This happens CONSTANTLY in Atlanta. They'll spend a bunch of money fixing a road, then a month later Public Works digs a huge hole and leaves a steel plate on it for a year, then patch it with either concrete that is an inch or two below the rest of the surface, or they don't pack the earth they put back and in 3 months the patch has sunk into a new pothole in a brand new road. The city has been trying to force public works to go do those things BEFORE road projects, but it's an uphill battle.

Not only that, but underground infrastructure and surrounding buildings put a high constraint on pavement design by putting a hard limit the total thickness of the pavement: can't build too deep or you'll disrupt other infrastructure, can't build too high or the road will be higher than surrounding building entrances or sidewalks.

Interstate construction don't have such limits are typically half a meter or more, not counting foundation earthworks, which can easily double that figure. In cities where telecom networks are 60cm deep and gas and electric networks 80cm deep, you just don't have the luxury of designing a meter-thick pavement that will have a decent IRI for decades to come.

It's kind of maddening how often blogs like this will make motions towards developing an educated opinion (citing multiple reports, researching stats from public datassets, etc.) but don't seem to have bothered to actually talk to any of the people who are invovled in the practice they describe in their post (in this case, building roads).

Rural roads are often unpaved. The local authority has to come by regularly with a grade to redo things or they become unusable quickly. Overall this is by far the cheapest way to have a road, but it doesn't scale to high use and city folks demand something that makes less dust. Rural roads also includes minimum maintance roads which demand 4wd (real 4wd, many SUVs will have trouble) when the weather is nice and a winch is a must when things get rainy or snowy.

Though given his definition of quality I expect he is actually ignoring all the real rural roads and only talking about major roads which while they get less traffic than urban roads are maintained to similar standards.

You're probably also going to have far fewer massive vehicles on those rural roads. More things like pickups yes, but probably considerably fewer semi-teicks and busses and fire trucks and cement mixers what not. Those big trucks passing through are going to stick to interstates far more often when going through rural areas.

That’s part of the reason. The other is that rural roads are mostly county or state funded (often through large Federal appropriations), and draw in a larger tax base and in-house professional engineering.

That’s why you can drive around rust belt areas of Upstate NY on nice roads - NYC Finance bonuses pay for that.

City roads are usually maintained by the city, which has much more limited access to capital. Because of that, in-house work is usually limited to mill and pave work and there’s not enough throughput for an appropriate staff of engineers. Big projects are usually task focus (safety, multi-modal) and are funded by Federal grants and use outside design and build contractors.

For the shared utility work, there is some coordination. My wife worked for a municipal water utility and ran the metering and infrastructure division. They received notice of paving or other jobs and prioritized proactive maintenance to happen while the road was under construction. The city would fine entities for digging up the street for non-emergency purposes for 6-12 months after the project completed. It helps, but broken mains or transformers necessitate the street cut.

Funny enough San Francisco Public Utilities coordinates with SF Streets to replace water/sewer lines prior to planned repaving work specifically to avoid this problem. They are clear that need and scheduling sometimes don't allow it but wherever possible they do.

Part of it is funding. Highways are for the most part federally funded, and the feds can print money at will. Urban roads have to be repaired from the city budget, and user fees (fuel taxes) are nowhere near enough to keep them maintained properly.

In New York, companies doing road work are required to leave a small plastic circle embedded in their patch that can be used to identify who did the work. They seem to most often be blue though I’m not sure the color is a requirement. Once you see it, you’ll notice them everywhere.

They put in new pavement in my neighborhood explicitly to fix some sewer issues. They ended up redoing several sections as the contractors paved over 3 access points (manhole covers). I'm not sure how you pave over a man-hole cover when it's sticking up 6 inches from the rest of the street.

2 huge pipelines with big enough diameter to fit smaller ones. One for utilities in (gas, electricity, cables, warm water). One for waste (sewage, trash etc)

Urban roads face a unique set of challenges beyond just higher traffic volumes

My favorite are the leaky man hole and other infrastructure covers which allow rain to wash the road bed into the pit. Then a void forms and a pothole forms. Then the muni fills the hole only for it to reappear as more road bed is washed away. Then repeat ad nauseam. I sometimes imagine a snake of asphalt all the way to the sewer plant.

