> Interestingly, in all cases urban roads are worse quality than rural roads, presumably because they see higher traffic than rural roads.
There's more infrastructure under urban roads. Crews come in to fix some utility, shred a section of a lane, patch it poorly with dissimilar materials, and leave.
This is a great analysis but it does focus exclusively on ‘roughness’, which is obviously important but isn’t the be-all-end-all of road quality.
One area I notice in particular that roads in the northeast US subjectively feel worse than Europe is in quality of road markings. Constant plow scraping and harsh salting seems to destroy markings.
I think it also shows up in the overall fit and finish of road infrastructure - edging and barriers, signage, lighting, maintenance of medians, how curbs and furniture contribute to junction legibility… and of course bridges.
One major reason is that European countries typically have national road agencies and consistent standards across the country (because, generally, smaller and less federal). US’s patchwork of federal, state and local road maintenance leads to vastly different budgets and department priorities across the network.
You have a good point. I live in Michigan and recently traveled down to Austin, Texas. The roads didn't seem all that much better but all of the road markings really stuck out to me. Reflectors in all the lines separating lanes, soft bollards surrounding cross walks and parking areas, extra curbs built in for bike lanes. It makes things look a lot nicer but my first thought was, "could you imagine trying to plow around those bollards, or those reflectors would get ripped up on the first pass."
Northern Europe gets more than enough snow and bollards and reflectors are a thing all the same. It's not a problem if you plan for it ahead of time and design and build things with that in mind.
Austin didn't even have snow plows until 2022, the year after snowmageddon. If I remember correctly, they tried using road graders and sand. Even then, it's generally ice, not snow in central tx, even after removing snow in 2021 there isn't/wasn't much to do about all the ice.
To me, snowmageddon will always be Atlanta 2014.
Just FYI, at least germanies rods are also a patchwork. E.g. there are the Autobahns, which are financed by the federal state. Than there are Bundesstraßen (Yellow markings, typically something like B56) which are also financed by the federal state.
Then there are Landstraßen, which are financed by the Bundesland (state, LXXX). Followed by Kreisstraßen, financed by the Gemeinde (county?`).
Finally there are Gemeindestraßen, financed by the city or town.
There are lots of norms and regulations on how to build these roads, so there is not that much variance except layout. E.g. a bike friendly city like Münster has a dfiferent layout than say Cologne.
I think your last paragraph is the key one. AFAIK in the US a lot less is regulated on a federal level. Like in Oregon you'll rarely see reflectors on the lane markings whereas they are omnipresent in some other states.
The lack of reflectivity of lane markings in North Carolina made night driving in the rain on the multi-lane roads around Raleigh quite a demanding task.
What are these lane markings you speak of? I must tell our local street department, they will be amazed to hear of it.
It was meant to be a sarcastic comment. My town's lane markings are so bad they might as well not exist in most places. And when they do repaint them they seem to use the thinnest flat paint they can buy, at night in the rain they just disappear. I know heavy reflective lane marking paint exists because I've seen it elsewhere.
Yes. There also is a version that's set into a groove so that snow plows don't scrape them off.
The reflectivity of the road markings in North Carolina—where plows are rarely used—is terrible, to the point that they are almost invisible on a rainy night, even on freshly painted roads. It's the worst of anywhere I've lived or driven in the U.S.
Relatedly, recently my wife mentioned seeing a vehicle with large boxes on each side and wondering what they were. From her description, I tracked down that they are a fleet maintained by a small company that measures road marking reflectivity:
https://www.beckenterprises.com/services/
So who knows, maybe NC is finally doing something about the road markings here.
In NC it really depends on where you live. With some of them looking very nice. While others it looks like it has not been touched in 20 years. I personally think they just have a set timeframe to refresh things and they stick rigidly to that no matter how good or bad they are.
I've driven NC from the mountains to the sea and haven't seen good reflective markings anywhere. Certainly all the road markings in and around Wake county are awful. Even at their best the markings don't compare to say Florida roads.
I think part of the problem is that NC counties don't maintain their own roads:
"North Carolina has the second largest state maintained highway network in the United States because all roads in North Carolina are maintained by either municipalities or the state."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_System
I think NCDOT just doesn't use reflective paint. Maybe it's more expensive. I see folks complain about it frequently.
https://old.reddit.com/r/asheville/comments/18ro7lx/why_does...
https://old.reddit.com/r/raleigh/comments/12ehtj6/rain_and_r...
A video of 3M reflective paint that is designed to work in both wet and dry conditions (skip to 6:40):
https://youtu.be/4iY8JqHN-kI?t=400
A related issue you may have noticed is the large amount of trash on our roadsides. This is again because roadside trash pickup is maintained by the state and the budget for roadside cleanup has been de/underfunded since 2008.
Interesting, they're not that far from me. I love these little niche industries that no one's heard of. I guess they have to travel a lot to get enough business though.
Ah, very cool, and great timing. I saw one the other day and was wondering what it was measuring (I assumed).
What an interesting niche business! I love that the Software section of their homepage appears to be a screenshot of WordPress template source code.
That’s a stock image when you search for “code” available on almost any stock image provider.
I figured something like that it's just a little bit funny.
I generally agree but need to point out Germany is organised like the US regarding road construction. Only Autobahnen and Bundesstraßen are under federal authority, with states and municipalities divvying up the rest.
Same in Italy (and probably most other EU countries); there's (about 25.000km of) roads that are maintained by a state agency; others are managed by a region, a province or a city. There's also an entirely different agency that needs to take care of highways.
Yeah the UK is pretty similar. Devolution means Scotland and to a lesser extent Northern Ireland have some autonomy, but the big important roads are controlled by national government (albeit not necessarily the UK government) and your residential street is handled by much more local government, in my case the city where I live.
Actually Scotland bizarrely happens to have a road most similar to what most US folks would consider normal - a motorway (a multi-lane highway) named M8 going straight into the centre of a large city (Glasgow) on concrete stilts. This is not how the rest of the UK does it, but it so happens the M8 was conceived in that window of time where it was considered a good idea, some parts of my city were made in that era and I'm glad I don't live in them.
But the regulations in Germany are largely federal, no?
They might be (no idea), but if they are there's a significant amount of leeway allowed and visible between municipal roads in Bavaria and Brandenburg (richer vs. poorer states...)
Edit: no, at least part of them is state specific, e.g. Saxony road administration law: https://www.revosax.sachsen.de/vorschrift/4785-Saechsisches-...
Oh interesting! I'm honestly surprised because roads always seemed so much more consistent to me in Germany.
Also, "Bepflanzung des Straßenkörpers" might be the most German thing I've read in ages ;)
> focus exclusively on ‘roughness’
also, as a road cyclist I've found that there are different types of paved roads, some are very smooth (asphalt I presume), and others are less so (concrete?). Both are paved, but one is much more pleasant to ride on than the other. I don't know if there is a relationship between roughness and durability or quality, or those are just different techniques.
Well then there's the overall experience using the roads, regardless of roughness. For example, Texas' under interstate turnarounds are super weird and make running a local errand feel like a cross country trip as an example. Areas without zoning laws between commercial / residential feel more stressful to me as a driver personally too.
While I agree on your additional criteria, I feel the roughness metric itself (at least as explained here) is not as informative as it could be: a generally smooth road surface with sudden discontinuities in level (e.g.potholes) seems qualitatively worse (and damaging) than would be a smoothly-varying one with the same roughness. Perhaps an alternative metric might be based on the maximum speed at which a typical car or truck could travel without experiencing vertical accelerations above a certain threshold? ('typical', here would be with regard to things like its mass, suspension travel and stiffness, and wheelbase.)
The metric might already account for the scenario you bring up, since a road with potholes will be more 'rough' than a smoothly varying one based on my understanding of this metric.
I thought about that, but this is what I had in mind: take a section (say 100 M) of an undulating road, smooth it out, then put a ridge across it that restores its roughness to its initial value. My feeling is that the latter would be more of a problem (this opinion is colored by the fact that, in my neighborhood, road repair is creating bumps and ridges like this.)
I guess it would depend on how big the ridge you add would have to be. I'm not at all an expert on this, but my thinking is that a ridge of size 2X would have an exponential effect on the travel of the suspension and resulting IRI value when compared to a ridge of size X. So a perfectly smooth road with a ridge of height 2X would have a higher IRI than the same road with 2 ridges of size X.
