8 ms·

The problem boils down to this: we've vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We've paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt/gr

The problem boils down to this: we've vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We've paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt/gravel, but they got paved because it's a sign your neighborhood has "made it." It's a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50's, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that. Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes? If we hadn't allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we'd have neighborhoods with dirt/gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc. Instead we have a country where we're slaves to cars.

rexreed 5y ago
Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  Roman roads were built with extremely robust foundations below which required very large amounts of labor to put in place.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    We have excavators, bulldozers, graders, etc, we don't need to use slaves to hand-dig road foundations.
- op00to 5y ago
  The Roman roads that last a long time are outliers. Most Roman roads are long gone.
- mitigating 5y ago
  Can you really drive on those at high speeds, is it dangerous? There's a few short blocks in NYC that are still cobblestone and even at 30mph it sucks.
  - warning26 5y ago
    Honestly on some roads, I'd argue that's a feature. It's ridiculous when there is a wide, flat, straight asphalt road surface with a speed limit of 25mph. Build it out of cobblestones, and 25mph suddenly feels a lot faster!
    - rexreed 5y ago
      Indeed, that's the core of the argument made in this article here (from 2009) which is arguing for a return to cobbles / bricks for Georgetown: https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-some-streets-to-revert-to-cobblestones/ https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-...
      - mark-r 5y ago
        The problem is that today's cobblestones are pale imitations of the old ones, and won't last nearly as long. There's a parking lot near me built about 5 years ago, and they tried to be decorative with part of it and made it from concrete shaped to look like cobblestones. Because of the grooves and surface treatment it is much weaker than standard concrete, and it's crumbling.
    - prawn 5y ago
      I'm with you on the speed reduction. An urban planner friend talks about how you're best motivating a speed limit by the environment (tighter road, bends, etc) rather than a literal limit and threat of fine. But how would cyclists fare on cobblestones, especially if you were talking about suburban streets with kids playing, bikes going around, etc?
      - TulliusCicero 5y ago
- Naga 5y ago
  I'm assuming you're speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought about why we have problems that the Romans didn't. I don't know about ease of maintenance and access to utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that survived, not 90% of the roads that haven't) and they were not affected as much by freeze/thaw cycles as North American roads are. My intutition says that they also probably were not generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures I've seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less road width means less maintenance since there's physically less roads.
  - rexreed 5y ago
    Yes, somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's an interesting thought exercise. For the high traffic streets where there is high speed and also lots of heavy traffic, for sure, asphalt dominates for many good reasons. But for the problems this article discusses for smaller cities where their population has moved to suburbs and exurbs and where the commercial centers have similarly moved out of city core, perhaps the more durable approach to cobbles (or brick) might be an interesting way to address ongoing maintenance challenges. It's mostly a thought exercise, but an interesting one.
- occz 5y ago
  The roman roads didn't have to bear the load that modern roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation are trucks.
acdha 5y ago
The other big thing was identifying the ideal as a detached single family house with a large lawn and dense housing as mostly for poor, likely brown, people with a few exceptions for rich people in desirable locations. Even things like condos have something of a “hasn’t made it” stigma for a lot of people, and that kind of thinking really locks in a lot of inefficient land use. Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for college is due to that being the closest many Americans come to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car travel soaks up.
- subroutine 5y ago
  Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state. I grew up not far from Galesburg, in a town roughly the same size. Many of the rural subdivision roads outside of downtown are paved with chipseal [1] rather than asphalt concrete or portland cement. While chipseal is certainly not as nice as concrete to drive on, it is much cheaper to maintain. I remember the road in front of my house getting re-treated every few years. Meanwhile the paved blvd connecting all these subdivisions hasn't been maintenanced since the 1980s, and is turning to rubble. So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built (there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony when you're just filling potholes). Of course, this mentality only exacerbates the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surfac...
  - acdha 5y ago
    > Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state. Yes, that's why that was the upper range. Note also that I did not restrict it to commuting — designing around car-only transportation means that almost every common activity becomes time spent immobile in a car, and people famously underestimate the amount of time they spend driving, looking for parking, etc. — usually “a 20 minute drive” means “25 minutes if you exceed the speed limit, hit every light, and there's minimal traffic and parking right in front”. If you start measuring that, you realize how much time people spend on things like unnecessary (we have relatives who'll spend an hour going shopping for like half a bag of groceries) or single purpose errands in addition to commuting. > So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built Definitely — and one big factor for this is that single-occupancy vehicles are extremely inefficient so there's always this call to add more lanes or a bypass road to “defeat” traffic, but that reliably encourages more usage so conditions usually only improve for a few months after opening.
aperson_hello 5y ago
To be fair, the "SUVs" that are being sold are effectively the same as station wagons of the past (but smaller and with better gas mileage). Hopefully self-driving cars will get us out of this pit of car-centric infrastructure, but that's a solution that's been a few years out for the past decade.
- plorg 5y ago
  Can you outline how this is supposed to free us from car-centric infrastructure? Unless it's coupled with style kind of Uber-subscription dystopia we would still need room to park all of these vehicles. While downtown parking can be a problem, garages aren't, and neither of these problems is on there scale of the larger infrastructure problems. The biggest problems with car-centric infrastructure are that they require a huge amount of ever-larger roads to funnel people (in cars) often tens of miles to do anything. Even in the rent-a-taxi scenario you would still need these roads, which would probably need more maintenance, not less. And all of that sprawl has knock-on effects as roads create divisions in communities, and low-density housing, enabled by car infrastructure, means you have and know fewer neighbors.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    At least the Uber-style infrastructure doesn't require oversizing everything. Even if my car is used 90% of the time for commuting by myself, it has to be big enough for the other 10% of the time when I'm taking the family and our luggage.
mitigating 5y ago
This might be ideal for side roads leading to a few houses but if it's major parts of a town aren't you just move the cost of roads somewhere else? i.e. "I hope you can afford a truck, SUV, or constant repairs to your suspensions/tires"
mark-r 5y ago
I'm pretty sure that if a bridge collapses underneath you, you're just as likely to die in a SUV as in a sedan.
- mark-r 5y ago
  For anyone who thinks I might be being facetious, I live in Minneapolis where there was an actual bridge collapse that killed people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge#Collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge...
TulliusCicero 5y ago
I think it's fine roads are paved. It's just that said roads are wider and effectively longer to service the same number of people, and this is due to zoning and the way property tax is handled.

