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How good are American roads?
- digitalsushi 2y agoI heard a civil engineer make a claim once that the dust on the side of the road is about 300% more laden with precious metals like platinum, than random mining. I suppose this is all roads and not just American roads, though.
- mikepurvis 2y agoIsn’t it supposed to be mostly brake pads, rotors, and tire rubber? Would be fascinating to imagine it being economically viable to vacuum up and reprocess it, but based on the above I’ve assumed it was worthless.
- alt227 2y agoSounds a bit like the guys that collect the sludge from the sewers in jewellery and gold smithing districts in cities, then pan it for gold. Its not going to make anyone rich, but theres enough gold dust in there to buy some food and shoes for somebody hungry enough to dive into a sewer and collect sludge!
- mikepurvis 2y agoSupermarkets that make you put in a quarter to take a shopping cart are really just paying the homeless $0.25 each to return them from the parking lot.
- technothrasher 2y agoIt seems more like the customers are paying the homeless, and the supermarkets are just acting as brokers.
- permo-w 2y agoit's the same for bottle deposits in parts of Europe. anything in a plastic bottle costs an extra ~10c which you can retrieve by depositing the empty in a machine at the supermarket
- permo-w 2y agoin the UK, trolley deposits are much more expensive, at £1. people are more likely to retrieve a £1 than a quarter, but the atomic payout is ~5x higher, so I wonder which scenario yields better pay for the homeless
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mikepurvis 2y agoI mean ultimately the goal is to find a balance where carts won’t be everywhere and customers aren’t inconvenienced to the point of choosing a different store.
- permo-w 2y agoI mean either way carts aren't gonna be everywhere, and I don't think pounds have ever been a problem for shoppers in the UK
- genter 2y agoDust from the catalytic converter. I've heard of gangs in LA taking shopvacs to the shoulder of the freeway at night.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoDoing a public service, there.
- buildsjets 2y agoPics or it didn’t happen. I’ll even accept AI slop if its well crafted.
- ASUfool 2y agoQuick attempt: https://ibb.co/DYVtXz2 https://ibb.co/DYVtXz2
- alt227 2y agoPretty good, have an upvote.
- buildsjets 2y agoAy, look at my homies get it done!
- potato3732842 2y agoDoesn't pass sanity check. They would run street sweepers if anything. And surface roads with stop and go would have a higher density of particles in the "go" places (like beyond lights). But if the gangs can make money doing it why wouldn't the municipalities do it?
- olyjohn 2y agoYes, it's copper and other metals used in the brake pads, as well as tire dust. Rotors are mostly just cast iron, so I'm not sure how bad that is.
- gothroach 2y agoCody's Lab did a video with some experiments collecting and refining road dust. As I recall, he did manage to obtain a small bead of platinum-group metals but it didn't appear to be economically viable at least at a small scale.
- xyst 2y ago> The US has the largest road network in the world, about 4.3 million miles of road, and Americans drive much more than residents in most other countries This is insane. This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation. We spend trillions in building, subsidizing, and maintaining this infrastructure. Only for this cycle to repeat itself in 25 years as the roads/highways breakdown and people move further out (induced demand). Then there’s the billions in lost productivity due to traffic. Significant decrease in activity and increase in obesity. Then the increased emissions from vehicles result in poor air quality. Then there is decreasing water and food quality as tire and brake particles make its way into the water and food supplies.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- O5vYtytb 2y agoYou're right that car centric transportation is entrenched, but this is the wrong statistic to prove that point. The US is a huge country and the overall density of roads (km/100km2) is lower than Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...
- trgn 2y agoman is measure of all things. its density of people is lower too.
- arethuza 2y agoEurope isn't a country though - difficult to do a comparison as a about 40% of Europe is the European part of Russia which has a much lower road density than the US, mind you European Russia is going to be the part that has the highest road density of that country.
- kube-system 2y agoAnd almost 20% of the US is a former part of eastern Russia with really low density. :)
- jameshart 2y agoThis 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.
- eqvinox 2y agoI 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.
- gattilorenz 2y agoSame 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.