You have a good point. I live in Michigan and recently traveled down to Austin, Texas. The roads didn't seem all that much better but all of the road markings really stuck out to me. Reflectors in all the lines separating lanes, soft bollards surrounding cross walks and parking areas, extra curbs built in for bike lanes. It makes things look a lot nicer but my first thought was, "could you imagine trying to plow around those bollards, or those reflectors would get ripped up on the first pass."

Just FYI, at least germanies rods are also a patchwork. E.g. there are the Autobahns, which are financed by the federal state. Than there are Bundesstraßen (Yellow markings, typically something like B56) which are also financed by the federal state.

Then there are Landstraßen, which are financed by the Bundesland (state, LXXX). Followed by Kreisstraßen, financed by the Gemeinde (county?`).

Finally there are Gemeindestraßen, financed by the city or town.

There are lots of norms and regulations on how to build these roads, so there is not that much variance except layout. E.g. a bike friendly city like Münster has a dfiferent layout than say Cologne.

The reflectivity of the road markings in North Carolina—where plows are rarely used—is terrible, to the point that they are almost invisible on a rainy night, even on freshly painted roads. It's the worst of anywhere I've lived or driven in the U.S.

Relatedly, recently my wife mentioned seeing a vehicle with large boxes on each side and wondering what they were. From her description, I tracked down that they are a fleet maintained by a small company that measures road marking reflectivity:

https://www.beckenterprises.com/services/

So who knows, maybe NC is finally doing something about the road markings here.

I generally agree but need to point out Germany is organised like the US regarding road construction. Only Autobahnen and Bundesstraßen are under federal authority, with states and municipalities divvying up the rest.

> focus exclusively on ‘roughness’

also, as a road cyclist I've found that there are different types of paved roads, some are very smooth (asphalt I presume), and others are less so (concrete?). Both are paved, but one is much more pleasant to ride on than the other. I don't know if there is a relationship between roughness and durability or quality, or those are just different techniques.

Well then there's the overall experience using the roads, regardless of roughness. For example, Texas' under interstate turnarounds are super weird and make running a local errand feel like a cross country trip as an example. Areas without zoning laws between commercial / residential feel more stressful to me as a driver personally too.

While I agree on your additional criteria, I feel the roughness metric itself (at least as explained here) is not as informative as it could be: a generally smooth road surface with sudden discontinuities in level (e.g.potholes) seems qualitatively worse (and damaging) than would be a smoothly-varying one with the same roughness. Perhaps an alternative metric might be based on the maximum speed at which a typical car or truck could travel without experiencing vertical accelerations above a certain threshold? ('typical', here would be with regard to things like its mass, suspension travel and stiffness, and wheelbase.)

For what it’s worth I hate the roads and parking in Europe. Roads are narrow, intersections are chaotic and parking is a joke. I drove around Europe for around 3 months (France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium etc.) and longed to drive back in the US again.

The more obvious reason is that colder places do not get as many freeze-thaw cycles. It simply stays frozen for a few months. In contrast, much of the northeast experiences many more freeze-thaw cycles since even in the winter it is warm enough to thaw the ice on some days.

> Not sure about those states in particular, but I have anecdotally noticed that some of the places with the harshest winters do some of the least road salting

Salt isn't effective when it gets really cold so it tends to be applied more around freezing as opposed to below. It also depends on the road surface temperature as well, heat of the sun melts off snow and that freezes at night. So you'll find salt has to be applied intelligently to the conditions, on bridges for example, which I suppose would come from experience.

I also observe southern states seem to use more rubber instead of rock in their road surface. So that might be a factor on how robust they are to wear.

This is somewhat true where I’m at in Canada. In the city, half the people have proper winter tires, the other half “wing it” with whatever they can afford/put-up-with.

Regularly see accidents all winter long from goofs sliding straight across multiple lanes of traffic or going off into the ditch. Only some of us are prepared.

We don’t salt, only drop sand grit and gravel sparingly. Our roads become ice rinks or snow piles for a decent portion of the winter.

Your comment about us being “better equipped” made me chuckle as I spent this morning watching my neighbours play slip-and-slide in the cul-de-sac cause they opted to not put their winter tires on.

As someone who grew up in the mountains, their behaviour is downright dangerous in my opinion.

