After the "Ghost Road" story on HN a few days ago [1], out of boredom and curiosity, I did a little browsing around online maps in Russia and noticed there really aren't any major roads at all connecting northern/eastern Siberia to the rest of Russia--unless Google Maps and Openstreetmap are woefully incomplete, which is possible. It seems so alien to my pampered US sensibilities, all spoiled by our glorious interstate highway system and regional State highways. How can the vast majority of a country's small towns and land area be not even remotely accessible by so much as a dirt road?? I get that few people live there, but the ones that do, how do they go anywhere else in Russia?
In the US, most of the country is at most 5-6 miles from some kind of road. Maybe there are spots in Yellowstone that are 20 miles from a road, but thats orders of magnitude less remote than what Maps depicts about Siberia!