- tialaramex 2y agoYeah the UK is pretty similar. Devolution means Scotland and to a lesser extent Northern Ireland have some autonomy, but the big important roads are controlled by national government (albeit not necessarily the UK government) and your residential street is handled by much more local government, in my case the city where I live. Actually Scotland bizarrely happens to have a road most similar to what most US folks would consider normal - a motorway (a multi-lane highway) named M8 going straight into the centre of a large city (Glasgow) on concrete stilts. This is not how the rest of the UK does it, but it so happens the M8 was conceived in that window of time where it was considered a good idea, some parts of my city were made in that era and I'm glad I don't live in them.
- mikepurvis 2y agoI bet the proportion of unpaved roads would look a lot less bad if it was done by lane-miles rather than road-miles.
- kube-system 2y agoOf course, nearly all roads with >2 lanes in the US are paved. But that doesn't tell us anything other than the fact that we have the money to pave roads that are frequently traveled.
- zip1234 2y agoTruly, we have so many underutilized overly wide roads. Simply removing lanes makes money go much further
- O5vYtytb 2y agoAmazing that Minneapolis tops the city road quality chart, despite having the harshest winters. Do southern cities not build their roads so robustly? Or are they not maintained?
- bluGill 2y agoI'm guessing not maintained. Minneapolis is forced to spend a lot more on roads just to keep things acceptable. They also have a lot of voters with a memory of how bad things get after a bad winter and so politicians don't dare short road funding let they be voted out over a few potholes. (I've seen roads in Minneapolis that were more pothole than surface)
- gorfian_robot 2y agothe south is generally a poor region with terrible public sand social services
- O5vYtytb 2y ago3 of the bottom 4 cities are in California.
- dmoy 2y agoI mean, yea? CA has the highest real poverty rate (SPM) in the whole country. Some of that won't translate as well to road quality due to the fixed cost portion of road repair (because the OPM rate isn't the highest (though still quite high)), but some of it will due to the not fixed cost portion (labor, etc). But it definitely affects prioritization. People won't care as much about road quality relative to other things.
- firesteelrain 2y agoThis does not make a great argument for California. It appears as a failed state compared to others.
- Spivak 2y agoThis explains why there's such a huge and consistent split in how good/crumbling US infrastructure is! It's "lives in a top-10 metro area / doesn't." It's been living rent-free in my head why opinions on this are so unbelievably stark. Turns out you can both be right.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoHow does Hawaii have interstates?
- ThinkingGuy 2y agohttps://www.straightdope.com/21341858/how-can-there-be-interstate-highways-in-hawaii https://www.straightdope.com/21341858/how-can-there-be-inter...
- cratermoon 2y agoJust one. H1 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_H-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_H-1>
- DCH3416 2y agoMore than one. H-1, H-2, H-3, and then looks like a spur of some kind H-201.
- kube-system 2y agoBecause "interstate" doesn't refer to the function of the particular road, it refers to the federal program that created them: the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways". There are a ton of interstate highways which do not go between states, even in the continental US, and especially the auxiliary (i.e. 3-digit) interstate highways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_auxiliary_Interstate_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_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highway... "Interstate" has always specifically referred to Eisenhower system roads only.
- kunwon1 2y agoI watched this YT video [1] about the interstate system recently, I found it informative and entertaining To me, the Eisenhower Tunnel in CO [2] is noteworthy. It crosses the continental divide at altitude. From what I've read and watched, they don't allow HAZMAT trucks to go through, because the risk is simply too high (well equipped fire/rescue departments are hours away, among other factors) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR7BA3xEmDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR7BA3xEmDo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Tunnel?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Tunnel?useskin=vect...
- kube-system 2y ago> 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.
- hanniabu 2y agoAlso 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.
- softfalcon 2y agoThis is the truth. They’re digging out under a massive overpass in my area right now to fix water main and gas piping issues as we speak. Road is all torn up and patched up. It has been a boondoggle of construction cones and heavy machinery for months now.
- bluGill 2y agoThe new suburb I live in they put all that beside the road not under it. That is what the space between the road and sidewalk is for.
- brewdad 2y agoThis works well in suburbs with modern setback rules. It doesn't work so well in established urban areas where buildings often go right up to the sidewalk which goes right up to the road.
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- rpcope1 2y ago> 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.
- panzagl 2y agoAhhhh Colorado, blue state tastes with a red state budget.
- dmix 2y agoKansas and Wyoming are red states?