The wikipedia article has more details on how the measurements are done (there are multiple different ways/instruments used which can have different results) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_roughness_index
> The IRI is based on the concept of a 'golden car' whose suspension properties are known. The IRI is calculated by simulating the response of this 'golden car' to the road profile. In the simulation, the simulated vehicle speed is 80 km/h (49.7 mi/h). The properties of the 'golden car' were selected in earlier research[12] to provide high correlation with the ride response of a wide range of automobiles that might be instrumented to measure a slope statistic (m/km).
For what it’s worth I hate the roads and parking in Europe. Roads are narrow, intersections are chaotic and parking is a joke. I drove around Europe for around 3 months (France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium etc.) and longed to drive back in the US again.
This feels like it's supposed to sound like a bad thing. I think it's awesome the cities you went to were designed for the people who actually live in those cities, not the people driving through.
If you find those roads narrow, don't try the UK or (especially) Ireland.
I've driven in France, Iberia, and Central/near Eastern Europe (Stuttgart to Budapest, Krakow, and back). City streets can be small, but the highways are highways. Even smaller roads in Slovakia weren't bad. Honestly didn't seem that different from driving in the US except that obedience to speed limits was a lot higher (though their limits are generally higher, so there's no real need to speed - 130 km/h is just over 80 mph, which is usually as fast as I would want to drive anyway).
Probably comes down to what you are used to. I find driving in the US stressful mostly because of other drivers not behaving like I’m used to.
Perhaps the best roads are those that see the least vehicular traffic.
Yeah in Europe you want to head for the main train stations or Park and Rides if you're spending time in cities. They usually have large car parks and good public transport.
Outside of towns and cities the road networks in those countries are generally excellent. Especially in France and Italy with their toll roads.
If you're just going city to city, take the train.
I've driven extensively in Spain and to a lesser extent France, Italy and Germany and never found parking a "joke" except in cities or with a huge car. Of course, due to density, the free parking places are usually very busy and hectic. But there's always an option to pay/pay more
> Interestingly, I expected cold places to have lower road quality in general due to things like freeze-thaw cycles and the impact of road salting, but there doesn’t seem to be much correlation. Plenty of cold places (North Dakota, Wyoming, Minnesota) have good-quality roads
Not sure about those states in particular, but I have anecdotally noticed that some of the places with the harshest winters do some of the least road salting -- because salt is mostly usable for light to moderate snowfall and the people who live in the harshest climates are often better equipped to drive on hard packed snow.
The more obvious reason is that colder places do not get as many freeze-thaw cycles. It simply stays frozen for a few months. In contrast, much of the northeast experiences many more freeze-thaw cycles since even in the winter it is warm enough to thaw the ice on some days.
Cold places see a lot of freeze-thaw cycles in fall and spring - before and after the hard freeze. I don't know how they compare, but it isn't clear cut.
> Not sure about those states in particular, but I have anecdotally noticed that some of the places with the harshest winters do some of the least road salting
Salt isn't effective when it gets really cold so it tends to be applied more around freezing as opposed to below. It also depends on the road surface temperature as well, heat of the sun melts off snow and that freezes at night. So you'll find salt has to be applied intelligently to the conditions, on bridges for example, which I suppose would come from experience.
I also observe southern states seem to use more rubber instead of rock in their road surface. So that might be a factor on how robust they are to wear.
0F is defined as the temperature that salt on ice reaches. Regular salt is used a lot in Minnesota because it works fine most of the time and is cheap. It doesn't work on the coldest days, so about 15F they start adding in salts other than NaCl. Below -15F they no longer have a salt that works at all - but those days are rare.
My Grandpa worked for the MN highway department until around 1995 when he retied, so my information is a bit out of date, but chemistry doesn't change that much so I doubt it is very different today.
This is somewhat true where I’m at in Canada. In the city, half the people have proper winter tires, the other half “wing it” with whatever they can afford/put-up-with.
Regularly see accidents all winter long from goofs sliding straight across multiple lanes of traffic or going off into the ditch. Only some of us are prepared.
We don’t salt, only drop sand grit and gravel sparingly. Our roads become ice rinks or snow piles for a decent portion of the winter.
Your comment about us being “better equipped” made me chuckle as I spent this morning watching my neighbours play slip-and-slide in the cul-de-sac cause they opted to not put their winter tires on.
As someone who grew up in the mountains, their behaviour is downright dangerous in my opinion.
> opted to not put their winter tires on.
Heh. At least they have them, and/or know what they are. I have been met with "they make tires just for snow?" when talking about snow tires in the US before.
Not sure when snow tires became more mainstream but I started driving in Michigan in the late 80s and didn't know a single family that used snow tires. Where I live now snow tires only make sense for those who live in or visit the mountains regularly. The valleys are mostly at or above temps where snow tires wear quickly or become less effective on wet surfaces.
I live in the southeastern US. I am aware that winter tires exist, but you simply can't buy them here off the rack. You have to order them. For our "snow", which happens once every 2-3 years, you don't even need them. In an ice storm, you just stay off the roads for two days. The heat from the sun is sufficient to melt it even if the air temperature never gets above freezing.
What you need here are tires that can handle huge amounts of rain. Which, in the western US, is not an issue.
Hah! Yup! Heard that one before from Californians, Texans, New Yorkers, and Arizonans in my travels.
Ignorance can be the death of ya! Thank goodness most of them aren’t trying to drive up here!
As a Californian living in the central valley, where we never get snow, I had never heard of snow tires until I lived in Germany, where seemingly everyone had them in winter. Nobody around here has them or even sells them.
When we go up into the mountains in winter, either the roads are cleared and we can drive on them with normal tires, or it's snowing heavily and we put snow chains on the tires and drive slowly. I've only had to use snow chains a couple times in my life because I generally only go into the mountains when it's not currently snowing, which is most of the time.
Climate change has made the climate drier here, the mountains get a lot less snow than they used to. It also helps that real winter with snow storms only lasts about 3 months.
I'd imagine most Californians are using chains or other traction devices rather than snow tires. Snow tires would be awful in the Bay Area or pretty much any of the state's main cities.
The average driver today knows shockingly little about their car. It's an appliance. They put gas in it, take it to the dealer for service when the message comes up saying service is due, and that's about it. Checking tire pressures, tread wear, brake wear, oil and other fluid levels, or opening the hood for any reason is not something they ever think about.
They make their payments and trade when the warranty expires. It's an appliance.
I've lived in Michigan most of my life and only people in the remotest places have snow tires. City folk just use the same all-weather radials all year round and maybe keep some chains in the trunk for emergencies.
Nobody lives upstate, relatively speaking. New York State’s population is 19.5M. 8M live within NYC limits. Another 8m live on Long Island and 2M in the counties just west of NYC. So around 1.5M for all the upstate areas combined compared to 18M in the metro area.
It would be weird if someone in upstate NY hadn't heard of snow tires, but it's not insane to not use them. I spent most of my life in Wisconsin (obviously a place with lots of snow and ice), and frankly snow tires just aren't necessary in most winter driving scenarios. All seasons will do you just fine 95% of the time, and for the other 5% you should consider chains instead of snow tires anyways. Or of course don't go out, which is the actual best option most of the time. Almost nobody back home has snow tires because they just aren't worth it.
>yeah but hang on.. New Yorkers!
New England too. At best only a minority of people use snow tires here.
Which should beg the question if these things are as magical as the internet cheerleaders say they are then why doesn't everyone in these sorts of states have them.
Winter tires are not cheap. I'm in Alaska and recently paid $1400 for a new set of studded winter tires for my F-150. And the tires I chose were one of the lower cost options available.
So I totally understand why folks who can barely afford to put gas in their car are driving around on all-seasons year round (and ending up in the ditch frequently).
> $1400 for a new set of studded winter tires for my F-150
The F-150 and maybe the studs play the biggest role here. I kept it below $400 for my small hatchback, even though I went for Conti (but it was before COVID).
Studs added about $150 (for the set) vs the price for the studless version of the same tire. Truck tires are definitely more expensive than those for passenger cars, though.
> goofs
Can confirm, definitely Canadian!
We just had a massive first snow dump in Regina here. 15-20cm in 24h. It's treacherous out there, I was in 4HI all morning trying to get around.
Wait, Canada don't have regulations about having winter tires of some kind? Wow, that is odd.
Canada is a federal state like the US, and it similarly delegates much of the power to regulate driving to the provinces.
British Columbia mandates winter tires on highways going through the mountains, and chains for trucks. I wish other provinces would put in similar mandates, because it's a bit of a clown show on the roads right now in Saskatchewan.
