Cutting down on our driving sometimes sounds even better when you think that less driving means fewer jarring lurches and artful swerving brought on by hitting or trying to avoid hitting the mass of potholes in our city.

There are streets that are more like a war zone than a modern American city. This problem is yet another warning that our infrastructure is crumbling faster than our Seattle Department of Transportation can repair or replace streets.

Ballard is better off than many parts of the city, but nonetheless we can find streets that are in urgent need to repair and they just get worse each year.

The city is currently fixing the Elliot Way and 15th Avenue corridor into Ballard, albeit with a ridiculous addition of a bike lane that runs virtually parrallel to a separate and almost new bike trail just yards west along the water. The inhibitions for heavy car traffic along this route would be understandable if not to blatantly redundant. The busy thoroughfare is more compressed now, even though less jarring a surface on which to drive.

A few months ago, we chastised our Lord Mayor of The Green when we suggested he continually ballyhoed grand schemes with press conferences and televised pronouncements, then disappeared and the subject was never heard of again. In March he grandly stated the only good pothole was a filled pothole.

Well this time we were wrong to a degree. The mayor was last heard from on potholes in March, but his people at the city transportation agency are doing as good a job as they can with a rotting street system too long ignored by Greg Nickels' predecessors and a staggering lack of money to renew them.

The Bridging The Gap levy has provided money to fill nearly 40,000 potholes last year and more this year.

But filling potholes is like putting a BandAid over a festering wound - it just covers a serious problem. Our street system needs a complete overhaul if we are to keep it from slowly rotting away.

Add this woe to the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the waterfront seawall, the 520 bridge and scads of highway and street bridges that are crumbling and we have a problem that will not be solved easily or quickly - certainly not cheaply.

We elect mayors and city council members to find solutions whether it is with a local plan or one that requires the assistance of the county or state. We need to find a plan, one that works, before the patient dies of this slow, insidious disease called road rot.

- Jack Mayne