- dirtyhippiefree 2y agoThe color map from the election confirms.
- ducttapecrown 2y agoThey are red states, but without the blue state tastes that might pull the state budget in other directions. (I don't know anything about the budgets of the states of Colorado or Kansas or Wyoming).
- Hilift 2y agoIt'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.
- glitchc 2y agoA good comparison point would be Germany. It has a very large network of roads too, some designed for very high speeds, and a strong driving culture (perhaps stronger than the continental US).
- kunwon1 2y agoI'm an American, I lived in Germany for several years around the turn of the century. German roads that I encountered were far superior to American roads. Their construction is far more robust, the roads last much longer. And with German lane discipline (passing someone on the right is practically a cultural taboo, it's a prohibition that's taken quite seriously) they are usually a joy to drive on.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoI found the autobahn utterly nerve-wracking to drive on. In the US, on an interstate, the MPH spread around the speed limit is probably -20 to +20 (i.e. limit is 75, slowest cars are at 55, fastest at 95) In Germany, on autobahns, you have speed ratios of up to 2x. You have to constantly be 110% aware of every vehicle within 1/4 mile of you, because you could either be closing in the much slower vehicle in front of you, or suddenly approached and passed by a much faster vehicle from behind.
- cr1895 2y ago>You have to constantly be 110% aware of every vehicle within 1/4 mile of you, Not such a terrible thing honestly... Personally, I find the lack of predictability on US interstates is much riskier. I'm pretty sure the accident statistics back this up too.
- rascul 2y agoThe qualifications to drive in some states are barely more than ability to breathe.
- jcadam 2y ago
- grecy 2y agoI just drove across ten US states and five Canadian provinces from the West to East Coast, shipped my Jeep to Europe by way of Iceland, then drove 100 miles through Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. Driving on the freeways in those mainland European countries was immensely relaxing and easy - the road quality is vastly, vastly better than the US or Canada. Expansion gaps, cracks and imperfections are almost imperceptible. Anecdotal, of course. I have a strong memory of Driving I-40 from Cali into Arizona and not being able to maintain 60mph because the potholes were so big I though I was going to break the suspension on my Jeep.
- vinay427 2y agoI think anecdotal evidence may be a reasonable proxy for those countries, although at least in stereotype and anecdotally they are very far from representative of (even) western Europe. I've noticed quite a bit of variance between major highways and smaller highways or other roads across Italy, for example.
- irrational 2y agoI'm surprised AZ is at 82%. I've driven all over the country and the very worst highway I've ever experienced, by far, is the drive from Las Vegas to Flagstaff.
- vesrah 2y agoYeah, the 93 between Kingman and Nevada is absolutely terrible. Last time I was through there (9 months ago) they were doing a small bit of paving but it wasn't in one of the rougher areas.
- smilekzs 2y agoThe 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"?
- mhuffman 2y agoThey are "at work" ... for other people's versions of "at work".
- xvedejas 2y agoI'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.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoOregon manages about 40% the road miles of California with 10% the population and 70% of the tax revenue per capita.
- xvedejas 2y agoI imagine that all states would have more trouble managing more roads than they currently do, and less trouble managing fewer roads than they currently do.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI dont follow? Are you invoking some diseconomies of scale. California has about twice the roads but more than 5X the budget.
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- bloomingeek 2y agoThe arm-pit state of Oklahoma, where I live, is considering a "mile tax" to support the maintenance of our road system. Of course we know it's also to offset EV vehicles gas tax loss. (which EV owners already have) Our roads are terrible and don't usually get repaired until they're almost dangerous. This tax will hurt fixed income and poorer people the most. As Thomas Jefferson said: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” My state is so red, it's scarlet.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- qup 2y agoI can't figure out if you want the roads fixed or you don't want the tax.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoPeople being too poor is a separate issue from bad tax systems incentivizing unsustainable behavior. Tax liabilities that are a function of consumption are the right way to tax. If the tax burden is deemed too high for poor people, then give them cash. Two different problems, two different solutions, and it keeps the incentives aligned properly.
- seizethecheese 2y ago“This is your brain on politics.” (A reply to the grandparent comment.)
