My love letter to the department of transportation yielded a semi-form letter reply. The bolded portion is the part my friends didn’t get:

Thank you for your comment. We will be weighing all the information and working with our contractor once they are hired next fall to make a decision. Trying to keep some lanes open and some interchanges open or closing it for certain lengths of time will be a hardship either way. We will work out a regional traffic plan and a construction schedule and communicate that next fall. We do have a set deadline for this project that it must be completed no later than October 1, 2010. It will not go on unterminably.

That’ll teach me to question their brain power.

“Unterminably.” Dude, just look down at the e-mail you’re replying to; it’s right there. I don’t know what that other sentence-shaped thing is, but at least it’s made up entirely of words.

Needless to say, this sheds light on how a thought process could begin with “this is the busiest highway in town, used by everyone to get everywhere” and end with “therefore, we must close it utterly for years and years.” Give credit where it’s due: shutting down Interstate 64 would solve the traffic problem on Interstate 64. In fact, I have been shopping an alternate plan around town all weekend: since the problem is that I-64 wasn’t built for that many commuters, and closing it will cause them to seek alternate routes to work, I propose that MoDOT should close the highway for a year, do nothing to it, and reopen it again.

PROs: inexpensive, consistently absurd
CONs: does not create jobs, redefines “road rage”

My urge to reply to the letter is all but overpowering.