Now onward to replacing the roads and bridges on freeways and highways with these new concrete.
Also, people vastly underestimate how cheap road surfaces need to be. Try and calculate the volume of material making up the US road system.
How sustainable is a system that requires perpetual good times?
Calling it a ponzi scheme is a stretch, but this guy seems to be the only one talking about this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...
Also easy expansion is more a function of interest rates than anything. Municipal bonds buy everything and there’s been very little interest on them. This means fewer taxes to buy things. And new bonds can be sold down the road as the town increases tax base and interest rates fall.
I live at the end of a deadend road that is 0.9 miles off another very rural road.
The road is chip sealed, which according to google in 2022 is $25,000 to $42,000 per mile.
There are 7 parcels that collect $6396 per year in property taxes.
At the low end of the chip seal price, it would take 3.53 years to pay it off and 5.9 years at the high end.
This assumes that no sales or gas taxes are used to fund any of the road construction, which isn't true.
I don't have utility water; it's available on my street, but it doesn't run by my house, it stops at a much lower elevation, our well water is fine (although we had to replace the well pump recently which was expensive). No utility sewer either, that's available in parts of my area, but mostly places with density or poor site conditions for septic or both.
Electricity is mostly overhead, with a little bit of underground telephone has a lot of undergrounding, but some overhead, cable and municipal fiber are almost all overhead. But when those are undergrounded here, they're on the sides of the road (directly under the overhead path) not under the road. That way it's easier to get to them for maintenance when needed.
Over their lifetime, easily. The pipes for those will last 100 years, easily. The maintenance of them are paid for by the delivery costs you pay in your bill.
As for rural I think there's 2 distinctions. 1 is we need rural communities because they produce our food and other things. Secondly, rural areas are between 2 or more populated areas. We need to connect populated areas so by necessity there are roads. Rural communities are built off of those.
The other distinction where you may be closer is exuburban communities built into rural areas. These may or may not be fully covered. Not initially anyways, but you'd assume the property taxes would cover in time.
My wife served on a sanitary district board. Decent underground sewer mains have an expected service life of 70 years. Some will last longer, some won't hit the expectation. It depends on site conditions, materials, etc, etc. Many will probably last to 100 years, but I wouldn't expect it to be easy. Especially if you had any of the not decent materials (Orangeburg pipe was common in some areas and is basically wood pulp/fibers mixed with hot tar; service life could vary between 10 and 50 years; the major manufacturer went out of business in 1974, as PVC and ABS pipes rapidly replaced Orangeburg in the materials markerplace).
Actually there was a huge nationwide boom in sewer building post WWII, especially in the 50s, and you can expect that infrastructure to need some largescale replacement over the next 20 years or so. Depending on system design and how housing and industry developed, some systems will be able to just inspect periodically and replace as needed, and some systems will probably take the opportunity to do a more modern redesign (older cities tend to have combined sanitary sewers and storm/runoff drainage; if you're tearing up all the streets to replace the sanitary sewer, it might be a good time to put in a parallel storm drain system)
I'm not sure about water mains, I'd guess they need more frequent replacement since they operate at pressure.
To think that the USSR had better infrastructure (less corruption) than modern day corrupt places like Montreal is a brutal shock.
But most bridges and highways are quite demanding and can't simply adopt a new concrete chemistry based on an improvement in a single dimension.
what we don't do today is follow through on the maintenance and replacement schedules, in an attempt to save money. we try to repeat our tradeoff after the infrastructure is built, again trading away longevity in favor of money. well, infrastructure decays if you don't maintain it or build it to last longer.
skimping on maintenance after you skimped on longevity is trying to eat the cake, and still have it after you've eaten it. it doesn't work that way.
the rough ride kept speeding down a lot more than the police could, because I watched people scream through my neighborhood all the time after they paved over the bricks.
plowing snow is harder on brick roads, but it isn't so hard that it is an unsolvable problem.
They're insanely slippery when wet. A freeze-thaw cycle tends to make them move, eventually leading to weird dips and ridges. They're expensive to install and more expensive to maintain.
my town used dirt as the "mortar" between bricks, so there was no solid joint to degrade over time. I do remember crews going around and spreading small amounts of dirt on those roads, to refill what little rinsed away after spring thaw. they'd just have a guy following behind the truck with a push broom moving the dirt so it fell between bricks.
dirt is dirt cheap.
> In 2012, Paul Lecroart, of the institute of planning and development of the Île-de-France, wrote that "Despite initial fears, the removal of main roads does not cause deterioration of traffic conditions beyond the starting adjustments. The traffic transfer are limited and below expectations".[4] He also notes that some private vehicle trips (and related economic activity) are not transferred to public transport and simply disappear ("evaporate").[4]
> The same phenomenon was also observed when road closing was not part of an urban project but the consequence of an accident. In 2012 in Rouen, a bridge was destroyed by fire. Over the next two years, other bridges were used more, but the total number of cars crossing bridges was reduced.[4]
It seems a lot like the real-world examples of the phenomenon look like close cousins of "if you remove the smallest values in a set, the average goes up".