Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eric_WVGG | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a blog post about the unsustainability of suburbs — https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2017/03/20/the-fiscal-unsust...

Even if this $1.5m figure is wildly inflated, calculate how few people live on a given mile in the suburbs, a conservative estimate on how much it costs to maintain a road, and the numbers just don't add up.

The suburbs were a ponzi scheme and the bottom is about to fall out.

View on HN

Or maybe how much road costs in the USA is a bit of a strawman version of how much road costs.

Come on, some remote villages in the third world have paved roads to them.

The third world has a lot more miles of dirt roads than paved roads. The slightly more expencive gravel roads are fine for suburban cul-de-sac‘a / side streets that don’t get that much traffic.

They kick up a shitload of dust so everything is dirty all of the time. They also become unusable/get destroyed in the rain. It makes sense for rural roads since the expense is massive and the dust not so much of an issue.

The dust is much less when speeds are kept lower, such as suburban cul-de-sacs as GP states. Dust can be further mitigated with an annual oil coat.

A well built gravel road will have a decent amount of rock which drains in the rain without turning to mud, culverts are needed on the steeper slopes to limit erosion.

While the total cost is much less than asphalt, dirt roads do need more regular maintenance which municipalities frequently try to skimp on.

A good read of the pro's and con's: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents...

And in the USA some rural areas have been "unpaving" roads because they have done the financial math : https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructu...

https://www.nap.edu/read/21935/chapter/1

very limited discussion a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272140

You'd be surprised how many unpaved roads there are. Even in Europe

https://i.redd.it/4xau5auzqg741.png

The suburbs will maintain their own roads before the bottom falls out. low income suburbs probably will not survive, but there's no law that says they cant have shitty roads that require a jeep to drive on

when the roads require a jeep to drive on, it's no longer a suburb - it's the country. the promise of the suburbs is that it's all the luxuries of city living, with all the space of rural living. Losing the amenities of the city is exactly how i would interpret "the bottom falling out"

Middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs will still exist, they'll just be a municipality a few miles over, where all the houses and roads are 25 years newer, and the long tail of opex costs hasn't quite hit as bad yet. It will, eventually.

If a suburb can attract some retail or office space or manufacturing, they can be like Irvine or Tysons or Bloomington -- the suburbs that have made it. Those that cannot will accumulate the same problems with fiscal sustainability that inner cities once did.

High income suburbs will struggle, too. Gotta pay for the roads somehow if federal subsidies stop trickling in. People on HN talk about moving to texas on taxes alone all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com