> 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 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.
The solution to this problem is utility tunnels. A tunnel network under road surface just for plumbing and cabling. Maintenance crews can just drive through in cars and do their jobs, without stopping traffic and digging out pipes. Many ultra-modern cities have one.
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.
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.
I remember the neighbourhood where I grew up. The roads were great until the cable TV company slices them all open to put their cables in. Then the patches would never hold, water would get in and under the road when it rained, and the roads were terrible for years.
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?
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).
I mean this isn't a research article, it's some data crunching and musings on a blog. I would not expect this person to start conducting interviews for a blog post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
Not only that, but underground infrastructure and surrounding buildings put a high constraint on pavement design by putting a hard limit the total thickness of the pavement: can't build too deep or you'll disrupt other infrastructure, can't build too high or the road will be higher than surrounding building entrances or sidewalks.
Interstate construction don't have such limits are typically half a meter or more, not counting foundation earthworks, which can easily double that figure. In cities where telecom networks are 60cm deep and gas and electric networks 80cm deep, you just don't have the luxury of designing a meter-thick pavement that will have a decent IRI for decades to come.
Funny enough San Francisco Public Utilities coordinates with SF Streets to replace water/sewer lines prior to planned repaving work specifically to avoid this problem. They are clear that need and scheduling sometimes don't allow it but wherever possible they do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is- that infrastructure is a scam. As in - its easy to build it, as its priced into the creation of a new house / suburbia. But maintenance is a piled up costfactor, not city and citizen has plans for. So everyone is constantly on the run from hoods were the infrastructure is decaying due to maintenance debt returns the road back to rubble.
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.
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)
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.
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 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most very cold areas are frequently above the temperature where salt is still somewhat effective, although I assume less than ideal.
> I'm guessing you meant EU, since the largest country in Europe is Russia.
They mentioned country-wide standards in European countries, not EU-wide standards (and the EU doesn’t dictate most road standards as far as I’m aware.)
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).
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
I honestly loved driving in France...once I realized that parking somewhere near transit (usually at the end of a tram line) was a heck of a lot better than driving my car around in the centre. Outside of the cities, intersections were great (primarily roundabouts), the freeways and tollways were impeccable, and people generally drove well
> 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.
> ... 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
> 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.
It's like I-70 was strafed by an A-10. Kansas I-70 uses concrete on a mostly stable substrate. It's flat, and doesn't pockmark like asphalt. Kansas tears out about five miles at a time and goes one lane during pours. Don't see that often in other states due to it's impractical.
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.
You could say that some residents aren't paying their fair share, but I'll have to be convinced that California lacks the tax revenue to fix such problems.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_tunnel
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.
Is Public Works a state agency? I would have expected them to be subordinate to the city.
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?
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
- 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.
Interstate construction don't have such limits are typically half a meter or more, not counting foundation earthworks, which can easily double that figure. In cities where telecom networks are 60cm deep and gas and electric networks 80cm deep, you just don't have the luxury of designing a meter-thick pavement that will have a decent IRI for decades to come.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have no problems with that here in Scandinavia. Also, salt is not used in very cold areas as it doesn't work.
>European countries typically have national road agencies and consistent standards across the country
(I'm guessing you meant EU, since the largest country in Europe is Russia.) We have EU wide standards in the EU.
> I'm guessing you meant EU, since the largest country in Europe is Russia.
They mentioned country-wide standards in European countries, not EU-wide standards (and the EU doesn’t dictate most road standards as far as I’m aware.)
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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).
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Road is all torn up and patched up. It has been a boondoggle of construction cones and heavy machinery for months now.
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.
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.
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.
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).
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-roadwork-indu... and many many other reports.
CA takes so many tax dollars from my hands. Why aren't they "at work"?
880 and 101 suffer because their high traffic volumes cause much higher wear and tear while also making it difficult to make repairs.
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.
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/
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!
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
- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE013.html
- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE077.html
Roughly 70% the tax revenue per capita ($3.8k vs 2.6), but somehow they manage to maintain their roads.
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):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw3K_obepyo&t=1s
> 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.
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.
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