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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Modern roads are designed to take serious abuse. 50 years of load cycling 20 ton semi at highway speeds causes mechanical damage which Roman concrete wouldn’t be effective in preventing. In ancient sites you can sometimes see the walls in high traffic areas have gotten smoothed and indented from hundreds of years worth of people gently dragging their fingertips across the surface as they walk by, tires are less gentile.

Also, people vastly underestimate how cheap road surfaces need to be. Try and calculate the volume of material making up the US road system.

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A fun exercise is to calcualte the cost of some road in a neighboorhood, and compare that to the total collected property tax of all the homes along that road.

A relative of mine who's otherwise a smart guy was lamenting rural broadband as an Obama boondoggle since it's never going to pay for itself to run fiber to all of the remote communities in our state... he didn't want to hear about the "P&L" for the road capital/maintenance costs.

Then multiple that by 20 (the lifetime of the road surface) and factor in that the resurfacing is significantly cheaper than the initial build and you quickly find roads are easily subsidized by property taxes.

Even in rural areas? Even if we add in the cost of maintaining infrastructure that runs under the road surface (water, sewer, and gas)?

I live in a very rural area and I had a few minutes so I calculated it.

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.

> (water, sewer, and gas)?

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.

> pipes for those will last 100 years, easily

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.

I live in a semi-rural area. There's no utility gas near me; we're too sparse for that to make sense. I'd guess most of the houses have big propane tanks (i've got two 250 gallon tanks) and there's several different companies that will come out and fill the tanks. In the nearby urban area, there's utility gas, but then they're trying to outlaw that for indoor air quality reasons.

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.

They are not subsidized, they are an infrastructure common good that is financed with taxes.

It depends. Where I live the roads in our neighborhoods are paid for by the town (property taxes) and many roads that run through the town are paid for by the county (income taxes) and then the highways are paid for by the state in part via tolls and other ones by the Federal Government via taxes.

There are two sides to this coin. The roads need repair continually and resurfacing eventually, yes. What happens when property values and the local economy begin to deteriorate instead of prosper? All those utilities and public rights of way still need those repairs, but there's no appetite to raise property taxes, and the tax base is dwindling, and there's little reason to keep paying the mortgage on a depreciating house, especially once 2/3rds of your street is gone.

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...

You abandon it. Detroit did this for example.

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.

NotJustBikes covered this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

I live in Montreal; many of the concrete structures in my city are crumbling and decaying due to the constant freeze/thaw temperature cycling that they're exposed to. I wonder if the self-healing property of this new advanced concrete would help to avoid some of the cracking & flaking we're seeing in constructions from the 60s & 70s.

Only if you take out the rebar. Concrete is porous, water penetrates to the rebar inside, the rebar rusts and expands, cracking the concrete. But if you remove the rebar, you remove much of the tensile strength of the structure, which means you need to use way more concrete to compensate (via the sheer compressive force of its own weight).

What about those new materials for rebar? Like fiberglass? What do you think of them?

Not the parent. My understanding is metal rebar is the cheapest. You need a lot of rebar in modern concrete construction.

I live in Montreal too, and while all what you say is true ... the same is not true for the xUSSR cold cities I lived before immigration. So quality makes difference. Also planing and designing for less maintenance. Concrete structures from the same era across xUSSR are in way better shape.

Montreal has infrastructure problems because of systemic corruption with the local Mafia.

To think that the USSR had better infrastructure (less corruption) than modern day corrupt places like Montreal is a brutal shock.

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