rexreed 5y ago

Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.

m0llusk 5y ago
Roman roads were built with extremely robust foundations below which required very large amounts of labor to put in place.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  We have excavators, bulldozers, graders, etc, we don't need to use slaves to hand-dig road foundations.
op00to 5y ago
The Roman roads that last a long time are outliers. Most Roman roads are long gone.
mitigating 5y ago
Can you really drive on those at high speeds, is it dangerous? There's a few short blocks in NYC that are still cobblestone and even at 30mph it sucks.
- warning26 5y ago
  Honestly on some roads, I'd argue that's a feature. It's ridiculous when there is a wide, flat, straight asphalt road surface with a speed limit of 25mph. Build it out of cobblestones, and 25mph suddenly feels a lot faster!
  - rexreed 5y ago
    Indeed, that's the core of the argument made in this article here (from 2009) which is arguing for a return to cobbles / bricks for Georgetown: https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-some-streets-to-revert-to-cobblestones/ https://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2009/01/16/why-not-allow-...
    - mark-r 5y ago
      The problem is that today's cobblestones are pale imitations of the old ones, and won't last nearly as long. There's a parking lot near me built about 5 years ago, and they tried to be decorative with part of it and made it from concrete shaped to look like cobblestones. Because of the grooves and surface treatment it is much weaker than standard concrete, and it's crumbling.
  - prawn 5y ago
    I'm with you on the speed reduction. An urban planner friend talks about how you're best motivating a speed limit by the environment (tighter road, bends, etc) rather than a literal limit and threat of fine. But how would cyclists fare on cobblestones, especially if you were talking about suburban streets with kids playing, bikes going around, etc?
    - TulliusCicero 5y ago
Naga 5y ago
I'm assuming you're speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought about why we have problems that the Romans didn't. I don't know about ease of maintenance and access to utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that survived, not 90% of the roads that haven't) and they were not affected as much by freeze/thaw cycles as North American roads are. My intutition says that they also probably were not generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures I've seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less road width means less maintenance since there's physically less roads.
- rexreed 5y ago
  Yes, somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's an interesting thought exercise. For the high traffic streets where there is high speed and also lots of heavy traffic, for sure, asphalt dominates for many good reasons. But for the problems this article discusses for smaller cities where their population has moved to suburbs and exurbs and where the commercial centers have similarly moved out of city core, perhaps the more durable approach to cobbles (or brick) might be an interesting way to address ongoing maintenance challenges. It's mostly a thought exercise, but an interesting one.
occz 5y ago
The roman roads didn't have to bear the load that modern roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation are trucks.