- weberer 2y agoThat sounds just like the FairTax plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
- olyjohn 2y agoEvery state has been getting lobbied to do this for at least the last 10 years. These bills come through the legislatures every year, and I think it will keep coming until finally one of them passes. There are manufacturers of the GPS trackers pushing for it, and companies who want to have the state-granted monopoly to manage the tracking and billing. They are frothing at the mouth to get this passed and make a ton of money billing every single person.
- cryptozeus 2y agoGreat analysis! In last decade I have seen road quality of California degrade like crazy. It used to have clean, open roads now the quality has gone down to trash. Hwy 101 feels like you are in New Jersey.
- rconti 2y ago> 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.
- bluGill 2y agoRural 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.
- rwiggins 2y agoMaybe 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?
- nemomarx 2y agoI think it's a snow thing - asphalt seems to wear down really fast in rural PA, probably from freezing at nights and snow and ice, so you can't do paving as cheaply out in the mountains or so on. The county dumps gravel down once a year and let's passing traffic wear it smoother over time, but it sucks to drive on fresh.
- shkkmo 2y agoAbsolutely. The freeze thaw cycle is brutal on asphalt in many ways. Surface cracks expand, frost heaves distort and the material itself weakens. This is before any additional damage caused by plowing or ice scraping.
- rsynnott 2y ago> but this is based on a survey of the perceptions of business leaders about road quality, not actual road data Like... business leaders specifically in the freight and transport industry, or just _in general_? The first seems like it might be _marginally_ useful; the second is just nonsensical.
- Jimmc414 2y agoGreatly 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoAlso the only state I've seen with drive through daquiri service !
- Jimmc414 2y agoIt gets worse! They tape the lids to the cup and as long as you don’t put the straw in the cup it’s not an open container. Also, the state legislature ruled that roosters were not animals to circumvent cock fighting laws. There’s a web of similar Napoleonic Code caused loopholes in Louisiana law
- selimthegrim 2y agoCoconuts are exempt from injury liability
- Jimmc414 2y agowasn't familiar but wow. "Twenty-three years ago, Louisiana added coconuts to the list of official Mardi Gras throws protected from personal injury lawsuits, ordering that the public assumes the risk of being struck "by any missile" traditionally thrown, tossed, or hurled by krewe members."
- rascul 2y ago> as long as you don’t put the straw in the cup it’s not an open container. Some years ago when I was living in Louisiana, the straw could be inserted but the paper has to stay on the exposed end.
- asdasdsddd 2y agoLove 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.
- maxwellg 2y agoYou 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-taxes-2021/ 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.
- _yb2s 2y agoI'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.
- asdasdsddd 2y agoYes prop 13 is truly disgusting
- mcntsh 2y agoYou 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.
- _yb2s 2y agoKeeping 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.
- vzaliva 2y agoDoes this statistics include private roads? Or it is only roads accessible to public?
- blibble 2y agoas a brit I've driven through most of the US states and major cities, and they were generally comparable to what I was used to at home and throughout continental europe Los Angeles though was something else, giant gouges on 12 lane highways every few feet for miles on end and on sliproads, sudden surprise vertical walls with right angled bends was like something out of the third world
- vishrajiv 2y agoDo you remember which highway you were driving? Interestingly this goes against my experience. I’ve actually remarked to many friends that I enjoy night-time driving in Los Angeles since the highways are well-lit and smooth (and of course, no traffic at night).
- blibble 2y agoI-5
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago> Los Angeles though was something else, giant gouges on 12 lane highways every few feet for miles on end Probably concrete fastening projects. > sliproads on/off ramps for AmE speakers.
- kristjansson 2y agoLos Angeles is the v0.0.1 of freeways. Lessons were learned.
- koyote 2y agoAs someone who has driven in many different developed countries in the world (and been a passenger in many developing countries), California highways often feel like those in developing countries but it's combined with a much higher travelling speed. I think the only other country where I regularly got jolted up (nearly hitting my head on the ceiling of the car) was India.
- chainwax 2y agoI'm from South Carolina, pretty close to the border with North Carolina. All my life i've heard that South Carolina's roads are terrible, especially compared to North Carolina's _amazing_ roads. Looking at this data though, it seems while NC edges out SC by a small margin on interstate roads, SC actually beats NC on local roads. Take that, North Carolina!
