Bumpy Ride: Why America’s roads are in tatters | Hacker News Reader

Bumpy Ride: Why America’s roads are in tatters

harpers.org

38 pointsdrtillberg51 comments

> Each American driver pays about $450 per year toward roads, according to the Journal of Infrastructure Systems. Europeans fork over on average 2 to 3.5 times as much — the difference is largely in fuel taxes.

You get what you pay for I guess. Keep in mind that per capita income in America, both nominal and at PPP, is much higher than Europe (even excluding Eastern Europe). Even a relative poor state like Michigan (the setting of this article) has a GDP/capita comfortably exceeding Germany, France or UK.

Keep in mind median German household income is $50,500

Median Michigan household income is $51,084

You always have to account for the very different income distribution.

But point taken. I was utterly shocked at the state of the roads in NYC. Even in Manhattan they could be really poor.

The median income supports their point well. Looking at those figures you'd expect Michigan to have no more trouble than Germany maintaining roads.

You forget about population density. Lower density requires longer roads.

Yet the German pays $5.69/gallon compared to the American $2.56 (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/gas-prices/).

To people who haven't been to Germany: the roads there are not great. Germany did the same thing as the US has: cut funding.

You never EVER cut funding on infrastructure. Not even in a recession. It will come back to haunt you.

New York City learned this lesson only after infrastructure got so bad in the 1970s that a concrete truck literally fall through an elevated highway.

http://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/16/archives/truck-and-car-fal...

It comes back to haunt the next generation. Meanwhile, this generation gets to enjoy both smooth roads and low taxes.

You would think a generation of SimCity players would have learnt that lesson.

The root of the problem seems to be that those causing the most damage to the roads aren't paying enough to maintain them. A semi causes 1,400x more wear on the same stretch of road than a car! [1].

[1] https://www.lrrb.org/pdf/201432.pdf

There are some similar externalities when it comes to emissions. It's something you can't fix with a fuel tax.

> When Hulka started the job in 2003, asphalt cost between $24 and $27 a ton. “We’re seeing sixty-four dollars and up right now,” he said.

We've heard so much about the impact of today's dirt-cheap oil prices versus the $100+ prices of 2014, but petroleum was substantially cheaper in 2003 than it is now.

Maybe there is a non-petroleum binder that could be used instead of bitumen to make asphalt cheaper.

The article mentions chip sealing, which should cost half as much as asphalt. On a motorcycle trip in Mexico, I encountered a four-lane highway where the left (passing) lanes were of lesser pavement quality than the smooth asphalt right lanes. The idea being, you don't do distance travel on the passing lane so why not reduce the cost by paving that lane in a less expensive fashion. Of course, even that level of pavement would be farfetched for many degraded county roads, but it's a clever way to reduce the cost of a four-lane highway.

I'd first want to see a breakdown of the other costs. For asphalt roads, most of the mass is the aggregate, so a ton of asphalt should make a fair amount of road.

(apparently hot mix is between 3 and 7 percent asphalt)

It's incredibly sad that we've basically given up on paved roads. Regression to gravel represents the loss of important social technology for building and maintaining infrastructure.

More like it's incredibly sad that we've basically given up on rural America. We have no issue with paved roads in the biggest cities in the nation, but if an area isn't economically profitable in a global marketplace, it's being left to wither and die.

Counterpoint: Why spend (a lot) more on roads for a few instead of for the many?

That's exactly what unchecked capitalism says.

If there is no redistribution of wealth by any other mechanism, those who have no money will by and large not get any resources.

While that may work well for LLCs, when it comes to people we don't want that.

Why should the poor urban people pay to subsidize the lavish rural lifestyle?

No one is forcing people to live out in the boonies.

No one except all those folks running rent up in cities. Landowners and renters are both to blame here.

I'm no enemy of wealth redistribution, but you have got redistribute it where it's the most effective too, money spent paving roads for a few people could hire doctors and teachers for many people.

People in rural areas are also against this sort of communalism generally, if they wanted to live much closer together in town houses or apartment blocks then paved roads would be much more cost effective, but just because the want to live on large acreages where the can't see their neighbors doesn't mean the rest of society should subsidize them.