In (most?all?) of BC winter tires are required by law, and salting the roads is illegal due to the horrific damage the run off does to the environment.
Does BC allow chains instead of winter tires? Oregon does for cars and light trucks. WA seems to be more of a free for all but also tends to completely shut down their passes more often than Oregon does.
You mean to tell me dumping literal truck loads of salt into the water table is a bad thing? Why does everything that works well have terrible consequences.
It also tends to corrode any sort of metal in the structures that it’s on, which also contributes to poor road quality from the article. And it corrodes the cars traveling on it as well.
I've lived in WI 40+ years and winter tires are a waste of money. Unless you're in the mountains somewhere or going off-road, they're just an extra thing to buy.
Very much so - WI and other northern states know how to clear their roads. While you will need to slow down a little more while it is snowing it doesn't really matter because someone else will not have winter tires and so force you to slow down to that speed even if you have them. And even if you have them they are better than summer tires, but they are not that much better, you still need to slow down on ice.
Winter tires are very important in places where they get bad weather but don't clear the roads. Those are not generally places people live though.
Ehh, I almost never use winter tires but I still disagree. Some people are simply not good or attentive enough drivers for me to believe they will be fine without winter tires.
> ... because salt is mostly usable for light to moderate snowfall and ...
Perhaps more important - salt's effectiveness fades as the temperature decreases. Sand and gravel do not have that problem. So if you're running the Road Dept. in an area where serious cold ain't some rare event - why would you bother with salt?
EDIT: I know the "melt to pavement, solar heating finishes the job" tactic. Which can work with heavier snowfall, if you plow/shovel before salting. Colder weather inhibits both halves of the melt-&-heat. (Plus the further north you are, the shorter & slantier the sun's rays get, even on clear days.)
Because the goal is to get the road surface exposed so it'll heat up and melt off the snow during the day. And then the residual salt will leave a residue which will help prevent refreezing.
That only works in places with relatively milder winter climates. In harsher climates, salt stops melting snow, and the surface temperature of even exposed road may stay below freezing even during the day.
Yeah. I'm familiar with the harsher climates aspect.
The salt isn't really for the snow, it's for ice. Temperatures above like 10F, the sun will still cut through an untreated road surface and glaze over. Even with snow, because the top layer will still freeze, that nice crunch you get. The hazard is you have a smooth surface that your tires can't grip onto well when the sun goes down. I know it sounds counter intuitive but snow will still melt on very cold days because without wind you get a localized heating effect from the sun.
The nice thing is, ice gets increasingly grippy the further down you go. It's the around freezing temps that get you. And bridges since rather than the ground holding temperatures, now you've got an air conditioning going on under the road. That's why salt is so useful over say grit because it changes the freezing point of the water.
I've often heard the cold climate given as the reason for the terrible roads in Quebec, but you clearly notice the roads getting better as you cross the border out of Quebec into Ontario for example.
The Quebec road industry has historically been corrupt.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-roadwork-indu... and many many other reports.
Also depends on where you're looking. Cities will have worse roads because they're always digging working on gas and water lines, some of which leak. That disturbance of the ground will make things a lot worse than some rural road where the ground hasn't been disturbed since it was created.
This is the truth. They’re digging out under a massive overpass in my area right now to fix water main and gas piping issues as we speak.
Road is all torn up and patched up. It has been a boondoggle of construction cones and heavy machinery for months now.
The new suburb I live in they put all that beside the road not under it. That is what the space between the road and sidewalk is for.
This works well in suburbs with modern setback rules. It doesn't work so well in established urban areas where buildings often go right up to the sidewalk which goes right up to the road.
It doesn't work well here either. It frees up the roads a little, but as someone who bikes on those "shared use" sidewalks there are regularly "yellow vest people" blocking the sidewalks.
The article, and as of this comment, this thread, don't seem to contain particularly deep (ahem) comparisons of road construction, such as this article from Nature about bridge layer differences between US, Germany, England, and France:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12987-8
For roadbeds, here's Canada versus various EU countries, unfortunately US isn't included:
https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl07027/llcp_07_03.c...
This piece starts with 4 different paving approaches, relatively distinct, yet each having ~40 year lifespans (US old and new, France, Germany):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209575642...
The discussion goes into what might we mean by "how good"?
PS. US road builders better hope the measure is never total quality divided by time-to-construct. They'd have some real ground to cover (ahem):
The SFBay I-880 and US-101 are always packed, often under construction, but still pothole-filled, with sections of extreme roughness. Compare this to our OR neighbors, where there are signs saying "your tax dollars at work" by ORDOT everywhere. I used to scoff at this as a display of insecurity, but apparently (from TFA at least), Oregonians' tax dollars _are_ at work.
CA takes so many tax dollars from my hands. Why aren't they "at work"?
On the contrary, I believe they are. There are thousands of miles of back roads in California built and maintained by Caltrans that are in absolutely incredible condition. Drive up and down any random mountain/hill/pass off a main freeway and enjoy a road the envy of almost anywhere else: well-built, smooth, with painted lines and signage.
880 and 101 suffer because their high traffic volumes cause much higher wear and tear while also making it difficult to make repairs.
Oregon is 60% the size of California by land area but only 10% of the population.
Roads like 101 & 880 can't be worked on during the day because of massive congestion issues. But drive up & down 101 after 9 or 10pm (even on weekends), and you'll see crews hard at work. Hats off to those crews working the night shift.
> Compare this to our OR neighbors, where there are signs saying "your tax dollars at work" by ORDOT everywhere.
I see these signs all over Southern California (I remember seeing them around the Bay Area especially post 08 GFC): https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e074b5_617daf538f0c4e0e89...
They’ve been around since at least the late 90s/early 2000s. There's a whole official site for it too: https://rebuildingca.ca.gov/
> The SFBay I-880 and US-101 are always packed
A lot of this is due to the freeway system being unfinished.
101 would have been supplemented by the Bayfront Freeway (CA 87): https://cahighways.org/ROUTE087.html#_ROUTING_SEG2
And 880 by routes 61, 238, 185, 13, and 77:
- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE061.html#_HIST1964
- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE238.html
- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE185.html
Would have just meant more commuters
Only because those people can't find somewhere to live that's near work. So sick of this incredibly stupid line of thinking from otherwise very smart people who refuse to realize that increased demand on transportation infrastructure is the flip-side of the housing shortage.
Agreed, but I would say that inducing demand is the point of building anything. Nobody uses that term when it comes to building homes people want to live in. They only ever use it to oppose people being able to exercise their freedom of movement.
Anecdote: Worked road construction summer 2010 as the guy who put those little sticky tabs on the road to mark where lines are repainted after construction is complete.
Sometimes I'd finish early and get odd jobs. Between Roseburg and the Oregon coast a colleague and I were assigned to stand one of those "your tax dollars at work" signs on a steep slope. Took 2 hours at prevailing wage OT and for total labor cost of $480 between the two of us. By far the steepest labor rate I'd ever been able to charge. Thanks for the money, irony!
I'd like to see California consider reducing the total mileage of roads and focus on having a smaller amount of higher quality paved surfaces. My neighborhood street does not need to be 60ft wide, and our freeways do not need more lanes.
Start with the fire department. They are the ones demanding 60 ft wide residential streets so that their trucks can turn around without having to drive a few blocks out of the way.
Oregon manages about 40% the road miles of California with 10% the population and 70% of the tax revenue per capita.
I imagine that all states would have more trouble managing more roads than they currently do, and less trouble managing fewer roads than they currently do.
I dont follow? Are you invoking some diseconomies of scale. California has about twice the roads but more than 5X the budget.
I often breathe a sigh of relief when I pass over the boarder into Nevada and my car starts shaking.
Roughly 70% the tax revenue per capita ($3.8k vs 2.6), but somehow they manage to maintain their roads.
It's heavily county based. Drive on the 5 through LA county and the second it crosses into Orange County, it magically gets incredibly better.
Doesn't "often under construction" mean that they are "at work"?
They are "at work" ... for other people's versions of "at work".
we have a lot of expensive bridges
Anecdotally, I once shared a house with a Russian student in Monterey, California. He told me he was amazed by the quality of our roads compared to those in his homeland, though I don't recall which part of Russia he was from.
I grew up in rural California. Despite living quite remote—about 25 kilometers from the nearest town—by my standards our main roads were well-maintained. However, numerous smaller side roads branching off to serve sparse residential areas, sometimes leading to just a handful of houses, were another matter. I wonder if California has a larger proportion of these minor roads skewing the results. Yet paradoxically, two major urban centers, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are it would seem quite terrible.