- xenospn 2y agoI’m currently in Albania, a country famous for shit roads. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, really), their roads are better than LA roads.
- PaulHoule 2y agoThere is more than one kind of quality. When I drove from New Mexico from New Hampshire I thought roads in the US South were remarkably good. I settled in New York where major roads seemed pretty good but go to Pennsylvania and it seems there are two kinds of roads: bad roads and roads under construction, you never seem to find a good road that was just constructed. A lot of people thought it was frost heaves but this article say it isn’t. My quality problem in NY is that atlas maps and GPS maps show numerous roads that aren’t really passable or if they are passable are too risky. I never saw ‘minimum maintenance’ or ‘abandoned’ roads before I came to NY and I wish they were so marked in GPS maps. There is a road near me which is sometimes passable in the winter if you have the right kind of vehicle and if you know the road goes downhill and won’t require that much traction… People who don’t have the right kind of vehicle will get led by GPS down this road and think it is OK because there are tracks but halfway through they panic and try to turn around now they are in trouble. That road is passable in the summer except for when it gets washed out. Also NH is in a class by itself with its motor-oriented infrastructure (in 1980 they rerouted route 93 to go around Manchester and nobody goes there anymore) which is tree-structured as much as possible so you have many levels of hierarchy which can and will jam up. Want to walk? You can’t get there from here. I can go for years in NY without updating my GPS maps but if I drive to NH I will see the road I am got rerouted and there is a shopping center where there used to be a road. And this is in a state that doesn’t have income taxes so I don’t know how they pay for it.
- alkonaut 2y agoThe more important quality metric than “roughness” is infrastructure/safety. A multi lane road shouldn’t cross another one in a flat traffic light intersection. That risks T-collisions if someone runs a red light. It’s pretty cheap to keep roads smooth if you skimp on making separated lanes, safe multilevel junctions and roundabouts in every intersection.
- lemax 2y agoI once drove across the US-Canadian border during a snowstorm. On the Canadian side, the road was a slew of white slush that had us hydroplaning on and off. But as soon as we crossed back into the States, it was like a switch flipped. The road went from a slushy bog to a pristine surface with zero snow accumulation, just a slight gleam of moisture.
- rikthevik 2y agoI'm not sure if you ended up in Saskatchewan, but it kind of sounds like you did. The highways in Alberta are quite a bit better and it's a relatively abrupt change.
- TMWNN 2y agoI've heard that the quality of the Alaska Highway becomes noticeably better after entering the US from Canada.
- scoofy 2y ago>rough roads inflict costs in the form of reduced vehicle speeds. I mean, this seems like a benefit in disguise in many urban areas. The idea that we want high speeds is a real premise that needs to be defended.
- alexischr 2y agoThere is great variation between states. A good example is driving from Phoenix to San Diego via Yuma - the Arizona side is much better maintained, and the rougher California roads continue all the way to the city. (At least as of roughly four years ago)
- dmd 2y agoMassachusetts in nearly last place, right where I expected it to be but always assumed that was just "everyone thinks their own is the worst".
- nickjj 2y agoIt's interesting New Hampshire leads the way for interstate highways and it is a 0% income tax state. I live in NY but I went to New Hampshire last month for the first time. I have to say the roads were really good, even in more remote areas in the White Mountain region. Heck even the dirt road I had to go on for 1.5 miles was in good shape for a Hyundai Elantra rental car. On the flip side, the roads near me are really bad in some spots. It's torn up pavement with massive pot holes for years in a decently trafficked area literally 1 minute away from a major highway.
- kaliqt 2y agoIt's simple: politics over people. NY's orgs (government or otherwise) steal all the tax money while pretending to be for the people, NH conversely does not.
- justin66 2y ago> It's interesting New Hampshire leads the way for interstate highways and it is a 0% state tax area. You're talking about the state income tax? It'd be unusual for any state to use much of that money for roads. There are a lot of other tax revenue sources dedicated specifically to that purpose.
- nickjj 2y ago> You're talking about the state income tax? Yep thanks, I updated my post to reflect that. You oftentimes hear road quality being thrown around in relation to what you pay in income tax or taxes in general. That is all hearsay though.