It's the basic calculus of lane-km per capita. Cites have far more people using far fewer roads, so it's more justifiable to keep those roads paved. Shrinking rural communities do not, and they're also the loudest opponents of revenue tools like higher sales, income, or gas taxes that could help fund maintenance.

And that's how it should be. Why subsidize the hillbillies?

There are lots of issues with paved roads in well-populated and urban areas, too. Go drive on the Mass Pike if you don't believe me.

It's so bad that Massachusetts car insurance policies will cover a windshield replacement every year.

Is it sad? Perhaps there's a middle ground between Manifest Destiny and no infrastructure at all. Iowa has recognized that its infrastructure costs far exceeded it's tax revenue, and with a dwindling population, it no longer made sense to continue to maintain roads that were acceptable as gravel [1].

A sibling post mentions "giving up on rural America". I think we need to continue to find ways to keep quality of life high as progress marches forward; run fiber to rural America, but gravel roads aren't too much of a sacrifice (as long as we keep the interstates maintained through rural areas).

It appears in a lot of cases, a gravel road is just as good as a paved road [2].

"The decision to pave is a matter of trade-offs. Paving helps to seal the surface from rainfall, and thus protects the base and subgrade material. It eliminates dust problems, has high user acceptance because of increased smoothness, and can accommodate many types of vehicles such as tractor-trailers that do not operate as effectively on unsurfaced roads.

In spite of the benefits of paved roads, well-maintained gravel roads are an effective alternative. In fact, some local agencies are reverting to gravel roads. Gravel roads have the advantage of lower construction and sometimes lower maintenance costs. They may be easier to maintain, requiring less equipment and possibly lower operator skill levels. Potholes can be patched more effectively. Gravel roads generate lower speeds than paved surfaces. Another advantage of the unpaved road is its forgiveness of external forces. For example, today vehicles with gross weights of 100,000 pounds or more operate on Kentucky’s local roads. Such vehicles would damage a lightly paved road so as to require resealing, or even reconstruction. The damage on a gravel road would be much easier and less expensive to correct.

There is nothing wrong with a good gravel road. Properly maintained, a gravel road can serve general traffic adequately for many years."

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/7/6/iowa-dot-chief-...

[2] (warning: pdf) https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents...

From the article's third page: "Eventually, however, if you drive on gravel roads on a daily basis, your windshield breaks, your tires wear out, your front end goes out of whack". Gravel roads are worse than paved roads.

Yes, gravel roads are cheaper. A mud hut is cheaper than a marble building. Inferior things are often cheaper. Yes, they generate lower speeds. The point of a road is not to generate lower speeds. It is to facilitate transportation. Gravel roads do that less effectively than paved roads.

You're just rationalizing our society's backsliding. It's depressing enough that we're regressing a less-developed form of transportation because we can't afford to maintain our forebearer's technology. We don't have to celebrate it!

It's not backsliding. The backslide was the inefficient allocation of resources to roads that were hardly used. They're now reversing the backslide.

Based on the article this entire phenomena is justified in my opinion. It was paving every road when petroleum was dirt cheap that was unwarranted. The lower costs of building/maintaining are the tradeoff for a lower traffic road. In terms of all the issues facing America today, paving every road doesn't seem like a very important one compared to the cost explosion in healthcare. Most of the problems the locals encountered in the article would be fixed if they replaced the no maintenance paved road with a low maintenance gravel road.

When I grew up, my home was on a gravel road in Texas and we just drove slower once we got off the paved road. It was the cost of living in a rural area and we just accepted it. Eventually the road was paved but there were still unpaved roads all around me by the time I graduated high school.

Who said that we have to use petroleum? You can pave roads with cement or even old tires (as a base layer and part of the aggregate).

Building roads using concrete made with Portland cement is more expensive than asphalt.

But cement roads last longer and can handle heavier loads.

But asphalt is more easily repaired and can be recycled...

Both are recycled.

This is an early search result for concrete recycling:

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/infrastructur...

