A member of our family totaled his car by driving down a New Orleans street and hooking the undercarriage of the violently bouncing car on a protruding man hole, bending the frame.

Myself, I had $500 damage to my Grand Marquis just by dropping a wheel in a deep pothole on Fleur de Lis Drive in Lakeview – who knew it would be so deep.  I was going slow, trying to get to my Church, it slammed the car into the ground so hard it broke the bumper and tore the shroud off the radiator fan.  There are NO PLANS to fix that road, although it is major enough to have a neutral ground and streetcar tracks on it.

The same car had the entire exhaust system torn off it by simply backing out of my Algiers driveway and catching the tailpipe in dirt where a street used to be.

The City has a lot of Grand Marquis and Crown Victoria cars which must be meeting the same fate on a regular basis at tax payer expense.  These cars are unsuitable to drive in New Orleans period, never mind taking them home.  If a City employee needs a take home vehicle, it would be best to give them a take home dump truck that is built for driving here.

I think given the condition of New Orleans streets, there should be a bylaw preventing New Orleans City owned cars from being driven on New Orleans streets.  Its just plain destructive of public property to drive a government car in New Orleans, during working hours or not.  The city owned cars need to be kept in adjacent parishes where they have actual roads to drive on.

We should NOT make exception for the city politicians and bureaucrats who have had the roads leading to their houses repaired, even though those roads are now reasonable to drive on without wrecking the car.  I guess thats why the politicians here can’t get the roads fixed, or let the roads get this way in the first place.  The roads they live on are in good shape, and since they don’t have to pay when their government vehicle is wrecked by driving in Lakeview or Algiers then its really no skin off their nose if the rest of us are wrecking our vehicles to get home.

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