- justin66 2y agoYeah, I don't really understand that, but I don't doubt it is true. I'm in a state where the state and federal gas tax as well as vehicle registration and vehicle sales tax (ugh) cover the cost of road maintenance, but it's certainly not because we don't pay a state income tax. So, one of those deals that varies by state or one of those things that's widely misunderstood - I couldn't say. (one of the annoying things about our taxation is that owning a hybrid or electric entails a more expensive vehicle registration since you're not going to be paying as much in gas taxes. $100/yr more for a hybrid. Yuck.)
- Agingcoder 2y agoInteresting. I traveled 15 years ago around california, over 4000 miles in three weeks. I remember being shocked at the state of the roads - some of them were downright dangerous, the car wouldn’t stay on the road, and I felt I was more or less constantly vibrating. Based on the article I must have driven on non interstate roads which are in california in particular really bad .
- rightbyte 2y ago"Overall, the quality of US interstates is very high, while the quality of roads in major cities is quite poor." Is this really true? Coming from a country with alot of ice, American cities I've worked in seemed to have prestine roads.
- Terretta 2y agoThe article, and as of this comment, this thread, don't seem to contain particularly deep (ahem) comparisons of road construction, such as this article from Nature about bridge layer differences between US, Germany, England, and France: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12987-8 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.cfm 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/S2095756420301021 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw3K_obepyo&t=1s
- burnt-resistor 2y agoShitty in Silicon Valley and most of Texas, places that don't even receive snow.
- donaldihunter 2y agoNot surprised to see California and Californian cities near the bottom of all the lists.
- randerson 2y agoIn my area of the US, it seems like every manhole cover was designed to be in the road… and often where ones tires need to be. Makes for a very bumpy ride even when the condition is “perfect”. I’ve driven thousands of miles/km in other countries where the roads have barely any manholes.
- lexarflash8g 2y agoQuality of roads in a city/town typically correlate with the income and socioeconomic status of the location. In the Bay area, affluent suburban areas have pretty good roads (believe taxes have an effect). While cities like Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond have streets full of potholes and very bumpy roads that can even damage your car while driving at a normal speed. For state with the highest income tax wonder where the funds go to. Good article on current state of US roads. I've seen other countries in EU and they seem to have much better or comparable roads in rural areas than the US.
- JasserInicide 2y agoOur roads shouldn't be problems anymore. Didn't we pass a $1+ trillion infrastructure bill in 2021 or is that just getting pilfered by contractors? I have 0 faith in the federal government to do anything at scale anymore.
- d357r0y3r 2y agoAnecdotally, it seems like a ton of projects got started as a result of this bill, but it doesn't seem like many of them are getting worked on or finished. It's giving me the impression that contractors bid and took on as many new projects as possible with no ability to actually staff or execute the projects. Given that this happened at the same time a major labor shortage occurred, perhaps it was a perfect storm.
- einpoklum 2y ago> Overall, my main takeaway is that roads in major US cities are often shockingly bad My main takeaway is that the US relies too much on cars and trucks relative to rail and bike (and perhaps one should say walking). I took that away from the first few lines though.
- dwg 2y agoAnecdotally, I once shared a house with a Russian student in Monterey, California. He told me he was amazed by the quality of our roads compared to those in his homeland, though I don't recall which part of Russia he was from. I grew up in rural California. Despite living quite remote—about 25 kilometers from the nearest town—by my standards our main roads were well-maintained. However, numerous smaller side roads branching off to serve sparse residential areas, sometimes leading to just a handful of houses, were another matter. I wonder if California has a larger proportion of these minor roads skewing the results. Yet paradoxically, two major urban centers, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are it would seem quite terrible.
- kamaal 2y ago>>He told me he was amazed by the quality of our roads compared to those in his homeland 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.
- jmward01 2y agoThis is a really great bit of analysis. I wish more things like it existed. I wonder if something similar exists for a utility comparison of roads? Something like average economic value/waste generated per mile of road? Probably not that exactly, but something that gets to not how well they are built, but instead how well they are implemented.
- Dave_Rosenthal 2y agoInteresting article. I would have loved to see the quality ratings weighted by how many people drive the roads, not by road-mile. I bet it would look a lot worse. It seems like low traffic roads out in the middle of nowhere are pretty decent, while the multi lane juggernauts in downtown that everyone spend their time on are disasters.
