What about lumper-ready projects?

a href=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ez6JTnOl_tQ/SZCuMkq02NI/AAAAAAAAAMs/d8raKEc2ITc/s1600-h/shovel.jpg”img id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300928292440037586″ style=”FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 170px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 167px” alt=”” src=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ez6JTnOl_tQ/SZCuMkq02NI/AAAAAAAAAMs/d8raKEc2ITc/s200/shovel.jpg” border=”0″ //aMonday morning’s National Public Radio listeners got an analysis of the descriptor “shovel-ready,” used numerous times in recent months by President Barack Obama to describe the kinds of infrastucture projects he hopes to set in motion by injecting billions of dollars into the highway and other infrastructure programs via the stimulus bill.br /br /One of emshovel-ready/em’s most early — or, perhaps, echoed — uses is from Wayne Klotz, president of the Texas-based American Society of Civil Engineers. “We have projects that are shovel-ready, the designs are complete, the environmental permits have been obtained, the right-of-way has been obtained, and the state is waiting to get funding,” Klotz told Reuters in a Nov. 26, 2008 report. Days after Obama’s Inauguration, the ASCE released its a href=”http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2009/”2009 Report Card/a, which is a set of recommendations for repair to much of the nation’s infrastructure, including roads, bridges and highways. The engineering society and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, cited in the report, are only two of many groups anticipating that Obama’s “shovel-ready” projects hit pay dirt.br /br /As for us, can one can assume that infrastructure projects in motion easily leads to more freight on the hook? Can we assume a causal relationship, say, between emshovel-ready/em and emlumper-ready/em?br /div/divbr /divIn the a href=”http://www.digitalmagazinetechnology.com/magazineV2.0/?KEY=overdrive-09-02februaryamp;title=Overdrive+February+09″current, February issue/a of ema href=”http://www.overdrivedigital.com/”Overdrive/a/em, 12-year editor Linda Longton takes up the issue in her monthly column, her last as emOverdrive /emeditor (she’s moving to focus on larger editorial duties for the magazine’s publisher and this blogger’s employer, Randall-Reilly Publishing — a href=”http://maxheine.wordpress.com/”Max Heine/a will appear in her old column space from here on out). “One of Obama’s top priorities,” Longton writes, “is passage of a nearly trillion-dollar stimulus plan, designed to jump-start the economy and create jobs, in part through the largest governmental infrastructure spending program since the New Deal. This has the potential to boost freight levels temporarily, at least for truckers who haul construction materials….” /divdiv/divbr /divIf she and many economists, as she notes, are right, maybe emlumper-ready/em isn’t quite right. emAlmost-deck-ready/em, anyone? /divdiv/divdivem–Lucinda Coulter contributed to this report./em/divbr /li class=”social-digg”a onclick=”window.open(‘http://digg.com/submit?phase=2amp;url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title), ‘digg’); return false;” href=”http://digg.com/submit”Digg/a/lili class=”social-facebook”a onclick=”window.open(‘http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title),’facebook’); return false;” href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php”facebook/a/lidiv class=”blogger-post-footer”Channel 19 is the blog version of the column of the same name featured in Overdrive: The Voice of the American Trucker. Todd Dills ([email protected]) is its author./div