Dear Sir,

My name is David Moretz and I'm riding my bicycle from Oregon to Connecticut. I've been on the road since June 19th and have ridden over 4,000 miles. During this time, I've seen many wonderous sites, met many wonderful people, and have learned a great deal about the country that we call home. Because of my bike trip, the many miles that I've covered, and the fact that on a bicycle you experience the roads much more than you do when you're in a car, I feel compelled to write you a letter and ask you a question. Are you drunk?!?!?

Did you name Pennsylvania the Keystone State after the water-downed swill they pass off as beer? Do you and your cronies down in Harrisburg sit around your office, drink beers, and play pin the tail on the mountain to figure out where you're going to put your next road? In fact, have you ever left your office, put on a pair of spandex and ridden your bike on the roads that you've been hired to maintain? My guess is that you haven't.

Where in the world did you find the guys who designed your roads? Is geometry the only class you require your road engineers to take before hiring them? Does your interviewing process consist of one question, 'what's the shortest distance between point A and point B?' If they answer straight, are they hired? Do you have a bonus program set up for the engineer who designs a road, using the least amount of pavement?

All I ask is that you and your road designer posse take a bike trip from one side of the state to the other side before your next "state of the state roads convention." Don't even bother looking at the statistics and figures that your interns have put together for you to laud the directness of your roads and praise the pavement conservation efforts of your engineers. Don't waste time making fancy colored charts and graphs explaining how today's roads are much shorter than yesterday's roads. And all attempts to show Pennsylvania has a better road system than any other state in the union would be fraudulent.

But don't worry, I do have suggestions that might solve your problems. I am aware of the fact that some of the concepts I'm about to discuss are new to you, so I'll be sure to write slowly so you can follow along and use simple terms to illustrate my thoughts.

Concept 1: Field Trip
I'm certain that the bicycle riding tax payers would be more than happy to find out that they're money is being used to fund a field trip for you and your crew. I suggest you and your department take a couple of weeks to travel around the country to see how other road designers have developed roadways to navigate the mountains. Some suggested states to visit are Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. While you're there, you should also take note of their use of a shoulder. Since you may not be familiar with that term, I'm referring to the bit of pavement between the edge of the road and the white line that marks the right hand border of the driving lane. If this still doesn't ring a bell, then all I can say is, when you get to these states, the 3-4 feet of unused pavement, in which no cars drive, on the side of the road is a shoulder. the concept will make much more sense when you actually see a shoulder

Concept 2: Valley
Despite the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's motto "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line," I suggest you explore the concept building a road around a mountain. When you have two mountains, one on the left and one on the right, there is generally a depression of land in between the two summits. This area of low lying, non-elevated land is called a valley. Quite frequently, valleys stretch for miles and miles between the mountains on the left and the right. The ground that makes up the valley is always solid. There is a layer of topsoil that rests upon the bedrock below. Often there is a river that flows through the valley, but as long as you don't try and pave the water, valleys are perfectly capable of supporting the construction of a road. This is not a new concept, since I've seen ancient roads in Egypt go around a mountain instead of over it, but I'm not totally surprised it hasn't reached Pennsylvania. After all, there are still a fair share of women in Pennsylvania who walk around the mall with feathered hair, sweatshirts with the shoulders cut out and leg warmers, holding hands with their boyfriend, who has a giant comb sticking out of the back pocket of his parachute pants.

Concept Three: Tunnels and Switchbacks
There will be instances when you're redesigning the entire road system of Pennsylvania, that you will actually have to build a road over a mountain. When you find yourself in this situation, I suggest you immediately think of the following word: tunnel. There is nothing wrong with sticking a few hundred tons of dynamite in the middle of a mountain and blowing a hole right through it. It may sound crazy, but it works. Railroads do it, other states do it, and foreign countries have mastered it. Why go over it, when you can go through it, right? Look at the Chunnel between France and England. They didn't say, let's go over the water, they said, let's go right through it. If I may, I propose that that becomes your new slogan.

In the situations where it is impossible to build a tunnel and you absolutely have to go over the mountain, then I recommend leveraging the concept of a switchback. I've saved this term for last, since it is probably the most difficult one for you to grasp. Instead of building a road that goes directly from the bottom of the mountain to the top of the mountain (an art which you and your team of road builders have wonderfully mastered, I must say) a road with switchbacks, actually twists and turns across the face of the mountain until it reaches the top. The twisting and turning reduces the grade of the mountain, making it easier for trucks, cars, and yes bikers to reach the top. From a distance, a road with switchbacks sort of looks like a virgin ski slope with only one set of tracks from a skiier who has gracefully swished his way down the mountain, through knee deep powder. If done properly, a well-built road should look as pretty.

Finally, I want to make one more suggestion; collaborate with your friends over in the mining department. Since they're strip mining away all the mountains anyway, why don't you just have them strip mine the mountains that you want to build a road over. It may take a few years, but I don't see any reason why, without the proper collaboration, that every road in Pennsylvania couldn't be as flat as Kansas.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,