An e-mailer, AK, keeps pestering me to call for increased traffic vigilance on the Practice Freeway for purposes of raising money for the state.

"I drive that road all the time and go the speed limit — 45, as you know,'' wrote AK. "Cars are whizzing by me like they're flying saucers. Yeah, you see someone stopped once and a while, but if you had a trooper there all the time (out of view, of course), the state treasury would start looking like a sheik's 401k.''

AK is an imaginative fellow, and I don't wish to discourage him in any of his passions, including, apparently, writing; he is the same fellow who has e-mailed me that there are potholes on Interstate 94 between St. Paul and Minneapolis that are so large they have their own ZIP codes and visitor's bureaus. He finds that amusing. As for cars passing him like flying saucers, well, there is not a single stretch of pavement left in the metropolitan area where a car could get up enough speed to launch. That's an idea, though, to negotiate the wounded pavement: hovercrafts.

By wounded pavement, I mean potholes, which are not at all pot-shaped. That suggests something charming or manageable. Oh, I just nicked over a little pothole. That doesn't sound bad, does it? I think of a bubbling stew in a pot hanging over a pleasant wood fire.

We are not dealing with potholes. We are dealing with some of the ugliest destruction any of us has ever seen — gashes, rents, gouges, weird wedge-shaped chasms, all of them suggesting an unfortunate mirror image of our general economic malaise.

I'm afraid AK has it all backward. Yes, it is still the cheapest entertainment in town to drive the speed limit on the Practice Freeway and watch speeding drivers pass you in the left lane and look at you like you have done something wrong. But I'm reasonably convinced the days of the state gaining revenue from speeding tickets are over.

Sure, you'll get a daredevil on the PF who might make a dash for it between canyons, but in the main, as the late great Father Whalen used to say, we aren't going anywhere quickly, maybe ever again.

Our leaders have pretty much blown the bank. They have grown government so large to accommodate an ever-expanding entitlement class that they don't have any money for the basics, like roads. The poor slob who actually gets up in the morning and drives to a job so he can pay taxes has to budget for new tires and tie rods. And even if we had the money, I don't know how it would be possible to get a handle on what has happened, so thorough is the ruination.

No, AK, the days of those state trooper "fundraisers'' are but a fond memory. If you speed now, you are as loony as the guy who flew his airplane into the IRS building.

With dread, I think I can tell you what is planned for us. Nothing. We have managed to elect the kinds of people who, if they don't disdain the internal combustion engine, certainly wish to relegate it to second- or third-class status, the back burner. They favor pedestrians, bicyclists and trains. Some of them might even believe it serves us right to drive on such destroyed streets.

Probably, they will turn to euphemism.

Why, those aren't potholes. Not at all.

They are traffic-calming devices.

They could even sell that as a cost saving, because they never again will have to build a speed bump. Nature, and brittle old asphalt, have taken care of that.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at or 651-228-5474. Soucheray is heard from to 2 to 6 p.m. weekdays on KSTP-AM 1500.