At the same time, more Americans are buying higher-clearance vehicles as the price and mileage improve. Maybe there are some places where enough people have vehicles with clearance and decent tires where gravel is ok? If gravel is well done and has something to control the dust, you can go 40mph in it.

America is also a really really spread out country. I have a hard time seeing why every secondary road needs to be blacktopped if it’s just servicing residential areas.

You don't need high clearance for a well graded gravel road if it's not rutted or washed out, my little car can do those fine. My old driveway was gravel and not a problem. I'm not sure how you plan to deal with dust though. Also I believe they wear out more rapidly and are suitable for much lower use. For lower use rural roads well maintained gravel roads are an excellent solution.

And those bigger and heavier vehicles destroy the roads even more quickly. In some parts of the UK the roads are really bad if you don't drive a giant 4x4 (medium sized by US standards), so more people get them, and the roads get even worse. What's more is these giant vehicles make using the road less pleasurable for everyone as now every road is essentially more narrow due to the width of the vehicles and the damage at the edge.

It seems obvious to me that these larger vehicles should pay more tax to compensate for the damage and the inconvenience for other road users, but they pay exactly the same amount as small cars.

I've driven on gravel roads in South Africa and they often get this bumpy texture to them which is due to people driving on them really fast with big cars. It means if you have a medium-sized car you're stuck doing about 20mph and buggering up your suspension.

Aye here in the Netherlands because of the extremely high traffic density they have to do maintenance on highways every 7 years. When they planned the road network nobody imagined that there would be so many automobiles.

First world problems!

Fuel taxes are at least somewhat proportionate to vehicle size.

For gravel roads that have a tight washboard, going 30 mph often results in a smoother ride (the transition is above 20 anyway).

On a good gravel road, you can go 80 mph... I've seen loaded log trucks doing that on the Golden Road in northern Maine.

Of course that is privately maintained road, and the logging and paper companies that own it are invested in keeping serviceable.

Upgrading to gravel indeed.

My parents house back in Wisconsin has the bitumen roads all around the area. They litterly slap down tar, then pile small rocks on top of it, occasionally they take a roller to if but mostly they don't and leave the weight of the cars to finish the road. So there is no such thing as a flat road, and continuous tire dips are formed along the whole length of the road for water, snow and ice to collect in.

If you think roads in the US are bad, come to Quebec...

Amen! It’s the worst I’ve seen. Slightly for different reasons. The only plant that makes asphalt in Montreal uses used engine oil as binding agent which destroys roads much quicker. Common QC corruption.

Is there a version of this that doesn't split it over three pages to try and get me to load ads that ad and script blockers will just break anyway?

There's a "Download PDF" link right before the start of the article.

It's javascript, not a link.

Though I did miss that the single page option wasn't actually JS, because I stopped looking.

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/11/bumpy-ride/?single=1

There is one 'visible' ad per page. So it's not bad enough that you'll have anyone caring about your complaints.

Without reading it, is it because in the U.S. no-one wants to pay tax?

I'd call it a loss of the ability to pull together for the common good, part of the continued fracturing of western society into individual-sized pieces.

> part of the continued fracturing of western society into individual-sized pieces.

For the US, yes. For (some) European countries, not so. There's still a strong concensus around paying taxes and getting your money's worth in education, social security and paved roads.

That's part of it, but it's also a question of who bears the tax burden. Some of these places have lost tons of manufacturing jobs and can't afford to do improvements on a local level, and I imagine there's a more generalized dejection that makes collective infrastructure investments repulsive.

It's also arguably about not wisely routing and specking civic infrastructure.

The 'who pays' also goes towards the increased operating costs and lost time (forced slower travel speed) of users.

I can't help but wonder how much other alternative road types might cost, nor lament that we don't put nearly the foundation and engineering in to these things that many parts of Europe do. (I've heard they build things /once/ really well, and that maintenance is then lower after that.)

I doubt I'd be able to find anything to cite, but having lived in east Asia, I think part of the problem is that Americans take substantially longer to perform any kind of construction or repair. Things that would happen practically overnight take weeks or even months in the States.

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