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.
Is there a point you're trying to make? If so, care to enlighten us without assuming we all have history degrees?
Among these laws were civil penalties for builders who performed shoddy workmanship:
> If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver.
By the way, the Romans also had building codes, and engineers who built bridges and roads were liable for the durability of those structures, thus a tradition of over-engineering.
Regardless, I suspect there's a point being made about the timeless ineptitude of bureaucracy (even if I don't agree with it—some cultures are notably more competent at managing logistics of public works than other are).
Would it have been so much to ask to put a Wikipedia link and nerd-snipe some of us in the process?
And how hard it is for you to google for "wikipedia hammurabi" anyway?
I don't think Wikipedia gets to the point quickly enough for this context to be relevant.
Whether the OP was making a poorly-articulated point by merely bringing up Hammurabi and expecting the reader to know about his history with building codes, I think, is a separate issue. Anyone with a basic education should have heard of Hammurabi, though they may have forgotten the specifics about him. And finding a Wikipedia link on your own is trivial.
I merely mentioned that your and other claims that "anyone with a high school education has to have heard of him" is bollocks.
I have both a high school and university degree and have never heard of him and don't think I need to have.
Now you even claim someone with a "basic education" should've heard of him (meaning someone that didn't even finish high school). If you doubt that, Google about different countries' school systems and what would go for "basic" education.
That said you definitely would've nerd sniped me with a link and if these replies here on HN hadn't been there to catch my interest first I would have just googled him.
Basically by trying to be a smart ass and belittling others you harmed your own cause so to speak.
I question the value of your education.
Have you also never heard of Shakespeare or Bach?
The belittling continues I see.
Have you heard of Terry Fox? Anyone with an elementary school education surely has.
Parent definitely would've nerd sniped me with a link and if these replies here on HN hadn't been there to catch my interest first I would have just googled him.
Basically by trying to be a smart ass and belittling others they harmed their own cause of making Hammurabi more widely known.
You are reading way too much into someone not documenting their comment.
> they harmed their own cause
To me it looks like you and others paid even more attention this way.
> their own cause of making Hammurabi more widely known
I don't think that was their goal?
Or just do it for kicks and to feel better about himself.
But it's lo_zamoyski that made the reference.
Yet shiroiushi is the one directly insulting my (and others that I'm referencing as not having had to have heard of him)'s education without knowing anything about said education.
Depending on very specific and exact place of upbringing and schooling, there are a myriad of differences in what is regular curriculum or not. This is a global forum too, so it's even "worse" in that sense for making very absolute statements like shiroiushi has.
Has every Bachelor of Computer Science had to take a course that included learning about how regular expressions are implemented and had to implement a regular expression parser? I sure did, mandatory course and wouldn't have been able to get the BA and then go on from that even further without it at my university. Yet I've met people from other universities that didn't. Do I insult them and their education for it? I don't!
Regardless the answer, the lack of context makes the figure meaningless.
Are we really going to tell people that they can't live without sewer / clean water / electricity / whatever because the window closed 2 months ago and their problem didn't start until today?
This is everyday life in India. A big budget is sanctioned to build a road. Road gets built, then a month or two later, some body forgets they didn't do the sanitary/sewage pipes well enough and manholes are now overflowing, they tear down the whole road and then just leave it as is.
The process restarts again in two years or so. Here is the rub- The guy who builds it at the first place knows all this so builds it as cheaply as they can get away with.
Its just how corruption works, and money flow from tax payers to politically well connected contractors(often the politicians themselves, as the contractors are just shell companies owned by contractors). Even if the company is black listed a new one can always be floated next time.
>>I suspect local governments are just inept at logistics.
No they are just corrupt. Its easy money. No audits, no accountability and no questions of any kind.
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?
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.
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.
To give some specifics: I only remember driving down an actual gravel road (like, for public use) a single time. In 18 years. Even my friends who lived >30min from the nearest "city" (~10k population) had paved roads all the way.
But that is just my own experience. Areas with a different climate or geography might be a totally different story. My hometown area is relatively flat, lots of farmland, and rarely gets severe winter weather.
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.
> 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.
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.
