If they didn’t know already, Down East residents now understand the Southern term “gully-washer.”

That is precisely what October has brought: a deluge of rain that has eroded roadsides, flooded other streets, overflowed streams, weakened bridges, clogged culverts and eliminated what few “shoulders” there were along rural routes.

This fall’s unrelenting rains – record-setting in many areas of the state as well as New England – have left highways and byways in such deplorable condition motorists are wondering if they dare venture out, lest their vehicle slide into a ditch, hydroplane or crash into washed-out, buckled-up pavement.

The rainy remnants of Hurricane Wilma didn’t help the situation around these parts, where poor road conditions were made even worse the past few days.

A report recently issued by TRIP, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., evaluated data from Maine’s Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration. The conclusion: “Nearly one-third of major roads in Maine, maintained by state and local governments, are in poor and mediocre condition, providing motorists [with] a rough ride.”

The reason: lack of maintenance and upgrades due to funding shortage.

Cited in the report, U.S. Route 1A in Holden and U.S. Route 1 in Ellsworth were listed among the top 10 congested roads in the state. And for those of us living in the Down East areas of Hancock and Washington County, the statistics in the report were alarming.

“Our data shows it’s four times as likely [for motorists] to be killed in rural roads in Maine than other roads,” Paul Haaland of TRIP was reported as saying. Between 2000 and 2004, 978 people died in traffic accidents in Maine, 81 percent of those on rural, noninterstate routes.

Given those facts, rural Mainers should be pounding on the doors of MDOT but only after an en masse appearance before the Maine Legislature, which has a nasty habit of underfunding road maintenance and shuffling the problem off to voters in bond issue questions.

For the past several years, residents have been promised road repairs and improvements from the Hancock-Sullivan bridge to Sumner Memorial High School, where deteriorating conditions along the winding Route 1 are growing more dangerous by the day. There have been numerous reports from dissatisfied residents in the southwestern part of Hancock County and farther east are roads in Washington County that have motorists fearing for their safety.

State lawmakers better tackle serious transportation problems by funding their solutions. Relying on bond issue votes is as precarious as a recent gully-washer.

The executive director of TRIP stated: “Maine’s economy literally rides on its highway system.”

How true. But more important, Maine’s residents – young and old – ride on these highways: these cracked, potholed, bumpy, narrow, unlined, rutted roads.