of Rahling Road and Pebble Beach Drive? -- Ken
Dear Ken: No. But we're told by Bill Henry, the city's traffic engineering manager, that a multilane traffic circle is being built by Deltic Timber Corp. as part of the developer's required roadway improvements there.
Dear Mahatma: I drive a lot on Lawson Road near the rock quarries. I have noticed that dump trucks do not carry license plates. I also have noticed that school buses usually don't have license plates, either. Maybe there's an exemption for school buses, but surely not for lumbering gravel trucks. What's the deal? -- Curious Reader
Dear Reader: You're right about school buses, according to one of our favorite sources, Roger Duren, administrator of the Office of Motor Vehicles. He cites Arkansas Code Annotated 6-19-113, under which school buses owned by public school districts are exempt from registration.
As for dump trucks, Mr. Duren knows of no law that would exempt them from being registered and licensed. He suggests reporting such a thing to the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, which enforces laws applicable to commercial trucks.
We would add that the Highway Police, an agency of the Highway Department, does the heavy lifting when it comes to enforcement of commercial trucking. The central office number is (501) 569-2421.
Dear Mahatma: Why haven't we enhanced the rock at the Big Rock Exchange? Anyone who drives has been by there. How about lighting it up at night? -- Eddie
Dear Eddie: We passed your suggestion to the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, and in return we were told there are no plans to light up the big rock.
Mahatma@arkansasonline.com
Metro on 11/14/2015