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3. Repairs would not all be made at one time if a single attendant 
were employed for a long time instead of the present method of many 
men for a few days. 
4. Too much material is used and too little labor, because material is 
usually cheap and labor is expensive, and because it is easier to tell a man 
how to haul a load of gravel than to tell him how to make tools for filling 
the ruts. 
5. Place a man in charge of the road who has to attend to it con- 
stantly and he will soon learn that it is easier to keep it in good condition 
by scraping the ruts than by drawing on four times as much gravel as is 
essential. 
6. Improper material is used because the men employed on repairs 
have neither the time nor the incentive to learn the qualities of road ma- 
terials. This requires a certain amount of expert knowledge that can 
easily be gained by experience. 
7. To remedy poor location requires only that a man should be able to 
see that it is easier to draw a load around a hill than over it. Teach the 
road attendant to ride a wheel and he will soon appreciate the difficulty 
of steep grades. 
In short the reason our roads are bad is because nobody makes it a 
business to attend to them. And the remedy is a system of maintenance 
which shall make it somebody’s business to keep them) in good repair. 
Dirt roads should be in good condition for at least nine months of the 
year, and gravel roads ought to be good at all times. 
By our present Indiana laws we have abundant provisions for super- 
intendence, not perhaps of the most expert kind, but engineering skill is 
not necessary. What is more essential in a road superintendent is that 
he should have the power to discharge an attendant for lack of attention 
to duty, and that he should be able to tell when a road is not in good con- 
dition. As a matter of fact the average engineer is too apt to go to the 
other extreme und to attempt to construct permanent roads at great ex- 
pense when our system of maintenance by no means warrants it, which 
would be as reckless as to invest in an expensive building and then fail 
to insure it against fire. Our roads should be divided into sections of 
not more than twenty miles in length; for each section a man and team 
should be employed, all of whose attention is to be devoted to the care 
of that road from the first day of March until the first day of December. 