> Colorado near the absolute bottom for road quality
> Kansas and Wyoming have much better road quality
Absolutely zero surprise there. It's amazing the moment you cross the Kansas-Colorado border on I-70, for example, how the interstate goes from very good to immediately extremely bad.
Ahhhh Colorado, blue state tastes with a red state budget.
Kansas and Wyoming are red states?
They are red states, but without the blue state tastes that might pull the state budget in other directions. (I don't know anything about the budgets of the states of Colorado or Kansas or Wyoming).
The color map from the election confirms.
Love that I live in California pay out my ass in property AND state tax and get the worst roads in America despite the fact that we barely deal with ice, snow, or rain.
You personally may pay lots of property taxes but California's Prop 13 means that people who have been here for a long time and kept property within the family are paying significantly less. Our average tax rate is 35th in the nation - https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/high-state-property.... I grew up in New Jersey originally so I have an admittedly warped view of property taxes, though.
I'm not sure what the solution is but there is a gross misallocation of housing in California... the suburban family homes with 4 bedrooms and massive yards designed for kids to play outside are almost exclusively occupied by retired childless people that only use the rooms when the grandkids visit, and tiny apartments are packed with families that are paying 4x+ for housing what the retired people in large homes are paying.
Prop. 19 was supposed to fix this but clearly did not- I rent in a suburb and have a young kid, but there are almost no other people under 65 or so within a large radius of my home.
Yes prop 13 is truly disgusting
Keeping roads perfect requires taking them out of commission for repair... which is a disaster on California freeways that have constant traffic. I think CA does a fair job of balancing that with road condition, and I assume they are already using more durable and expensive road construction methods than other areas that lacks so much constant heavy traffic.
I wonder if California would be better off with more Carmageddon type projects like when they shut down the 405 for like a week and hammered out necessary work.
If you shut down one freeway in the LA or SF area, every other one grinds to a halt also- including essentially all non-dead-end local roads... you might as well shut them all down at once, but there aren't enough road crews to repave them all in a week.
Above a certain population density there isn't really any way to use cars that isn't awful. When I was in Socal I would often meet people 10-20 miles away, e.g. for an after work bar trip and ride my bicycle - and beat all of the car drivers by a long wait.
In my area of the US, it seems like every manhole cover was designed to be in the road… and often where ones tires need to be. Makes for a very bumpy ride even when the condition is “perfect”. I’ve driven thousands of miles/km in other countries where the roads have barely any manholes.
Quality of roads in a city/town typically correlate with the income and socioeconomic status of the location. In the Bay area, affluent suburban areas have pretty good roads (believe taxes have an effect). While cities like Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond have streets full of potholes and very bumpy roads that can even damage your car while driving at a normal speed. For state with the highest income tax wonder where the funds go to. Good article on current state of US roads. I've seen other countries in EU and they seem to have much better or comparable roads in rural areas than the US.
Greatly depends on the state. Louisiana interstates still haven't recovered from the fallout from the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed in 1984, which raised the legal drinking age to 21 as a condition of receiving annual federal highway funds. Louisiana was the last state in the U.S. to have a legal drinking age of 18. Louisiana experienced about 9 years of reduced highway funds as a result.
Also the only state I've seen with drive through daquiri service !
It gets worse! They tape the lids to the cup and as long as you don’t put the straw in the cup it’s not an open container.
Also, the state legislature ruled that roosters were not animals to circumvent cock fighting laws.
There’s a web of similar Napoleonic Code caused loopholes in Louisiana law
> as long as you don’t put the straw in the cup it’s not an open container.
Some years ago when I was living in Louisiana, the straw could be inserted but the paper has to stay on the exposed end.
Coconuts are exempt from injury liability
wasn't familiar but wow.
"Twenty-three years ago, Louisiana added coconuts to the list of official Mardi Gras throws protected from personal injury lawsuits, ordering that the public assumes the risk of being struck "by any missile" traditionally thrown, tossed, or hurled by krewe members."
It's interesting New Hampshire leads the way for interstate highways and it is a 0% income tax state.
I live in NY but I went to New Hampshire last month for the first time. I have to say the roads were really good, even in more remote areas in the White Mountain region. Heck even the dirt road I had to go on for 1.5 miles was in good shape for a Hyundai Elantra rental car.
On the flip side, the roads near me are really bad in some spots. It's torn up pavement with massive pot holes for years in a decently trafficked area literally 1 minute away from a major highway.
> It's interesting New Hampshire leads the way for interstate highways and it is a 0% state tax area.
You're talking about the state income tax? It'd be unusual for any state to use much of that money for roads. There are a lot of other tax revenue sources dedicated specifically to that purpose.
> You're talking about the state income tax?
Yep thanks, I updated my post to reflect that.
You oftentimes hear road quality being thrown around in relation to what you pay in income tax or taxes in general. That is all hearsay though.
Yeah, I don't really understand that, but I don't doubt it is true.
I'm in a state where the state and federal gas tax as well as vehicle registration and vehicle sales tax (ugh) cover the cost of road maintenance, but it's certainly not because we don't pay a state income tax. So, one of those deals that varies by state or one of those things that's widely misunderstood - I couldn't say.
(one of the annoying things about our taxation is that owning a hybrid or electric entails a more expensive vehicle registration since you're not going to be paying as much in gas taxes. $100/yr more for a hybrid. Yuck.)
It's simple: politics over people.
NY's orgs (government or otherwise) steal all the tax money while pretending to be for the people, NH conversely does not.
There is more than one kind of quality.
When I drove from New Mexico from New Hampshire I thought roads in the US South were remarkably good. I settled in New York where major roads seemed pretty good but go to Pennsylvania and it seems there are two kinds of roads: bad roads and roads under construction, you never seem to find a good road that was just constructed. A lot of people thought it was frost heaves but this article say it isn’t.
My quality problem in NY is that atlas maps and GPS maps show numerous roads that aren’t really passable or if they are passable are too risky. I never saw ‘minimum maintenance’ or ‘abandoned’ roads before I came to NY and I wish they were so marked in GPS maps. There is a road near me which is sometimes passable in the winter if you have the right kind of vehicle and if you know the road goes downhill and won’t require that much traction… People who don’t have the right kind of vehicle will get led by GPS down this road and think it is OK because there are tracks but halfway through they panic and try to turn around now they are in trouble. That road is passable in the summer except for when it gets washed out.
Also NH is in a class by itself with its motor-oriented infrastructure (in 1980 they rerouted route 93 to go around Manchester and nobody goes there anymore) which is tree-structured as much as possible so you have many levels of hierarchy which can and will jam up. Want to walk? You can’t get there from here. I can go for years in NY without updating my GPS maps but if I drive to NH I will see the road I am got rerouted and there is a shopping center where there used to be a road. And this is in a state that doesn’t have income taxes so I don’t know how they pay for it.
I'm convinced that the states neighboring Pennsylvania take extra care of the last mile of roads on their side leading into PA so the transition is especially obvious.
It sure looks that way on the Maryland side.
I bet the proportion of unpaved roads would look a lot less bad if it was done by lane-miles rather than road-miles.
Truly, we have so many underutilized overly wide roads. Simply removing lanes makes money go much further
Of course, nearly all roads with >2 lanes in the US are paved. But that doesn't tell us anything other than the fact that we have the money to pave roads that are frequently traveled.
I once drove across the US-Canadian border during a snowstorm. On the Canadian side, the road was a slew of white slush that had us hydroplaning on and off. But as soon as we crossed back into the States, it was like a switch flipped. The road went from a slushy bog to a pristine surface with zero snow accumulation, just a slight gleam of moisture.
I'm not sure if you ended up in Saskatchewan, but it kind of sounds like you did. The highways in Alberta are quite a bit better and it's a relatively abrupt change.
I've heard that the quality of the Alaska Highway becomes noticeably better after entering the US from Canada.
The more important quality metric than “roughness” is infrastructure/safety.
A multi lane road shouldn’t cross another one in a flat traffic light intersection. That risks T-collisions if someone runs a red light.
It’s pretty cheap to keep roads smooth if you skimp on making separated lanes, safe multilevel junctions and roundabouts in every intersection.
Interesting. I traveled 15 years ago around california, over 4000 miles in three weeks. I remember being shocked at the state of the roads - some of them were downright dangerous, the car wouldn’t stay on the road, and I felt I was more or less constantly vibrating. Based on the article I must have driven on non interstate roads which are in california in particular really bad .
