I drove my mum home from FLA this past spring, and I was kind of shocked by how terrible the roads were. I was kind of expecting these big interstates to be like the 400 series highways up here. It messed with me to be driving on these little potholed two laners, with all kinds of construction going on where part of the road had crumbled into the culverts.
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Of course, phase two of the devolution of our roads will be from gravel/dirt to unmanaged and unmaintained deeply rutted surfaces, infested with scrub and re-emerging rocks and stones.
This article describes some of the challenges. In an era of significantly reduced budgets for infrastructure maintenance, it will be a relatively easy (if extremely painful) decision to let go of dirt road upkeep, particularly in the rural hinterlands where hardy souls will be expected to work their own salvation, God willing.
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Rural? I live in Dallas which isn’t exactly rural or cash strapped. We have interstates here with recurring potholes that will literally destroy your wheels. It seems like as soon as one causes a wreck they pour some asphalt in the hole and wait for it to come back.
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Canada is a bad example. Roads in the USA have to deal with changing seasons, not just the one.
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Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but if you are: Toronto experiences a 70ºC difference between our summer highs and winter lows.
[quote=“abides, post:25, topic:81468, full:true”]
Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but if you are:[/quote]
Do I look like I’m joking?
What’s that in normal degrees?
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Canada has both Winter and Mosquito Seasons.
The college I went to in upstate New York dealt with potholes by putting a “Rough Road Ahead” sign on the main street through campus. It was easy enough to dodge them on a bike, and there wasn’t anywhere useful for most students to park in the daytime, so I’d only occasionally need to drive across it.
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Looks like the the race to the bottom will be off-road.
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Things are bad all over.
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Amazingly, that small government can still find some change under the sofa cushions for the F35.
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Cost to repair roads grows exponentially over time because they degrade exponentially. A stretch of road that would cost 5 million to repair after X years might cost 12 million to repair 3 years later and 30 million to repair 3 years after that. It is always cheaper to fix things now. As a country we are richer and more productive than we have been in our history but we’re acting like we can’t afford basics like paved roads, street lighting, public libraries and clean water. Germany is poorer than us on a per capita basis yet somehow manages to afford all of these things plus universal healthcare and college tuition.
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+100 more likes. I laughed a lot at that one.
Why hasn’t anyone invented pavement that lasts longer?
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They have. It’s called concrete, but it costs even more and takes longer to construct than bituminous, so it doesn’t get done in “fuck you, I got mine” states.
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you guys should make America great again
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It’s really dismaying how prevalent that is, kids selling $5 bags of M&Ms outside the grocery store or on the subway to raise money for basketball uniforms or a trip to the Model U.N. or whatever. For some reason it’s never white kids.
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My late uncle ran a highway construction company. I remember reading one of his specialized civil engineering journals and coming across a comparison of typical U.S. road standards with typical European ones. Something like this but in more detail:
The European cross-section was about twice as deep as the U.S. one, with more layers designed to prevent or mitigate weather damage, and the expected longevity was much longer. More expensive upfront but doesn’t need to be resurfaced every ten years so cheaper in the long run.
(Concrete cracks too if there isn’t proper insulation and drainage underneath, and it’s noisy as hell to drive on at highway speeds.)
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1776 Freedoms.
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Relevant to the topic. What goes into repaving a road:
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