acdha 5y ago

The other big thing was identifying the ideal as a detached single family house with a large lawn and dense housing as mostly for poor, likely brown, people with a few exceptions for rich people in desirable locations. Even things like condos have something of a “hasn’t made it” stigma for a lot of people, and that kind of thinking really locks in a lot of inefficient land use. Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for college is due to that being the closest many Americans come to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car travel soaks up.

subroutine 5y ago
Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state. I grew up not far from Galesburg, in a town roughly the same size. Many of the rural subdivision roads outside of downtown are paved with chipseal [1] rather than asphalt concrete or portland cement. While chipseal is certainly not as nice as concrete to drive on, it is much cheaper to maintain. I remember the road in front of my house getting re-treated every few years. Meanwhile the paved blvd connecting all these subdivisions hasn't been maintenanced since the 1980s, and is turning to rubble. So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built (there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony when you're just filling potholes). Of course, this mentality only exacerbates the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface#Bituminous_surfac...
- acdha 5y ago
  > Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state. Yes, that's why that was the upper range. Note also that I did not restrict it to commuting — designing around car-only transportation means that almost every common activity becomes time spent immobile in a car, and people famously underestimate the amount of time they spend driving, looking for parking, etc. — usually “a 20 minute drive” means “25 minutes if you exceed the speed limit, hit every light, and there's minimal traffic and parking right in front”. If you start measuring that, you realize how much time people spend on things like unnecessary (we have relatives who'll spend an hour going shopping for like half a bag of groceries) or single purpose errands in addition to commuting. > So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built Definitely — and one big factor for this is that single-occupancy vehicles are extremely inefficient so there's always this call to add more lanes or a bypass road to “defeat” traffic, but that reliably encourages more usage so conditions usually only improve for a few months after opening.

aperson_hello 5y ago

To be fair, the "SUVs" that are being sold are effectively the same as station wagons of the past (but smaller and with better gas mileage). Hopefully self-driving cars will get us out of this pit of car-centric infrastructure, but that's a solution that's been a few years out for the past decade.

plorg 5y ago
Can you outline how this is supposed to free us from car-centric infrastructure? Unless it's coupled with style kind of Uber-subscription dystopia we would still need room to park all of these vehicles. While downtown parking can be a problem, garages aren't, and neither of these problems is on there scale of the larger infrastructure problems. The biggest problems with car-centric infrastructure are that they require a huge amount of ever-larger roads to funnel people (in cars) often tens of miles to do anything. Even in the rent-a-taxi scenario you would still need these roads, which would probably need more maintenance, not less. And all of that sprawl has knock-on effects as roads create divisions in communities, and low-density housing, enabled by car infrastructure, means you have and know fewer neighbors.
- mark-r 5y ago
  At least the Uber-style infrastructure doesn't require oversizing everything. Even if my car is used 90% of the time for commuting by myself, it has to be big enough for the other 10% of the time when I'm taking the family and our luggage.

mitigating 5y ago

This might be ideal for side roads leading to a few houses but if it's major parts of a town aren't you just move the cost of roads somewhere else? i.e. "I hope you can afford a truck, SUV, or constant repairs to your suspensions/tires"

mark-r 5y ago

I'm pretty sure that if a bridge collapses underneath you, you're just as likely to die in a SUV as in a sedan.

mark-r 5y ago
For anyone who thinks I might be being facetious, I live in Minneapolis where there was an actual bridge collapse that killed people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge#Collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge...

TulliusCicero 5y ago

I think it's fine roads are paved. It's just that said roads are wider and effectively longer to service the same number of people, and this is due to zoning and the way property tax is handled.