> but this is based on a survey of the perceptions of business leaders about road quality, not actual road data
Like... business leaders specifically in the freight and transport industry, or just _in general_? The first seems like it might be _marginally_ useful; the second is just nonsensical.
Massachusetts in nearly last place, right where I expected it to be but always assumed that was just "everyone thinks their own is the worst".
Great analysis! In last decade I have seen road quality of California degrade like crazy. It used to have clean, open roads now the quality has gone down to trash. Hwy 101 feels like you are in New Jersey.
"Overall, the quality of US interstates is very high, while the quality of roads in major cities is quite poor."
Is this really true? Coming from a country with alot of ice, American cities I've worked in seemed to have prestine roads.
The arm-pit state of Oklahoma, where I live, is considering a "mile tax" to support the maintenance of our road system. Of course we know it's also to offset EV vehicles gas tax loss. (which EV owners already have) Our roads are terrible and don't usually get repaired until they're almost dangerous.
This tax will hurt fixed income and poorer people the most. As Thomas Jefferson said: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” My state is so red, it's scarlet.
Why should we subsidize driving exactly? Charge per mile based on how much vehicle weighs and pollutes and charge enough to cover the cost of maintaining the roads. Many of the poorest people can't even afford a car. Insurance, fuel, maintenance are expensive and paying for roads is expensive.
Every state has been getting lobbied to do this for at least the last 10 years. These bills come through the legislatures every year, and I think it will keep coming until finally one of them passes. There are manufacturers of the GPS trackers pushing for it, and companies who want to have the state-granted monopoly to manage the tracking and billing. They are frothing at the mouth to get this passed and make a ton of money billing every single person.
Why wouldn't you just use a yearly odometer inspection by the DMV? Even if the legislature wanted to enact such a tax, why involve GPS and third party companies?
Internalizing the costs you create are good though. In a perfect world I would think weight x miles would be what you'd want to tax on. I say this as someone who owns an EV; I should have to account for the higher road deterioration my heavier vehicle causes. If someone's income is too low you fix that other ways than trying to subsidize their externalizing behaviors.
I can't figure out if you want the roads fixed or you don't want the tax.
Oregon has tried to implement a miles tax multiple times but failed to pass it. Instead they've opted for a surcharge on vehicle registrations for EVs and also on any vehicle that gets better than 20 mpg.
Counterproductive from a climate change standpoint for a "green" state but it preserved the road money.
I think a miles traveled tax that accounts for vehicle weight would probably less regressive than the current gas tax.
EVs save substantially in running costs. I’d imagine it would charge those using 3/4 and 1-ton pickups as family cars the most.
People being too poor is a separate issue from bad tax systems incentivizing unsustainable behavior.
Tax liabilities that are a function of consumption are the right way to tax.
If the tax burden is deemed too high for poor people, then give them cash.
Two different problems, two different solutions, and it keeps the incentives aligned properly.
“This is your brain on politics.” (A reply to the grandparent comment.)
I'm from South Carolina, pretty close to the border with North Carolina. All my life i've heard that South Carolina's roads are terrible, especially compared to North Carolina's _amazing_ roads.
Looking at this data though, it seems while NC edges out SC by a small margin on interstate roads, SC actually beats NC on local roads.
Take that, North Carolina!
How does Hawaii have interstates?
Because "interstate" doesn't refer to the function of the particular road, it refers to the federal program that created them: the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways".
There are a ton of interstate highways which do not go between states, even in the continental US, and especially the auxiliary (i.e. 3-digit) interstate highways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_auxiliary_Interstate_H...
The US already previously had (and still has), a national road system that traversed across states other than the Eisenhower system. But nobody calls these roads "interstate" because they're not in the Eisenhower system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highway...
"Interstate" has always specifically referred to Eisenhower system roads only.
I watched this YT video [1] about the interstate system recently, I found it informative and entertaining
To me, the Eisenhower Tunnel in CO [2] is noteworthy. It crosses the continental divide at altitude. From what I've read and watched, they don't allow HAZMAT trucks to go through, because the risk is simply too high (well equipped fire/rescue departments are hours away, among other factors)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR7BA3xEmDo
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Tunnel?useskin=vect...
As I understand, HAZMAT is very commonly banned in a lot of tunnels, and some jurisdictions ban it in all tunnels.
There's an interstate that runs entirely within one county, in Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_97
Not just that, but how is the overall quality of roads in Hawaii so bad?
It is not a poor state.
Just one. H1 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_H-1>
More than one. H-1, H-2, H-3, and then looks like a spur of some kind H-201.
as a brit I've driven through most of the US states and major cities, and they were generally comparable to what I was used to at home and throughout continental europe
Los Angeles though was something else, giant gouges on 12 lane highways every few feet for miles on end
and on sliproads, sudden surprise vertical walls with right angled bends
was like something out of the third world
> Los Angeles though was something else, giant gouges on 12 lane highways every few feet for miles on end
Probably concrete fastening projects.
> sliproads
on/off ramps for AmE speakers.
As someone who has driven in many different developed countries in the world (and been a passenger in many developing countries), California highways often feel like those in developing countries but it's combined with a much higher travelling speed.
I think the only other country where I regularly got jolted up (nearly hitting my head on the ceiling of the car) was India.
Do you remember which highway you were driving? Interestingly this goes against my experience. I’ve actually remarked to many friends that I enjoy night-time driving in Los Angeles since the highways are well-lit and smooth (and of course, no traffic at night).
I-5
Los Angeles is the v0.0.1 of freeways. Lessons were learned.
Our roads shouldn't be problems anymore. Didn't we pass a $1+ trillion infrastructure bill in 2021 or is that just getting pilfered by contractors? I have 0 faith in the federal government to do anything at scale anymore.
Anecdotally, it seems like a ton of projects got started as a result of this bill, but it doesn't seem like many of them are getting worked on or finished. It's giving me the impression that contractors bid and took on as many new projects as possible with no ability to actually staff or execute the projects. Given that this happened at the same time a major labor shortage occurred, perhaps it was a perfect storm.
I'm surprised AZ is at 82%. I've driven all over the country and the very worst highway I've ever experienced, by far, is the drive from Las Vegas to Flagstaff.
Yeah, the 93 between Kingman and Nevada is absolutely terrible. Last time I was through there (9 months ago) they were doing a small bit of paving but it wasn't in one of the rougher areas.
I heard a civil engineer make a claim once that the dust on the side of the road is about 300% more laden with precious metals like platinum, than random mining. I suppose this is all roads and not just American roads, though.
Cody's Lab did a video with some experiments collecting and refining road dust. As I recall, he did manage to obtain a small bead of platinum-group metals but it didn't appear to be economically viable at least at a small scale.
Isn’t it supposed to be mostly brake pads, rotors, and tire rubber?
Would be fascinating to imagine it being economically viable to vacuum up and reprocess it, but based on the above I’ve assumed it was worthless.
Sounds a bit like the guys that collect the sludge from the sewers in jewellery and gold smithing districts in cities, then pan it for gold. Its not going to make anyone rich, but theres enough gold dust in there to buy some food and shoes for somebody hungry enough to dive into a sewer and collect sludge!
Supermarkets that make you put in a quarter to take a shopping cart are really just paying the homeless $0.25 each to return them from the parking lot.
It seems more like the customers are paying the homeless, and the supermarkets are just acting as brokers.
I mean ultimately the goal is to find a balance where carts won’t be everywhere and customers aren’t inconvenienced to the point of choosing a different store.
it's the same for bottle deposits in parts of Europe. anything in a plastic bottle costs an extra ~10c which you can retrieve by depositing the empty in a machine at the supermarket
Dust from the catalytic converter. I've heard of gangs in LA taking shopvacs to the shoulder of the freeway at night.
Doesn't pass sanity check. They would run street sweepers if anything.
And surface roads with stop and go would have a higher density of particles in the "go" places (like beyond lights).
But if the gangs can make money doing it why wouldn't the municipalities do it?
Pics or it didn’t happen. I’ll even accept AI slop if its well crafted.
Ay, look at my homies get it done!
Pretty good, have an upvote.
Doing a public service, there.
Yes, it's copper and other metals used in the brake pads, as well as tire dust. Rotors are mostly just cast iron, so I'm not sure how bad that is.
A good comparison point would be Germany. It has a very large network of roads too, some designed for very high speeds, and a strong driving culture (perhaps stronger than the continental US).