Yep, in New York the pothole season is early Spring rather than winter, for example.

> ... because salt is mostly usable for light to moderate snowfall and ...

Perhaps more important - salt's effectiveness fades as the temperature decreases. Sand and gravel do not have that problem. So if you're running the Road Dept. in an area where serious cold ain't some rare event - why would you bother with salt?

EDIT: I know the "melt to pavement, solar heating finishes the job" tactic. Which can work with heavier snowfall, if you plow/shovel before salting. Colder weather inhibits both halves of the melt-&-heat. (Plus the further north you are, the shorter & slantier the sun's rays get, even on clear days.)

I've often heard the cold climate given as the reason for the terrible roads in Quebec, but you clearly notice the roads getting better as you cross the border out of Quebec into Ontario for example.

Also depends on where you're looking. Cities will have worse roads because they're always digging working on gas and water lines, some of which leak. That disturbance of the ground will make things a lot worse than some rural road where the ground hasn't been disturbed since it was created.

On the contrary, I believe they are. There are thousands of miles of back roads in California built and maintained by Caltrans that are in absolutely incredible condition. Drive up and down any random mountain/hill/pass off a main freeway and enjoy a road the envy of almost anywhere else: well-built, smooth, with painted lines and signage.

880 and 101 suffer because their high traffic volumes cause much higher wear and tear while also making it difficult to make repairs.

Oregon is 60% the size of California by land area but only 10% of the population.

Roads like 101 & 880 can't be worked on during the day because of massive congestion issues. But drive up & down 101 after 9 or 10pm (even on weekends), and you'll see crews hard at work. Hats off to those crews working the night shift.

> Compare this to our OR neighbors, where there are signs saying "your tax dollars at work" by ORDOT everywhere.

I see these signs all over Southern California (I remember seeing them around the Bay Area especially post 08 GFC): https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e074b5_617daf538f0c4e0e89...

They’ve been around since at least the late 90s/early 2000s. There's a whole official site for it too: https://rebuildingca.ca.gov/

Anecdote: Worked road construction summer 2010 as the guy who put those little sticky tabs on the road to mark where lines are repainted after construction is complete.

Sometimes I'd finish early and get odd jobs. Between Roseburg and the Oregon coast a colleague and I were assigned to stand one of those "your tax dollars at work" signs on a steep slope. Took 2 hours at prevailing wage OT and for total labor cost of $480 between the two of us. By far the steepest labor rate I'd ever been able to charge. Thanks for the money, irony!

> The SFBay I-880 and US-101 are always packed

A lot of this is due to the freeway system being unfinished.

101 would have been supplemented by the Bayfront Freeway (CA 87): https://cahighways.org/ROUTE087.html#_ROUTING_SEG2

And 880 by routes 61, 238, 185, 13, and 77:

- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE061.html#_HIST1964

- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE238.html

- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE185.html

- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE013.html

- https://cahighways.org/ROUTE077.html

I'd like to see California consider reducing the total mileage of roads and focus on having a smaller amount of higher quality paved surfaces. My neighborhood street does not need to be 60ft wide, and our freeways do not need more lanes.

I often breathe a sigh of relief when I pass over the boarder into Nevada and my car starts shaking.

Roughly 70% the tax revenue per capita ($3.8k vs 2.6), but somehow they manage to maintain their roads.

Doesn't "often under construction" mean that they are "at work"?

It's heavily county based. Drive on the 5 through LA county and the second it crosses into Orange County, it magically gets incredibly better.

They are "at work" ... for other people's versions of "at work".

we have a lot of expensive bridges

You personally may pay lots of property taxes but California's Prop 13 means that people who have been here for a long time and kept property within the family are paying significantly less. Our average tax rate is 35th in the nation - https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/high-state-property.... I grew up in New Jersey originally so I have an admittedly warped view of property taxes, though.

Keeping roads perfect requires taking them out of commission for repair... which is a disaster on California freeways that have constant traffic. I think CA does a fair job of balancing that with road condition, and I assume they are already using more durable and expensive road construction methods than other areas that lacks so much constant heavy traffic.

It's like I-70 was strafed by an A-10. Kansas I-70 uses concrete on a mostly stable substrate. It's flat, and doesn't pockmark like asphalt. Kansas tears out about five miles at a time and goes one lane during pours. Don't see that often in other states due to it's impractical.

