You are citing the US News "best states" ranking. In that ranking, California is ranked #37 overall and Arkansas is ranked #47 overall. Even your own hand picked data source supports the OP...
37th/50 isn't good. But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely). This same ranking puts states like South Dakota and Indiana ahead, which I'm sure many would object to all the same.
This is the second day in a row I've watched threads about Arkansas of all places devolve into these nasty generalities(yesterday's was about WalMart and Bentonville). I don't live in Arkansas or anything, but I think we as a community can do better than devolve into it over and over, unless the topic at hand was the problems of a state.
I'm not saying that 37 out of 50 is good. I'm saying that 47 out of 50 is bad. Your data source doesn't refute the OPs argument that Arkansas is not a great place to live -- it actually supports the OP.
"But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely)."
Well, here's why it sucks, just so you can feel better.
1. the apartment rental industry is outright violating a court order that basically sets late fees and needs to outright face criminal charges. See Orozco v Casimiro
2. Ill-advised farmers up north are consuming tons of water on crops that make zero sense, and in many cases are growing crops that are basically exporting our scarce water overseas. Then they want to complain about a 'government-created dust bowl' when it's their own out of control water usage basically creating and exacerbating the situation. Oh and the desire to live in a floodplain, thus draining the largest lake in the state (if not landlocked lake in the country) and worsening drought conditions for the area for the past near-century.
3. OTHER STATES keep shipping their homeless here, thus drastically increasing our poverty numbers, artificially, and straining resources we don't really have thanks to ill-advised programs that do nothing to actually address anything.
4. Thanks to climate change, it's getting fucking HOT. Like, the heat you would normally only experience in the desert, is now a regular occurrence here in the valleys of SoCal. The deserts are actually cooler on occasion.
5. People can't drive and the cops do nothing even when it happens right in front of them. Oh, speaking of police, did you know many of them are in inter-department gangs? Yea, we just had to outlaw that.
6. Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
7. Thanks to new law, fast food workers have a minimum wage over the state minimum wage. So many jobs which require high skill, like what I do in LASERs and LED lighting, get paid less than them (I'm lucky, where I work knows my worth) and it ends up being demoralizing. I'm betting it caused a small hit across a few sectors as people said "I'll pay the $30 to get a license that lets me make $20 an hour" meanwhile starting techs in my sector get $16, or $17 on a night shift differential.
Happy yet? I can keep going. Rabbit hole's deep af.
Thanks, I think. But no, I didn't mean to pick on California as a bad state, I thought for some reason most people thought it was a nice state. I do, at least, despite its warts.
All I meant to say is that we can find many reasons every state is bad. But we shouldn't post them every time it's mentioned.
If Meta declared they were opening a huge new office in the bay, we'd get interesting discussion. If they announced they're opening it in Little Rock, we get little more than how awful AR is.
> Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
I feel like it's extremely misleading to give this example without providing surrounding context.
"Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today.
It's not very obvious at all that it makes sense to spend money replacing the 100+ timber bridges along the stretch rather than just abandoning most of the road/downgrading it to a 4WD road with no bridges - although repairing/rebuilding it does seem to be what San Bernadino County hopes to eventually do.
Many of the bridges, while partially failing due to age, are also failing due to flooding damage - which is what caused the 3 ton weight restrictions to go in place in the first place and the sections that have been closed since 2014/2017.
-------
Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population, and there's basically zero regional significance to the closure beyond mildly inconveniencing a few people in Amboy who can now only go West to get to I-40/civilization. (Especially since most reports I've seen suggest you can continue to the unpaved/rarely traveled Cadiz Rd anyway, which was the only connection that could only be accessed from the closed section).
The road from Ludlow to the Dish Hill Volcano is open, just less convenient if you used to get to it from the East.
""Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today."
From end to end, Route 66 spans 2,448 miles.
"Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population,"
The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist. I talk to the population there regularly before I go out to the Chambless skarn to dig. ditto the mining community that's there for the quarry at Kelbaker road (I own the uranium mine nearby.)
"The road to Dish Hill"
Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover. You have to come from Amboy's power line backroads.
Great, but it's not contiguous. This stretch is about 70 miles long and merges back into I-40 at either end, and is the part of it we are talking about. What I said is accurate.
> The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist.
The farm in the middle of the desert that is a front for a decades-long attempt to loot and export the aquifer underneath it, regardless of the permanent damage it will cause, that one? That explicitly shouldn't exist.
It's also about 9 trailers and a house or two. And still has road access, as I noted and you appear to agree.
> Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover.
Meaning the actual paved road to get to the area, or the unmaintained (unofficial?) path from the road, under the tracks, to the hill itself?
-------
But this is getting into the debate weeds. I'll be very generous and call the population along this stretch of road about 50 people.
There's close to 100 timber bridges in need of replacement, 70 miles of degrading asphalt, and of course - perpetual maintenance costs for both over the long term. It serves basically zero transportation function today.
I'm not a small government type, but the many, many millions of dollars it would cost to actually repair this road (not to mention continue to maintain it), do not seem remotely justified by it's utility.
The very tiny populations, tiny amount of industry, and very limited north-south function (Amboy Rd) here can be served by keeping the ~10mi Amboy-Chambless stretch and abandoning the rest of it/downgrading it to a 4WD track across the desert just like the dozens of other roads. Maintained/paved access via I-40 from Kelbaker Rd only.
-------
tl;dr - This is not, in my view, a case of government being unable to maintain infrastructure. This is a case where a large portion of the population would not feel that putting money into keeping this road in existence as a paved/2WD road along it's full length, is a worthwhile endeavor. You clearly have a vested interest in it.
