As I wrote earlier I spent a couple of weeks halfway between here and Lapland and to do that and have a car around, I had to drive.

On the way there I started noticing odd things after maybe a couple of hundred miles.

There were two-number (and thus wide and in fairly good condition) roads in the middle of nowhere and often going it seemed from one extremely unimportant (and SMALL) town to another maybe 60 or 70 miles away. Drive across one of these roads and within it seemed 20 or 30 miles there was another of them.

I finally took one of them and it was as empty of traffic as I had imagined - I mean who actually in small, insignificant town X wants to drive 70 miles to small insignificant town Y (which - this is Finland - will have exactly the same shops and the same prices.

You'll perhaps be wondering how this situation came about. After all there are roads in Southern Finland that are in dire need of widening and have been for years.

The answer is Politics. As I wrote before the Center Party is the party of the rest of Finland. Go virtually anywhere outside the far south of Finland and the local voting areas are dominated by the Center Party (apart from a couple of larger towns - SDP - and some areas on the West Coast (Swedish Peoples Party)).

Add to that the fact the the Center Party has almost invariably been in every coalition government and you get a regular game played by the traffic ministry.

First they pick out say 5 roads that are needed to be improved (or built). Two of these will be in the south and three will be in the rest of the country. Invariably then there will not be enough money for all five and one will be dropped. That one will *always* be one of the two in the South.

In fact over the past maybe (I'm guessing, but it seems likely) 10 years that road is the road from Hanko to Helsinki which for most of its journey through Southern Finland is one lane in each way.

This road also happens to be the route taken by I think 60% of the car transporters taking new cars from the port in Hanko to Russia. That's the reason it has always been on the list; it's a very busy and very dangerous road (although less dangerous than in the early days when both the Russian trucks were of very bad condition and the drivers drove (fast) in convoys because, presumably, they were afraid of Finnish peasants attacking them (which - in case you were not aware of this - is a laughable thought - for one thing it would be hard to find a peasant!)).

Anyway the point is that this road has always been on the list for widening and has always been turned down with priority given to a road somewhere in rural Finland with about 2 cars an hour (I'm exaggerating but not by that much).

Not only that but another road that was given priority was expanding the bypass that goes around the south and west of Tampere (a city of 150 thousand people so not exactly difficult to drive through and there WAS already a perfectly good and fairly wide ring road in place) to full motorway level.

I saw this on our way back when we decided as it was a Monday not to go through the centre as we had done on the way up. Really massive roadworks solely with the intention of allowing cars to join the existing road to do so without seeing a Stop sign. A mere fraction of the sums involved would have improved the Hanko road years ago.

No doubt that was also done in the name of regionalism.

So there you have it. Not for the first time the people in the South pay the bulk of the taxes but the benefits are spread throughout the country.

Not only that but the regional areas outside the south also get subsidy payments from the larger towns in the south that have better economies.

So if you live like me in Southern Finland and drive north, whenever you see a wide empty road or a modern, large library in a very small place, just be proud that there (and not in your own backyard) is where your tax payments are going.

(and whatever you do don't look at the two garaged detached houses with extensive gardens that cost a fraction of the semi-detached house with carport and a mere scrap of land that is all you can afford in the South.)