Once upon a time, it was considered a sign of progress in rural American to pave over dusty gravel roads. After decades of spreading asphalt, economic reality is catching up with many counties in the Midwest. Iowa, Michigan, the Dakotas and other farm states are letting little-traveled paved roads revert back to gravel, reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

County and state transportation officials are simply recognizing reality. The cost of asphalt has risen with the price of oil and the cost of replacing a mile of paved road costs up to $300,000 now. An emerging rule of thumb is that a road needs 150 to 200 cars a day to be worth paving. Michigan has switched more than 100 miles of pavement to gravel, South Dakota 120 miles.

As Virginia’s road-maintenance budget stretches thinner and thinner, we may start to see a reversion to gravel roads in the Old Dominion. Citizens demand road upgrades but they aren’t willing to pay for it. Everyone concocts a reasons why “someone else” ought to pay. But the Virginia Department of Transportation can’t pave roads with hopes and wishes.

We face three broad options: (a) Raise the gasoline tax, (b) figure out how to make our road-transportation dollars work harder, or (c) live with deteriorating road conditions. Raising the gas tax is a political non-starter — even though it’s the closest thing we have to a user fee, in which the people pay the tax in direct proportion to which they ride the roads. Stretching our maintenance dollars is theoretically possible, if VDOT could break out of its biennial budget cycle long enough to invest in road improvements that pay themselves back within three or four years, but there’s too much lethargy in state government for that to happen.

That leaves the third option: deteriorating road conditions. That’s the way we’re heading. There were so many pot-holes in Interstate-295 this winter that I was thinking for a while that state officials had decided to let the Interstate revert to gravel. Get used to it. There’s more where that came from.