(Actual answer: I know a bunch of people who live in houses in the middle of seemingly-nowhere in rural Ohio, and almost none of them farm anything at all. They just seem to like the space and the quiet and the desolate isolation.
The only farmer who I know is my parents' neighbor, who has a house few miles away from their place.)
(Some adjustments may have to be made, but that's only another also-irrelevant expense.)
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?
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...
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.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
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!
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.
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.
You just about need an offroad vehicle to avoid hitting the street.
Oh, and there's still farm equipment every now and then. I am in Texas after all.
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 :-)))
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.
In New York, 2/3 of tax revenue is personal income taxes, and about 40% of that revenue is for filers making over $1M. Pretty sure 80% of those filers, which include non-human entities domiciled in NYC, are in the NY Metro and Long Island, depending on how you measure it.
The percentage of tax revenue just from NYC financial services is very significant, and is very volatile. Because it’s difficult to issue general obligation debt, most NY bonds are revenue bonds secured by PIT. So when there’s a market downturn that impacts bonuses, there is a very significant impact on the state balance sheet, as debt service has a higher precedence than government operations.
Buffalo would not turn into Mogadishu without NYC, more like Mississippi with snow. You’d probably see a significant reduction in services, especially Medicaid, child health plus, and schools, and 30-40% increase in property taxes. NYC moderated the impact of western and central New York’s unfortunate rust belt state as industry was wiped out in the 80s and 90s.
With respect to roads, every state or US highway outside of city limits is maintained at state expense. Most counties get state aid for county highways as well. That state revenue isn’t coming Erie county.
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.
It's remarkable that a state where the rainiest months of the year coincide with some of longest winter nights in the lower 48 states uses such horrible road paints.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: no, at least part of them is state specific, e.g. Saxony road administration law: https://www.revosax.sachsen.de/vorschrift/4785-Saechsisches-...
Also, "Bepflanzung des Straßenkörpers" might be the most German thing I've read in ages ;)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
What you need here are tires that can handle huge amounts of rain. Which, in the western US, is not an issue.
Ignorance can be the death of ya! Thank goodness most of them aren’t trying to drive up here!
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.
They make their payments and trade when the warranty expires. It's an appliance.
I get that some people don't have space for an oil pan, but tons do. Brake pad replacement doesn't require anything besides the jack from your car and a socket wrench.
And it's not hard to see why.
I had a GE washing machine start misbehaving one day. It would fill the tub, do a few spins to try and balance the load, start to spin up for a few minutes, stop. Try and balance the load, spin for a few minutes, stop. Then eventually just give up, without even draining the tub before unlocking the door.
Me knowing appliances pretty well, I already had the knowledge the service manual is probably tucked away inside the shell. Strike one going against most normal people, they wouldn't know to do that. Open that up, see how to get into the diagnostic menu and translate the error codes and run some tests.
Ok, so now I know it's a speed sensing issue. The speed the motor is reporting and the speed the tub speed sensor isn't making sense for the fixed gear ratio so it thinks there's something unsafe going on. That's a decent safety issue, but looking at the tub as it spins it's probably just a sensor issue.
The tub hall effect sensor was like $20 shipped from the GE parts website. Quick and easy to swap out. No dice, still not wanting to spin up. More reading online, it's likely the main motor inverter board. Well, that's pretty deep in the machine, could also be the motor assembly itself which would be covered under warranty, let me call a GE service guy to come.
Service guy comes, he plugs some wireless adapter into a hidden USB port, fumbles with it for a few minutes with an iPad with a shattered screen, gives up diagnosing the issue. Writes up an invoice proposal for $900 worth of parts and labor for him to swap out a ton of things, or a referral code/discount coupon for me to buy a new unit.
I decline the order. Surely not all this shit is wrong with the thing. I find the inverter board online from a third party site for <$100, was available from the official parts site for not much more. Start unplugging it a bunch, and notice the motor hall sensor pin wasn't seated very well. I don't want to put it all together again just to find reseating/gluing the connection together didn't solve the problem, so I just put the new inverter board in. Put it all back together and it's just fine for <$100.