I'm an American, I lived in Germany for several years around the turn of the century. German roads that I encountered were far superior to American roads. Their construction is far more robust, the roads last much longer. And with German lane discipline (passing someone on the right is practically a cultural taboo, it's a prohibition that's taken quite seriously) they are usually a joy to drive on.
I found the autobahn utterly nerve-wracking to drive on.
In the US, on an interstate, the MPH spread around the speed limit is probably -20 to +20 (i.e. limit is 75, slowest cars are at 55, fastest at 95)
In Germany, on autobahns, you have speed ratios of up to 2x. You have to constantly be 110% aware of every vehicle within 1/4 mile of you, because you could either be closing in the much slower vehicle in front of you, or suddenly approached and passed by a much faster vehicle from behind.
>You have to constantly be 110% aware of every vehicle within 1/4 mile of you,
Not such a terrible thing honestly...
Personally, I find the lack of predictability on US interstates is much riskier. I'm pretty sure the accident statistics back this up too.
The qualifications to drive in some states are barely more than ability to breathe.
Absolutely. I was stationed in Germany for 3 years while I was in the Army. You could be in the left lane of the Autobahn, doing 90+ passing a truck, and suddenly a Ferrari that wasn't there 5 seconds ago is right behind you, flashing its headlights demanding you get out of the way (apparently you're supposed to merge into the side of a semi).
>And with German lane discipline
The number of big trucks hanging out in the left lane in the US drives me mad...
Depends on the state. Many like NY have "No trucks in left lane" laws.
It's also a legal taboo, fyi
There is great variation between states. A good example is driving from Phoenix to San Diego via Yuma - the Arizona side is much better maintained, and the rougher California roads continue all the way to the city.
(At least as of roughly four years ago)
Not surprised to see California and Californian cities near the bottom of all the lists.
Does this statistics include private roads? Or it is only roads accessible to public?
> Overall, my main takeaway is that roads in major US cities are often shockingly bad
My main takeaway is that the US relies too much on cars and trucks relative to rail and bike (and perhaps one should say walking). I took that away from the first few lines though.
This explains why there's such a huge and consistent split in how good/crumbling US infrastructure is! It's "lives in a top-10 metro area / doesn't." It's been living rent-free in my head why opinions on this are so unbelievably stark. Turns out you can both be right.
Amazing that Minneapolis tops the city road quality chart, despite having the harshest winters. Do southern cities not build their roads so robustly? Or are they not maintained?
I'm guessing not maintained. Minneapolis is forced to spend a lot more on roads just to keep things acceptable. They also have a lot of voters with a memory of how bad things get after a bad winter and so politicians don't dare short road funding let they be voted out over a few potholes. (I've seen roads in Minneapolis that were more pothole than surface)
Maintenence. I grew up in the north (Michigan) and spent time in Massachusetts, living in Texas now it's very different how infrastructure is funded. I'd call it a result of the general politics, no one wants to spend money on infrastructure.
I believe the latest stat I heard was that over 70% of the roads & alleys in the city where I live are >40 years old. That also means all of the infrastructure under the roads (water, conduits, etc.) are also >40 years old.
Not all Southern states.
Florida is an outlier in road quality both anecdotally and from this page - almost equal in quality to blue states of New Hampshire and Maine. Non-interstate Florida roads drop to 74%, lower than Alabama (which has less interstate roadways than Florida) but higher than all other Southern states and most Northern states.
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/florida-ranks-among-top-5....
Winnipeg has notoriously bad roads throughout the city, and the harsh winters are always the excuse. But Minneapolis and Fargo don't seem to have these problems!
There’s a joke in Minnesota about having only two seasons, winter and road construction. As soon as the ground thaws, road construction starts up all over Minnesota.
St Paul is right next door to Mpls and has absolutely terrible roads, but they’re improving. St Paul has full road replacement on a 120 year schedule because they got drunk on TIF over the past few decades and don’t have the money for to schedule full road replacements every 60 years.
St Paul does enough road maintenance and pothole filling that it owns an asphalt batch plant: https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/public-works/street-maint...
My grandpa used to work for the MN highway department. That isn't a joke, it was reality for them. Either the plows are on the truck and they are plowing snow, or the plows are not on and they are fixing roads.
Roads are a tiny % of any government budget. St Paul could have the money to do more if they wanted, and it wouldn't be much of a total budget increase. However it would still increase taxes and so people should debate if it is worth the cost.
the south is generally a poor region with terrible public sand social services
3 of the bottom 4 cities are in California.
I mean, yea? CA has the highest real poverty rate (SPM) in the whole country.
Some of that won't translate as well to road quality due to the fixed cost portion of road repair (because the OPM rate isn't the highest (though still quite high)), but some of it will due to the not fixed cost portion (labor, etc).
But it definitely affects prioritization. People won't care as much about road quality relative to other things.
But it may explain road quality, which makes sense to me. MN has some of the lowest poverty rates and is on the opposite end of the scale there
When I was driving in Minneapolis a few years ago, you couldn’t drive more than 20 miles an hour because the roads were so bad around the neighborhood. I wonder if they fixed that.
I think Minneapolis has a citywide 20 mph speed limit for non-arterial roads. They might consider the rough road a feature.
> Do southern cities not build their roads so robustly? Or are they not maintained?
Yes
>rough roads inflict costs in the form of reduced vehicle speeds.
I mean, this seems like a benefit in disguise in many urban areas. The idea that we want high speeds is a real premise that needs to be defended.
> The US has the largest road network in the world, about 4.3 million miles of road, and Americans drive much more than residents in most other countries
This is insane. This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation. We spend trillions in building, subsidizing, and maintaining this infrastructure. Only for this cycle to repeat itself in 25 years as the roads/highways breakdown and people move further out (induced demand). Then there’s the billions in lost productivity due to traffic. Significant decrease in activity and increase in obesity.
Then the increased emissions from vehicles result in poor air quality. Then there is decreasing water and food quality as tire and brake particles make its way into the water and food supplies.
You're right that car centric transportation is entrenched, but this is the wrong statistic to prove that point. The US is a huge country and the overall density of roads (km/100km2) is lower than Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...
Europe isn't a country though - difficult to do a comparison as a about 40% of Europe is the European part of Russia which has a much lower road density than the US, mind you European Russia is going to be the part that has the highest road density of that country.
And almost 20% of the US is a former part of eastern Russia with really low density. :)
Only if you're trying to intentionally cherry pick the data. Population density inherently affects road networks, and that will be reflected in the data.
man is measure of all things. its density of people is lower too.
For your critique, you'd want to break out urban+suburban road networks from regional and rural ones. The US was a frontier country that grew on top of continent-spanning trails with pockets of community cropping up everywhere there were agricultural, material, or strategic resources, or the need for a travel rest. It's to be expected that we have many miles of road and mostly a good thing that our communities are so well-connected and traversable.
It's what happens inside those communities, when they could be designed with better concern for local community or sustainability, that warrants the critique. And it's a good and fair critique. Just not one directly spoken to by the quoted statistic.
Couldn’t driving more be a sign of a strong and productive economy? Other large countries like Russia or Australia or something that drive less have smaller GFP as well.
Can we make a better comparison of how much Americans drive, plus total travel, vs total travel for other countries of similar density and size?
I imagine you'd have to weigh this against alternative forms of transit. The freight rail industry is the largest in the world and directly represents (presumably productive) economic activity. Personal transit makes up a much larger percentage of road usage, even in metro areas with healthy public transit. It's hard not to see this as some form of inefficiency.
You should compare EU to the US before you comment on roads. The US is much larger than any EU country and so of course we will have a lot more roads.
> This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation
How? We’re big, rich and sparsely populated. I’m not saying that means we must have this system. But the longest road network doesn’t prove that’s wrong.
The National Forest Service alone maintains 265,000 miles of roads.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technology/infrastructure/ro...
This is called an "Argument from Incredulity" and it's a fallacy. Pointing to a large number without any basis of comparison does not make any statement about whether it is too large or too small. You also have billions of cells in your body! Is that too many?
[dead]
I just drove across ten US states and five Canadian provinces from the West to East Coast, shipped my Jeep to Europe by way of Iceland, then drove 100 miles through Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.
Driving on the freeways in those mainland European countries was immensely relaxing and easy - the road quality is vastly, vastly better than the US or Canada. Expansion gaps, cracks and imperfections are almost imperceptible.
Anecdotal, of course.
I have a strong memory of Driving I-40 from Cali into Arizona and not being able to maintain 60mph because the potholes were so big I though I was going to break the suspension on my Jeep.
