Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure we disagree. You use the gravel rural roads to get to the nearest paved road. So rarely are you going more than a few miles on gravel, then you hit a paved road which you travel for the many miles to where you are going. Most of the roads are still unpaved, but you spend most of your driving time on the paved roads.

View on HN

Errr, not in the rural area I grew up in. Gravel driveways are super common, gravel roads not so much.

To give some specifics: I only remember driving down an actual gravel road (like, for public use) a single time. In 18 years. Even my friends who lived >30min from the nearest "city" (~10k population) had paved roads all the way.

But that is just my own experience. Areas with a different climate or geography might be a totally different story. My hometown area is relatively flat, lots of farmland, and rarely gets severe winter weather.

FWIW in non-rural Canada we sometimes have gravel roads in towns twice that 10k size and in the metro area of a multi million inhabitant city (of which there are not all that many in Canada :)).

Not saying it's common. I don't have to drive over one of those but I have had to when there was construction on our regular route. It's right off the main road leading into town from the highway.

Here’s a house in San Francisco that’s on a dirt road: https://maps.app.goo.gl/UeLKZmXAcHUhTn848?g_st=com.google.ma...

What most people mean by gravel road is macadamized road, which is a gravel/aggregate material bound in crowned layers from larger rocks to smaller on top often by a tar or asphalt binder or at least through compaction. There are true gravel roads in some rural areas, but, thankfully, I've rarely encountered them.

Oh yes, my mistake, I was inferring the wrong conclusion from your first comment.

> Most of the roads are still unpaved, but you spend most of your driving time on the paved roads.

Yeah I definitely agree with that. I imagine if you were to look at my county's roads from a satellite, it'd be something like the (grid-shaped) veins of a leaf — the thick, prominent veins are the paved roads, providing the structure, while the thinner, branching veins are the gravel roads that run between them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com