I used to play drums in a band called The Retractions. I purchased a piccolo snare drum because, you know, I loved the sound; it had a high snap to it that really fit my style of playing. Once I bought the drum, however, I found that I needed a new case for it since it didn’t fit the case for the old snare drum. So I bought a new case, but then I found that the drum didn’t fit well on the old snare stand during extended playing. That became an opportunity to reconfigure my snare drum stand, something I had been thinking about for a while.

The reconfiguration required me to purchase a new cymbal stand with a counterweight that I then cantilevered my snare drum into position with. That prompted me to buy a new cymbal – ultimately a new cymbal case – and also made room for a double bass pedal I had been coveting. Of course, all this hardware didn’t fit in the old stand case and so I had to purchase a second one. Ultimately, I couldn’t fit it all into my old car and so I would up buying a bigger vehicle, which I also kind of wanted anyway.

And on and on and on….

One initial decision induced a cascade of other decisions – each logical and desirable at the time – but which I never would have done had I know where it all would lead when I started down the path.

During Big Box Stores Week, I received the proverbial semi-trailer comment. Chuck, I agree that we need to look at street design, but we can only change things so much because we need to accommodate semis. So logical yet so wrong.

Go back to the early days of the interstate highway system, originally intended to be the ultimate road (connection between productive places). Prior to the highway, if you were a sugar beet farmer in Minnesota’s Red River Valley, you received whatever the price of sugar beets were in Duluth at the time your beets reached there, minus transportation costs. That’s because your only real option was to put your beets on the monopoly railroad system and ship them to Duluth. After the highway went in, you could ship your beets by truck to a different rail line, perhaps one to Minneapolis or Chicago, and receive the price there.

Markets changed dramatically. Farmers could pick the best price. Railroads had to price more competitively. Wholesalers could now choose product from wider market areas. This was a revolution that later adding some turn lanes, a second travel lane or a separated interchange could only marginally improve upon. A byproduct of this revolution was that the tractor trailer became a ubiquitous and indispensable part of our economy.