I think anecdotal evidence may be a reasonable proxy for those countries, although at least in stereotype and anecdotally they are very far from representative of (even) western Europe. I've noticed quite a bit of variance between major highways and smaller highways or other roads across Italy, for example.
Shitty in Silicon Valley and most of Texas, places that don't even receive snow.
I’m currently in Albania, a country famous for shit roads. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, really), their roads are better than LA roads.
This happens CONSTANTLY in Atlanta. They'll spend a bunch of money fixing a road, then a month later Public Works digs a huge hole and leaves a steel plate on it for a year, then patch it with either concrete that is an inch or two below the rest of the surface, or they don't pack the earth they put back and in 3 months the patch has sunk into a new pothole in a brand new road. The city has been trying to force public works to go do those things BEFORE road projects, but it's an uphill battle.
This happens in other countries too. Some people theorize that it's done because of internal rivalries between dependencies/political factions, but I suspect local governments are just inept at logistics.
Its also a difficult problem. They need the right digger and the right crew at the right time and possibly the right weather to get the job done. Many times there will be weeks of juggling around schedules and suddenly the digging started three weeks after the road was finished
I.. I have no idea. I don't even know who Hammurabi is.
Is there a point you're trying to make? If so, care to enlighten us without assuming we all have history degrees?
1? 1000?
Regardless the answer, the lack of context makes the figure meaningless.
He reigned for 42 years (1792–1750 BC), so I hope not too many.
Here, the gov gives time windows for utility owners to dig and do maintenance, after which it'll be repaved. If you want to do maintenance on your infra, you request a timeslot and the gov groups the maintenance (eg sewer and gas). You best not miss your window.
It's a carrot, not a stick. It's designed to spread the digging.and repaving costs around so the work is cheaper. It's more that the city knows it's doing work in an area, digging up the road, so they tell all the utilities, hey if you are thinking of doing work on Main Ave, we'll be starting work on September 3rd, if tell us now and can get a crew out before September 21st, you won't need to pay to excavate and repave.
We were getting our roads redone in my town and the county commissioner ordered an asphalt miller to run on one singular road, when we needed it (and said for it to run) on all of them. It cost us the same to run it on one road or all of them, because most of the costs were transport of machinery. So I definitely lean towards ineptitude.
interesting. I noticed something similar in the UK but not in Germany. Maybe some simple change in the way these utility repairs are regulated is to blame?
While interstates are nice, cities are where people live, so the quality of urban roads matters and is maybe the reason for the perception of US roads?
Probably everywhere frankly, but Dallas is terrible, too. My wife and I took up skateboarding recently and it became much more obvious. Go out to the suburbs or a running trail or nice park and it's smooth sailing. You can push and coast. Where we live near downtown, it's cracks, rocks, discontinuities, metal plates. The gas company also dug up a bunch of bedrock 7 years ago, left a huge pile of it on the corner, rain came a few days later, and for the last 7 years, our sidewalks have been covered in dirt and the houses and cars all get a thin yellow film on them because there is so much dirt in the air all the time.
That's before considering what regular construction crews do. Most of the sidewalks are closed most of the time. They're routinely torn out and never fixed. There are nails and other debris in the roads all the time. When we first moved to our current address, my wife had all four of her tires go flat within the first year. I didn't own a car until two years ago, but both front tires have gotten nails in them already. That's also on top of the city's contracted out private dump truck crushing my rear windshield and smashing the hatch and leaving a business card with a claim number on one of my front wiper blades. That was nice to walk out to.
Then there was the crew across the street stealing all of my power tools when I accidentally left my garage open one day.
I'm not a NIMBY, but experiencing this makes me weary of the Hacker News zeitgeist railing against communities that don't want their neighborhoods turned into constant construction. There are entirely non-evil reasons homeowners might want that because building where people already live is incredibly disruptive.
How did a pile of Rick seven years ago lead to continuous dust even today?
If it's crunched up fine limestone it has a hard time growing plant cover. Instead it will be loose debris that easily breaks down and produces dust.
In New York, companies doing road work are required to leave a small plastic circle embedded in their patch that can be used to identify who did the work. They seem to most often be blue though I’m not sure the color is a requirement. Once you see it, you’ll notice them everywhere.
It's kind of maddening how often blogs like this will make motions towards developing an educated opinion (citing multiple reports, researching stats from public datassets, etc.) but don't seem to have bothered to actually talk to any of the people who are invovled in the practice they describe in their post (in this case, building roads).
Rural roads are often unpaved. The local authority has to come by regularly with a grade to redo things or they become unusable quickly. Overall this is by far the cheapest way to have a road, but it doesn't scale to high use and city folks demand something that makes less dust. Rural roads also includes minimum maintance roads which demand 4wd (real 4wd, many SUVs will have trouble) when the weather is nice and a winch is a must when things get rainy or snowy.
Though given his definition of quality I expect he is actually ignoring all the real rural roads and only talking about major roads which while they get less traffic than urban roads are maintained to similar standards.
> Rural roads are often unpaved.
Like the other replies have indicated, I'm not so sure this is the case? I live in very rural northwest Iowa, and while there are certainly plenty of gravel roads around here, I'm only driving on them if I'm intentionally trying to go "off the beaten path." You'll take a gravel road if you live on a farm, or you're trying to get to somewhere secluded such as a lake, campground or maybe a county park; but (imo) it's rare for the average person to drive down a gravel road just going from Point A to Point B on their daily commute.
I'm not sure we disagree. You use the gravel rural roads to get to the nearest paved road. So rarely are you going more than a few miles on gravel, then you hit a paved road which you travel for the many miles to where you are going. Most of the roads are still unpaved, but you spend most of your driving time on the paved roads.
FWIW in non-rural Canada we sometimes have gravel roads in towns twice that 10k size and in the metro area of a multi million inhabitant city (of which there are not all that many in Canada :)).
Not saying it's common. I don't have to drive over one of those but I have had to when there was construction on our regular route. It's right off the main road leading into town from the highway.
Oh yes, my mistake, I was inferring the wrong conclusion from your first comment.
> Most of the roads are still unpaved, but you spend most of your driving time on the paved roads.
Yeah I definitely agree with that. I imagine if you were to look at my county's roads from a satellite, it'd be something like the (grid-shaped) veins of a leaf — the thick, prominent veins are the paved roads, providing the structure, while the thinner, branching veins are the gravel roads that run between them.
Montana here. Most of the dirt roads (county roads) have been paved in the 25 years I've been here however there are some left where you can drive 20 miles unpaved. Also recently in Iceland I found a few unpaved roads (or rather "the Google Lady" did. Sorry whichever rental company I used there..
Do most people in rural areas not live on a farm? Excuse my ignorance but genuine question.
That is a tricky question to answer. Farms need small towns scattered all over - that is where many of the teachers, accountants, mechanics, hired hands, other services, and owners of the stores that serve all of the above live. Often small towns have factories that are not farm related and those employees live someplace. Do you count those small towns as rural? Many of the above have also realized that they can buy some build a house on marginal farmland cheap and so live rural but they are working a small town job - they may have a few goats or something but it isn't how they earn their money - hard they farmers? There are also people who retire to the country, hunting cabins (not residents), camp grounds (the owner lives there), and other non-farmers living in rural areas. Parents generally transfer the farm to the kid who will inherit it over decades, and part of that is the parents move to a small house off the farm but still rural - are they living on a farm?
Depending on how you count the above you can say that most people in rural areas are not living on farms. Even if you don't count small towns residents, there are a lot of people who are not farmers living out there.
Depends where you live. In my state you pretty much cannot build any kind of residence on land that is zoned for agriculture.
Certainly not. You will be lucky to find an area where 5% of the people living their are farmers or work on farms.
I don't have any real numbers to back this up, but I don't think so. Even in my quite rural area, most people live in towns despite the relatively vast, open farmland. My town's population is between 3-4000 people, but some are as small as 500. It'd take a lot of farms to spread all the people in my town out.
In my area the rural roads are typically asphalt. This part of the country receives a lot of precipitation and cold weather and our soils are pretty soft.
They stay in good shape for years, with little maintenance. There aren't many patches because there aren't many utilities. Truck traffic tends to gravitate to the highways, and car and ag traffic are low impact.
Maybe area-dependent? I grew up in an extraordinarily rural area in Tennessee. Most roads were paved (asphalt). Even ones out in the middle of nowhere.
The conditions of some of the remote roads might not have been great, mind you... and some seemed "thinner" almost, maybe paved a long time ago?