Ahhhh Colorado, blue state tastes with a red state budget.

Also the only state I've seen with drive through daquiri service !

> 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.

It's simple: politics over people.

NY's orgs (government or otherwise) steal all the tax money while pretending to be for the people, NH conversely does not.

I'm convinced that the states neighboring Pennsylvania take extra care of the last mile of roads on their side leading into PA so the transition is especially obvious.

Truly, we have so many underutilized overly wide roads. Simply removing lanes makes money go much further

Of course, nearly all roads with >2 lanes in the US are paved. But that doesn't tell us anything other than the fact that we have the money to pave roads that are frequently traveled.

>>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.

I'm not sure if you ended up in Saskatchewan, but it kind of sounds like you did. The highways in Alberta are quite a bit better and it's a relatively abrupt change.

I've heard that the quality of the Alaska Highway becomes noticeably better after entering the US from Canada.

Because "interstate" doesn't refer to the function of the particular road, it refers to the federal program that created them: the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways".

There are a ton of interstate highways which do not go between states, even in the continental US, and especially the auxiliary (i.e. 3-digit) interstate highways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_auxiliary_Interstate_H...

The US already previously had (and still has), a national road system that traversed across states other than the Eisenhower system. But nobody calls these roads "interstate" because they're not in the Eisenhower system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highway...

"Interstate" has always specifically referred to Eisenhower system roads only.

https://www.straightdope.com/21341858/how-can-there-be-inter...

There's an interstate that runs entirely within one county, in Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_97

Not just that, but how is the overall quality of roads in Hawaii so bad?

It is not a poor state.

Just one. H1 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_H-1>

Cody's Lab did a video with some experiments collecting and refining road dust. As I recall, he did manage to obtain a small bead of platinum-group metals but it didn't appear to be economically viable at least at a small scale.

Isn’t it supposed to be mostly brake pads, rotors, and tire rubber?

Would be fascinating to imagine it being economically viable to vacuum up and reprocess it, but based on the above I’ve assumed it was worthless.

Yeah, the 93 between Kingman and Nevada is absolutely terrible. Last time I was through there (9 months ago) they were doing a small bit of paving but it wasn't in one of the rougher areas.

I'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.

> Los Angeles though was something else, giant gouges on 12 lane highways every few feet for miles on end

Probably concrete fastening projects.

> sliproads

on/off ramps for AmE speakers.

As someone who has driven in many different developed countries in the world (and been a passenger in many developing countries), California highways often feel like those in developing countries but it's combined with a much higher travelling speed.

I think the only other country where I regularly got jolted up (nearly hitting my head on the ceiling of the car) was India.

Do you remember which highway you were driving? Interestingly this goes against my experience. I’ve actually remarked to many friends that I enjoy night-time driving in Los Angeles since the highways are well-lit and smooth (and of course, no traffic at night).

Los Angeles is the v0.0.1 of freeways. Lessons were learned.

Every state has been getting lobbied to do this for at least the last 10 years. These bills come through the legislatures every year, and I think it will keep coming until finally one of them passes. There are manufacturers of the GPS trackers pushing for it, and companies who want to have the state-granted monopoly to manage the tracking and billing. They are frothing at the mouth to get this passed and make a ton of money billing every single person.

I can't figure out if you want the roads fixed or you don't want the tax.

Internalizing the costs you create are good though. In a perfect world I would think weight x miles would be what you'd want to tax on. I say this as someone who owns an EV; I should have to account for the higher road deterioration my heavier vehicle causes. If someone's income is too low you fix that other ways than trying to subsidize their externalizing behaviors.

Why should we subsidize driving exactly? Charge per mile based on how much vehicle weighs and pollutes and charge enough to cover the cost of maintaining the roads. Many of the poorest people can't even afford a car. Insurance, fuel, maintenance are expensive and paying for roads is expensive.

Oregon has tried to implement a miles tax multiple times but failed to pass it. Instead they've opted for a surcharge on vehicle registrations for EVs and also on any vehicle that gets better than 20 mpg.

Counterproductive from a climate change standpoint for a "green" state but it preserved the road money.

I think a miles traveled tax that accounts for vehicle weight would probably less regressive than the current gas tax.