- BrenBarn 2y agoTwo thoughts. . . > California, which is reasonably rural This kind of remark always makes me think about how such things are defined and about 80-20 rules. Perhaps California is "reasonably rural" in terms of the proportion of its land area that is rural. But population wise it most definitely is not. The [US Census definition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States#Historical_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...) has classified California as the most urbanized state every decade since 1980. California has an 80-20 thing going on where almost all of the population lives on a tiny portion of the land, and then there is an enormous amount of land that is almost totally empty. This is different from more prototypical east-coast-style "urban" states with not so much rural land, and also different from prototypically rural states that don't have any very large cities. It's true that plenty of CA roads are in bad condition. But CA is in a situation where it has miles and miles of roads in remote areas that barely anyone drives on, and then it has roads in dense urban areas that see some of the heaviest traffic in the US. It's just hard to compare things in terms of miles of road. The other thing that comes to my mind whenever I see comparisons of US roads with those in other countries is the signage. It does vary from place to place in the US, and outside the US my only real experience is with Europe, but I'm amazed at how much better and more consistent signage seems to be on highways in the US compared to Europe. In the US you can be driving through totally empty land dotted with tiny villages, and still you will see a sign "Tiny Village 20" then "Tiny Village 10", then "Tiny Village next exit", and then the exit. In Europe sometimes you can be almost in the town before you see the one and only sign saying "Medium-sized Town right here!" In urban areas, it's fairly rare in the US to encounter intersections without street signs that are pretty well visible from all sides of an intersection, whereas in Europe many signs are flat against walls, making them hard to see except from certain angles. There's more to driving than just road miles. :-)
- kilotaras 2y ago> IRI measures how much a car moves vertically as it travels over a given distance, and is typically given in units like “inches per mile” or “millimeters per meter. How accurate are phone accelerometers these days? Could Uber/Lyft/etc. start collecting that data from drivers phones.
- KoftaBob 2y ago> And here again we see that cold climate doesn’t seem to have much impact on road quality, with cold places like Minneapolis and New York near the top, while warm cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Dallas are near the bottom. This stuck out to me. I wonder what NYC and Minneapolis are doing right that California should be doing to better maintain their roads?
- scotty79 2y agoInterstate road quality chart is rough... It's like somebody dropped the ball on maintenance of those exactly 30 years ago.
- otteromkram 2y ago> rough roads inflict costs in the form of reduced vehicle speeds. Most non-rural places do this on purpose in concert with not ticketing noisy (eg - exhaust notes) cars and trucks. Really makes for a sadistic feel when noise machines are prevented from leaving the area quickly. Traffic "calming" is another deplorable initiative. Nothing better than exerting ultimate control over the roads to sadistically keep them filled with traffic at all times so that peace and quiet never surmise. And, people still believe they have the freedom to drive wherever they want, anytime they choose. Sure, but you're basically on a bus schedule now with all the added stops and flow control. Say, can y'all figure out how to create road surfaces that actually dissipate noise (like blacktop), but not for a limited time or limited ideal operating envelope?
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoTitle is for 'American' roads. I'd like to see some of these charts with other countries included like Germany, or some country from each continent.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoAs an American living in the North East, I'd say American roads are crap. I'm not sure if construction methods are part of it, but it seems to largely be down to absurdly shoddy repairs. Growing up in the UK (which has similar winter freeze-thaw cycles to contend with), I was used to seeing pothole repairs done with hot asphalt, jackhammer-like packing down of repair material, and steam rollers. In the US it's quite common to see them just throw few shovels of loose material into a pothole and pat it down with the back of a hammer - or sometimes just leave it loose for the next car's tires to throw right back out again.
- unstyledcontent 2y agoAs a Minnesotan, I'm both surprised and not surprised that Minnesota has some of the highest quality roads. The roads take a beating but MNDot is pretty high tech in their road quality monitoring. Our company makes a tool that automates road quality assessments using computer vision and machine learning straight from a smart phone camera. It's pretty mind blowing and hopefullyis somethingmore municipalities will adopt. If you are curious, check it out, xweather.com/roadai.
- KameltoeLLM 2y ago[flagged]
- noobermin 2y agoRich for someone to say "roads don't get a lot of attention" when they literally pulls billions every year whereas transit gets a pittance.