I imagine it was just a loose connection for that sensor. This is probably still a perfectly functional board on my shelf. I'll keep it and the other sensor in case some other issues happens in the future. But it could have been just a loose connection that sent this nearly $1000 unit to the scrapyard if it wasn't for me bothering to look. It could have been an exceptionally cheap part. And the final fix I accepted was just somewhat cheap part.
In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.
I bought the part-number equivalent part and the prongs didn't fit in the slot. I spent 45 minutes carefully filing down/snipping the prongs to fit the enclosure. Been 5? years without an issue.
One would expect that there is nothing more standard than USB-A. Nope. There is an exception for every rule.
i.e. if I spend 3 days figuring out my washing machine, I'm trading leisure time (bought at whatever my salary rate is) for the cost of the machine. If the machine is a nightmare to open up and close, then I don't really blame people for just buying a new one.
A bunch of this can obviously be mitigated: right-to-repair is a good start, but we also need incentives for serviceability - the example you give of being able to actually get diagnostic data is one area (IMO: that should just be legally mandated as open-source, make it a national security policy - which it is IMO). Firmware blobs for chips should also be public - i.e. I've got a few things where the microcontroller is dead, I can source a replacement, but there's no way to get a copy of the onboard programming.
And then obviously, if we could somehow encourage design which means components are easy to remove, that would be great (i.e. logic and control boards should always be mounted accessibly).
I've had similar experiences with other appliances over the years. It's not just a GE thing.
Is that the conclusion to this whole story?
And if I didn't have enough knowledge and determination past a standard consumer it would have been trash. Sadly most consumers and support techs don't care enough.
Yes, New York like most States is full of dozens and dozens of counties with less than 10,000 people but they add up and while the city proper of Buffalo is like 1/10th a single Borough in population, it too has suburbs and exurbs. Even the area around Fort Drum is just over 100k people.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-roadwork-indu... and many many other reports.
Road is all torn up and patched up. It has been a boondoggle of construction cones and heavy machinery for months now.
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
Unfortunately the alternative to divesting in road infrastructure won't be investing in rail infrastructure, it will be telling people to stay home. For sure a lot of demand for rail investment will come once it becomes harder to get around and more people lose their autonomy, but the reality for many people will just become not going anywhere at all. That means segregation-with-extra-steps for all too many places, and I was raised to believe that's a bad thing. Peep the Bay Area for example — it's really bad! http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea.html
Aside: I'm a huge railfan and have actually gotten to drive a locomotive at the Western Pacific Railway Museum even though it was very expensive and confined to a tiny circle of track. Highly highly recommend a trip out there for anyone, even if just to sight-see the gorgeous Feather River Canyon: https://museum.wplives.org/ral/
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):
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Some years ago when I was living in Louisiana, the straw could be inserted but the paper has to stay on the exposed end.
"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."
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.
If you are from any other countries apart from the first world, the US even with all its problems is a super massive upgrade over anything back home.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
NY's orgs (government or otherwise) steal all the tax money while pretending to be for the people, NH conversely does not.
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.
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.
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.
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...
It is not a poor state.
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.
How this works in trucking is interesting. Whenever a truck fills up its tank, the driver pays the gas tax in that state. They then track how many miles they drive in each state, and then quarterly have to "correct" their gas tax by paying the states where they drive more miles than they paid taxes for and get refunded by states where they fueled but didn't drive as many miles. Trucks these days have automated systems for tracking all this.
If you are interested, this is part of IFTA, the International Fuel Tax Agreement.
Counterproductive from a climate change standpoint for a "green" state but it preserved the road money.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 number of big trucks hanging out in the left lane in the US drives me mad...
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!
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
Probably concrete fastening projects.
> sliproads
on/off ramps for AmE speakers.
I think the only other country where I regularly got jolted up (nearly hitting my head on the ceiling of the car) was India.
Is this really true? Coming from a country with alot of ice, American cities I've worked in seemed to have prestine roads.
(At least as of roughly four years ago)
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.
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....
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...
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.
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.
Yes
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 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...
i.e. Try and measure how many roads there are in areas where most people actually live?
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.
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?
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.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technology/infrastructure/ro...
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.
