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Comment by apta | Hacker News Reader

> On a recent trip back up there you can tell when you hit NYS roads - rusted bridges and crumbling asphalt pock marked with pot holes that can damage your car.

Genuine question: where else in the US are roads better? I've been to several states and some Canadian provinces, and compared to the developed Gulf nations, all of the roads I saw there were like what described.

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US roads are generally better in the south where they don't use salt or experience freezing in the winter time.

Except for Mississippi.

You'd think that but in FL at least, there is ~6 potholes on my route to work every day that have been left there for months.

Maybe you should ask Domino's to help with those potholes.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/06/dominos-pizza...

I already have. lol.

Six whole potholes, wow. In NY you'll get six potholes on one road.

6 potholes is 2 miles on one road.

NY state actually maintains its roads pretty well. For a snow belt state they by and large have the best infrastructure with wide shoulders consistently used to minimize damage from plows and heaving. Poorer counties and large cities are less consistently good but the majority of the state's roads are nice. Compared to midwest concrete abominations that are allowed to deteriorate into crumbled messes 20 years past their design life I'll take the continuously improved NY asphalt.

Water doesn't need to freeze to destroy asphalt. Water soaks into the asphalt like a sponge and when vehicles drive over it, cracks form. Those cracks then fill with water and the process repeats.

The best roads are probably those in the desert.

The highways in and around Phoenix, Arizona have amazing road surfaces. Smooth & quiet driving for miles. I keep hoping someday day California surfaces its highways with the same material. Regular city streets seem pretty much the same.

This. Phoenix highways have the best pavement quality. Good news is that post SB-1 Caltrans is using the same material in CA highways as well - rubberized asphalt. I recently drove from SF to LA and sections of I-5 were recently repaved. Great ride quality

I've actually noticed this a few times. The asphalt around Phoenix is in amazing shape. Most of the road looks relatively new with freshly painted lines.

In NH it varies from town to town. The smaller touristy towns have improved their roads dramatically in the last 10-20 years. Where I live, Epsom, you can tell immediately when you enter either Chichester or Northwood because the highway gets noticeably worse. Not awful, just worse. But overall I'd say NH highways are quite good now.

I agree, I came to NH from MA and was shocked at how nice the roads are in comparison. I'll never understand where MA tax money goes, because it clearly doesn't go to the roads.

I suspect NH puts a lot of money into that stretch of road as a form of advertising. Note that we also put the liquor outlets (and fireworks stores, though privately owned) right there on the border.

Parent poster was right on the money.

I’ve lived in 5 US states with state income taxes ranging from zero percent to merely substantially lower—nevermind a “city tax” that’s in addition and higher that most state taxes—and uniformally the roads and bridges are significantly better than NYS. And then there’s the billions NYC collects annually in fines [0].

Does anyone know the root cause of this? Where does all of the revenue go?

[0] www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160324/civic-center/new-york-city-collects-record-19-billion-fines-fees.amp

Traffic, structural model, materials, environment.

I found a few websites that seem to have repackaged this professor's lecture notes and then found the original.[1] The most unexpected insight was that slow traffic is a big factor. NY and LA definitely have slow traffic compared to most other cities in the US.

[1]: Mathew, Tom V. "Factors affecting pavement design." 3 August 2009. https://www.civil.iitb.ac.in/tvm/1100_LnTse/402_lnTse/plain/... "

I also found this Virginia Tech paper that lists a number of citations that may provide additional insight, https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/56449

In CA about 25% goes to pensions, 35% to healthcare, and the rest is <45% give or take a few percent.

Traffic usage. NYC roads are simply used by more people during more parts of the day than pretty much any other city except LA. LA's roads are messed up as a result of the large volume of trucking traffic. As a result, both the roads in NYC and LA need resurfacing more frequently than other locations, but that takes a lot of time and a lot of money, and so in many cases unless the road is really messed up it's not worth it to accelerate maintenance ahead of cycle.

I was mostly referring to highway roads in poor shape. They were bad in other states but noticeably worse in NY.

Driving up from the south you do notice a "line" sort of where you enter areas that more commonly get snow and the highway degrades a bit but then entering NY seemed like even worse.

places without snow

This on the money. Newfoundland, for instance, spends a lot of money on roads in some areas, because the road markings are completely scraped off by snowplowing every winter. Whereas Arizona and the Southwest are great for long-term preservation, which is why they put the Airplane Graveyard there.

For being a state with a lot of cold and snow, Montana's roads seem pretty good.

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