EVs save substantially in running costs. I’d imagine it would charge those using 3/4 and 1-ton pickups as family cars the most.

People being too poor is a separate issue from bad tax systems incentivizing unsustainable behavior.

Tax liabilities that are a function of consumption are the right way to tax.

If the tax burden is deemed too high for poor people, then give them cash.

Two different problems, two different solutions, and it keeps the incentives aligned properly.

Anecdotally, it seems like a ton of projects got started as a result of this bill, but it doesn't seem like many of them are getting worked on or finished. It's giving me the impression that contractors bid and took on as many new projects as possible with no ability to actually staff or execute the projects. Given that this happened at the same time a major labor shortage occurred, perhaps it was a perfect storm.

I'm guessing not maintained. Minneapolis is forced to spend a lot more on roads just to keep things acceptable. They also have a lot of voters with a memory of how bad things get after a bad winter and so politicians don't dare short road funding let they be voted out over a few potholes. (I've seen roads in Minneapolis that were more pothole than surface)

Maintenence. I grew up in the north (Michigan) and spent time in Massachusetts, living in Texas now it's very different how infrastructure is funded. I'd call it a result of the general politics, no one wants to spend money on infrastructure.

I believe the latest stat I heard was that over 70% of the roads & alleys in the city where I live are >40 years old. That also means all of the infrastructure under the roads (water, conduits, etc.) are also >40 years old.

Not all Southern states.

Florida is an outlier in road quality both anecdotally and from this page - almost equal in quality to blue states of New Hampshire and Maine. Non-interstate Florida roads drop to 74%, lower than Alabama (which has less interstate roadways than Florida) but higher than all other Southern states and most Northern states.

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/florida-ranks-among-top-5....

Winnipeg has notoriously bad roads throughout the city, and the harsh winters are always the excuse. But Minneapolis and Fargo don't seem to have these problems!

There’s a joke in Minnesota about having only two seasons, winter and road construction. As soon as the ground thaws, road construction starts up all over Minnesota.

St Paul is right next door to Mpls and has absolutely terrible roads, but they’re improving. St Paul has full road replacement on a 120 year schedule because they got drunk on TIF over the past few decades and don’t have the money for to schedule full road replacements every 60 years.

St Paul does enough road maintenance and pothole filling that it owns an asphalt batch plant: https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/public-works/street-maint...

the south is generally a poor region with terrible public sand social services

When I was driving in Minneapolis a few years ago, you couldn’t drive more than 20 miles an hour because the roads were so bad around the neighborhood. I wonder if they fixed that.

> Do southern cities not build their roads so robustly? Or are they not maintained?

Yes

I think anecdotal evidence may be a reasonable proxy for those countries, although at least in stereotype and anecdotally they are very far from representative of (even) western Europe. I've noticed quite a bit of variance between major highways and smaller highways or other roads across Italy, for example.

You're right that car centric transportation is entrenched, but this is the wrong statistic to prove that point. The US is a huge country and the overall density of roads (km/100km2) is lower than Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...

For your critique, you'd want to break out urban+suburban road networks from regional and rural ones. The US was a frontier country that grew on top of continent-spanning trails with pockets of community cropping up everywhere there were agricultural, material, or strategic resources, or the need for a travel rest. It's to be expected that we have many miles of road and mostly a good thing that our communities are so well-connected and traversable.

It's what happens inside those communities, when they could be designed with better concern for local community or sustainability, that warrants the critique. And it's a good and fair critique. Just not one directly spoken to by the quoted statistic.

Couldn’t driving more be a sign of a strong and productive economy? Other large countries like Russia or Australia or something that drive less have smaller GFP as well.

Can we make a better comparison of how much Americans drive, plus total travel, vs total travel for other countries of similar density and size?

You should compare EU to the US before you comment on roads. The US is much larger than any EU country and so of course we will have a lot more roads.

> This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation

How? We’re big, rich and sparsely populated. I’m not saying that means we must have this system. But the longest road network doesn’t prove that’s wrong.

The National Forest Service alone maintains 265,000 miles of roads.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technology/infrastructure/ro...

This is called an "Argument from Incredulity" and it's a fallacy. Pointing to a large number without any basis of comparison does not make any statement about whether it is too large or too small. You also have billions of cells in your body! Is that too many?