Just maybe, straight questions will get straight answers

Sometimes, when you’re looking for a solid answer to a pretty simple question, what you end up getting is a maybe, but it depends.

Maybe you can do that, but it depends.

Maybe the folks in charge will fix your road, but it depends.

Maybe that new technology will make your life easier, but it depends.

This is where we separate the whiners from the grown-ups, folks. In a perfect world ... never mind. There’s no such thing and there never will be. We will get maybe, and we will deal with it.

Mike’s question was so good, even the people who couldn’t really answer it liked it.

“I see the commercials where the pig hands a cop a smartphone with his insurance ID card and wondered if Nevada would take that as proof of insurance.”

Maybe! (you saw that coming, right?)

I checked with the DMV, but they said to check with the state Division of Insurance. Here’s what agency spokesman Jake Sunderland had to say in an email: “An interesting question. We don’t believe that Nevada statutes and regulations currently accommodate this. They would likely need to be amended to account for this type of evidence of coverage.”

I didn’t like that answer because I wasn’t ready for maybe just yet, so I called Las Vegas police Sgt. Todd Raybuck, who always knows the traffic laws. He said the traffic officers had been briefed pretty recently about this very issue; they’d seen the commercial, too.

Kinda-sorta-maybe was pretty much his response, though. It depends on the officer, he said. Just like with traditional paper proof of insurance, it would depend on whether the officer believed it was real. If he or she didn’t, no dice.

Given that this is a pretty new thing and individual officers might not be confident enough to say what’s real and what isn’t, I’d stick with the paper if I were you, Mike. At least until our legislators meet, write the perfect, definitive law on the subject and fix all our problems.

Hal sent me a picture of a road with a big crack in it. He said this was Robindale Road out near Paradise Road. There are cracks all over the place out there. “Is the bumpy-from-cracks portion of Robindale, as indicated here, in the hopper to be repaved soon?” he wrote in an email.

Maybe, Hal, but it depends on what you mean by soon. If your “soon” means a definite date at sometime in the predetermined future, then I’m afraid I have bad news.

Dan Kulin, a spokesman for Clark County, said they are going to go take a look at all those cracks.

For now, the road is on the Giant List of Roads that Need Repaving, which is buried in a sarcophagus beneath that pyramid the county calls its headquarters.

(Not really. The sarcophagus is actually buried at the now-public Area 51. Good luck on your hunt!)

The repaving, though, has not yet been put on any schedule because, and I’ve said this many times before, there’s no funding for it.

Jane had a problem that caused her to worry.

She lives in the totally grid-like part of town between Rainbow and Jones boulevards just south of Sahara Avenue. She said there have been a bunch of work crews out there all summer doing stuff on Edna Avenue.

“First a sewer line was installed, then the gas company did something, and finally the power company,” she wrote in an email.

This made her wonder if the government types were coming with their tractors and their asphalt and those dang orange cones and whatnot.

“My concern is they are going to widen the street, which will increase the traffic that cuts through the neighborhood. Please advise,” she wrote.

Typically, Jane, roads don’t get widened unless there’s a darn good reason to widen them. New development, for example. There it’s a win-win because the developer usually has to pay to widen the road that the new development is causing to be widened.

Get it?

But your neighborhood is totally built out. It has been since I was a kid, as best as I can remember. So there won’t be any new development.

Just to be sure, I checked in with Kulin, the county guy. Nope, he said. The county definitely does not have plans to widen that portion of Edna Avenue.

That is kind of stunning, no? A solid answer. Maybe that perfect world isn’t so impossible, after all.

Maybe.

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