Dear Karnak of Local Transportation: I compliment city, county and state agencies on their efforts to fill potholes and combat road degradation. But a major artery in downtown Little Rock is being neglected. Broadway! It is so chattered that driving from Markham to Interstate 630 almost makes my dental fillings fall out. -- Duke
Dear Duke: Yours is one of three emails that have poured in about Broadway, specifically from Markham to I-630. Broadway is also, or primarily, U.S. 70, and thus under the jurisdiction of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department.
So we asked: How about it, fellas?
The response, from spokesman David Nilles, was that District 6 certainly would take a look and make repairs needed for a safe roadway. Alas, there are no plans to resurface Broadway in the downtown area.
But the street can be put on the "needs" list should the overlay program be revived. The program was canceled this year for budget reasons, Nilles said, and next year is uncertain. The Highway Department has asked Gov. Asa Hutchinson for $36 million in state general improvement funds for overlay. Last word on the subject was that the governor was noncommittal.
Dear Readers: A recent news story in this newspaper's Business & Farm section told about Detroit, a city with the nation's highest percentage of "driving dirty." As defined in Detroit, driving dirty is driving without insurance. That percentage is right at 50 percent, as reported by The Associated Press.
This got us to thinking about Arkansas and its percentage of driving dirty. So we asked John Theis, assistant revenue commissioner at the state Department of Finance and Administration.
Does the department have a sense of the percentage of the state's licensed drivers who are uninsured?
Yes, it does, in the form of data. From which readers are free to extrapolate.
As of July 31, there were 2,781,749 motor vehicles registered in Arkansas. Of those registered vehicles, no liability insurance was in effect for 572,443. We took off our shoes, divided the second number by the first number, pencil-whipped the problem into submission and came up with right at 20 percent of registered vehicles without liability insurance.
Since the department has no way of knowing how many of these 20 percent of vehicles are up on blocks, stored in a garage under 6 inches of dust or otherwise not being driven, all we know is what we know.
We also asked how many licensed drivers Arkansas has. As of June 30, there were 2,127,085 licensed drivers. Given that the U.S. Census Bureau reported 2,966,000 people lived in Arkansas in 2014, 71.7 percent of Arkansans have a driver's license.
Vanity plate seen on a shiny new Corvette: GOPAULA. This is Paula's second appearance. In December 2011, the plate was seen on a Mustang. Oh, Paula, you are really something, girl.
Mahatma@arkansasonline.com
Metro on 09/12/2015