Of course there are political factors. I have always heard that in Wisconsin many rural roads were paved to better serve dairy farmers beginning in the 1890s - and continued through the WPA program. While in Minnesota, similar rural roads remained unpaved.
Best link I could find to substantiate such a claim
https://www.uwlax.edu/currents/biking-in-the-driftless-regio....
Of course in contemporary times the high maintenance cost has many Wisconsin towns/counties considering returning to gravel.
https://www.wpr.org/economy/taxes/small-wisconsin-towns-pave...
I think it's a snow thing - asphalt seems to wear down really fast in rural PA, probably from freezing at nights and snow and ice, so you can't do paving as cheaply out in the mountains or so on. The county dumps gravel down once a year and let's passing traffic wear it smoother over time, but it sucks to drive on fresh.
Freeze thaw and Temp range. MN may experience air temps from -20 to 100 over the course of a year. And you might experience 50 degree swings in a week (-20 to +30).
A lot of that is the road profile. Western NY has notably better county highways than PA because they tend to have wide shoulders that mitigate plow damage and frost heaving on the he edges.
Absolutely. The freeze thaw cycle is brutal on asphalt in many ways. Surface cracks expand, frost heaves distort and the material itself weakens. This is before any additional damage caused by plowing or ice scraping.
Chip and Seal is a technique used in a lot of rural areas that comes in with less maintenance than gravel but not as expensive as asphalt. It is basically a a top thin layer of tar with gravel pressed into it.
My city in SF bay area resurfaced some residential streets that way. So far it held on well for 10 years probably because we don't get much truck traffic. Meanwhile the near freeway is a major route for big trucks so after the winter rain its all full of potholes.
Rural around here in the PNW, the vast majority of rural roads are paved, except for forest service roads and the odd road here or there. I do a lot of countryside cycling and it's rare that I encounter a gravel road.
What they don't always have is the smooth surface found on highways; it's paved but of a bit of a rougher type (don't know all the technical differences, but it's noticeable on a road bike).
Living in a rural northern CA county, the roads are paved, however many are failing. The funny this is, one county over has much better maintained roads (by the state) because they are in a different district.
I don't think so. I grew up only in rural areas. We had plenty of roads, the vast majority of public roads were blacktop. The only dirt roads I recall were on private property.
At the very beginning he separates into:
- freeways
- local roads
- unpaved roads
Obviously the high-clearance-only roads in the mountain West will score poorly here, but when trying to compare US roads to Netherlands roads, those are not useful as the Netherlands has no equivalent.
You're probably also going to have far fewer massive vehicles on those rural roads. More things like pickups yes, but probably considerably fewer semi-teicks and busses and fire trucks and cement mixers what not. Those big trucks passing through are going to stick to interstates far more often when going through rural areas.
City buses are what really shred urban roads (and winter plows)
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
This is a reason why buses are not as cheap as they seem at first glance.
Often times, buses are favored because they require low capex (adding lines is easy, politically palatable, etc).
But in practice, on really busy bus lines with high throughput, it shreds the roads, to the point where you really need to re-pave the whole road every 10 years -- in which case, why not just put a rail line in and use a train!
There are certain places/conditions where trackless does make more sense, however. Philadelphia still has several trolleybus lines active for instance, in addition to buses, trolleys, subway, el-train, and traditional rail.
My guess is that it works here because our roads turn to shit anyhow from the freeze/thaw cycle, so it's not adding as much maintenance burden as it would elsewhere.
In the mid-90s, Seattle started excavating its bus-stops-on-a-slope and pouring a new concrete foundation, because the busses were warping the asphalt so badly.
I was just back there this last weekend, and you can no longer see any of the concrete - it has all been coated with asphalt. However, I assume its a rather thin layer because none of the bus stops I checked show the signs of damage that were becoming common in 90-96.
They opened a new truck stop near me with asphalt roads. 6 months later they tore it up for concrete because the asphalt shifted into lumps where the trucks were turning cono
Asphalt, like glass, is an amorphous solid. When a heavy truck sits still on asphalt, asphalt will flow out from under the tires. Not only do you get a depression and eventually a pot hole where the tire was, and you get a little hill next to it.
You just about need an offroad vehicle to avoid hitting the street.
I think they meant that the bus stop is on a hill maybe?
Yeah looking at any road around me it's obvious which lanes the busses prefer.
On average yea but when a rural road is neglected it's far far worse than any urban road. I'm looking at you Pennsylvania.
Born and raised in Pgh, the highways are awful. Always have been.
In my rural area there are tons of gravel pits so the roads take a lot of abuse. However every gravel pit ive seen here open up on a new road has been forced to spend the money on upgrading that road to handle those gravel trucks.
We have large farm machinery though.
Large machinery, but typically very low ground pressure. After all, that same machinery is designed to operate on arable soil without sinking or bogging down. It is my understanding that it is ground pressure more than absolute weight that correlates to road surface damage/erosion.
At some point axle load starts mattering more than ground pressure because whatever's below the pavement itself starts being extruded. I don't think that matters in most cases though.
yeah, the farm vehicles usually have gigantic tires too, compared to any regular passenger vehicle
There is large machinery. But does it go down the same stretch of road 20 times a day all days of the year though? May also depend on location. You ain't taking the combine down the road several times a day in the middle of winter. So you do get the wear and tear of large farm equipment, but its still probably less than an urban road and not year round.
Farmers are using normal semis to move the crops from the field to elsewhere on the road. Farm equipment on the road is generally unloaded.
Do those go down the road every 10-20 minutes like the poor bus service on the urban street outside my home does? And that is just the busses. Add 2-3 semi-trucks every five minutes.
Oh, and there's still farm equipment every now and then. I am in Texas after all.
I think other explanations replying are on point. I live in a town that's surrounded by a lot of farm traffic, and most of those roads are in good shape. But there are also routes used heavily by trucks servicing fracking sites, and those roads are TRASHED.
My grandma used to live close to a road servicing an oil derrick, back in 90's Romania (so 0 infrastructure investments for probably 10 years).
At one point my family was in a Dacia 1310 (crappy and very cheap Romanian car) and we literally went very slowly (probably 10kmph) through a section where the road was basically sunk, there was a "pothole" probably 10-15m long and 80% of the road wide (both lanes), about 1m deep, I think.
The funny thing is that there were potholes inside the uber-pothole :-)))
Axle loading limits
They put in new pavement in my neighborhood explicitly to fix some sewer issues. They ended up redoing several sections as the contractors paved over 3 access points (manhole covers). I'm not sure how you pave over a man-hole cover when it's sticking up 6 inches from the rest of the street.
Part of it is funding. Highways are for the most part federally funded, and the feds can print money at will. Urban roads have to be repaired from the city budget, and user fees (fuel taxes) are nowhere near enough to keep them maintained properly.
I thought the feds pay a large portion of construction but the states pay most of the maintenance. some states clearly do a worse job of highway maintenance than others. it's like night and day crossing the MD/PA border on I-95.
Hence why U.S. roads are not built to last in the long term.
That’s part of the reason. The other is that rural roads are mostly county or state funded (often through large Federal appropriations), and draw in a larger tax base and in-house professional engineering.
That’s why you can drive around rust belt areas of Upstate NY on nice roads - NYC Finance bonuses pay for that.
City roads are usually maintained by the city, which has much more limited access to capital. Because of that, in-house work is usually limited to mill and pave work and there’s not enough throughput for an appropriate staff of engineers. Big projects are usually task focus (safety, multi-modal) and are funded by Federal grants and use outside design and build contractors.
For the shared utility work, there is some coordination. My wife worked for a municipal water utility and ran the metering and infrastructure division. They received notice of paving or other jobs and prioritized proactive maintenance to happen while the road was under construction. The city would fine entities for digging up the street for non-emergency purposes for 6-12 months after the project completed. It helps, but broken mains or transformers necessitate the street cut.
This trope that rich cities pay for everything needs to be taken out and shot. Yes, there is a cash flow there but it's nickels or dimes on the dollar, not a huge amount compared to variances in budget and expenditures. Buffalo would not turn into Mogadishu without NYC paying for the privilege of ordering it around by proxy of Albany.
2 huge pipelines with big enough diameter to fit smaller ones. One for utilities in (gas, electricity, cables, warm water). One for waste (sewage, trash etc)
My favorite are the leaky man hole and other infrastructure covers which allow rain to wash the road bed into the pit. Then a void forms and a pothole forms. Then the muni fills the hole only for it to reappear as more road bed is washed away. Then repeat ad nauseam. I sometimes imagine a snake of asphalt all the way to the sewer plant.