Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads | Hacker News Reader

Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

citylab.com

223 pointsatomatica138 comments

I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than deteriorated pavement and have much lower maintenance costs.

I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch, but I agree that, outside of cities, most routes don't need to be paved - you can safely travel 50 mph on a flat, straight gravel road. Of course the main arteries - Hwy 52, Hwy 20, I-80, and many others need to stay maintained. But there are so many small roads that, although quaint and a pleasure to drive, are probably unnecessary from a utilitarian/practical point of view.

The problem with gravel roads is that after a heavy rain a lot of potholes appear and some of them can be pretty big, it's relatively ok during the day travel, but driving at night will most certainly cause a lot of car damage and accidents in a long run.

You're right. But the cost is still lower than fixing potholes in asphalt due to wear & tear, freezing and thawing, and slippery ice is less of a problem too.

Not surprisingly, most Iowa folks are good drivers in bad weather. Generally it's avoided altogether. When it has to be done, most people are smart enough to slow down and be careful, or pull over and wait it out. There will still be accidents, but less cars slide off icy gravel roads since they seldom exist.

The cost to the government may be lower than fixing potholes in asphalt, but not necessarily to the people driving cars.

So you're saying the total cost is lower, and borne only by the people incurring it, not every taxpayer?

I... uh... were you disagreeing with the person above you?

No he didn't say the total cost is lower, he said one side is lower and one higher. He was completely ambiguous (and I have no additional knowledge to add) about which cost changed more.

The political cost of accidents and other car damage far exceeds the political cost of a diffuse tax burden for roads which everybody generally agrees are necessary.

Yeh gravel shifts significantly once you get pools of water forming. Gravel roads need annual levelling work even for low traffic routes.

But that cost is cheaper than repaving right?

In simple terms of time and money, yes. But in terms of not producing mountains of asphalt, especially.

It's merely hot and dusty work, it doesn't stink at all.

But wouldn't driving a road grader down the route, even once a year, be cheaper than repaving every couple of years? Just in material cost it should be cheaper, not to mention cheaper equipment (grader v. paver+dump trucks) and staffing. I fully confess, however, that I have no objective numbers.

I live on a gravel road, and I can tell you one thing for certain. Vehicle maintenance costs are noticeably higher when routinely driving on gravel roads. I have to replace brakes and suspension components much more frequently than friends and family who live on paved roads. Also, if you are not careful about washing your vehicle to routinely get the rock dust off, your vehicle will be prone to early rust issues.

I'm from North Dakota, and yeah, I would rather drive on gravel than ill-maintained pavement. ND has had to go the other way in the west because of the large amount of traffic[1] and pave and maintain some roads that would normally not merit it.

I am actually a little ticked that the northern states are not doing research on alternate materials / surfacing technology.

1) western North Dakota now has traffic such that I find Minneapolis / St. Paul during rush hour relaxing in comparison. I would hope for more rail, but they seem to keep crashing and I guess a pipeline isn't going to happen.

Minnesota does a significant amount of research on road surface materials. There is a section of I94 northwest of the Twin Cities that has three segments of highway, and traffic can be diverted onto one of the segments to test new road surfaces. Here's the MN DOT site with some test videos: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnroad/testcells/mainline.html (thrilling stuff).

Now that I'm in MA, I have heard several people say that concrete highways do not last through the winter, despite the large number of concrete-type highways in good condition in MN. Maybe this is the result of careful local road surface research? Roads are certainly better in MN than they are in MA, even though MN has colder and snowier winters. That could just be anti-highway spending sentiment from the big dig though...

Another Midwesterner transplant to MA here -- colder in the winter is actually better for highways. Up and down around the freezing point all winter like Massachusetts does produces massive frost heave that Minnesota roads just don't need to contend with.

Building good road-bed underneath helps enormously. Comparing the roads in Maine and Quebec, in Maine it's a mess of frost-heaves and constant repavement. In contrast, the Canadians rip up an old road down to ledge and build back a solid foundation - when a section of road gets rebuilt, it lasts 15-20 years.

I had always heard that ND had all concrete interstates (the only state with no asphalt interstates, in fact) because of the harsh winters.

> I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch

I read that differently than you, I think. I read it not as "we don't need roads" but as "we don't need all of the roads we currently have, we can get rid of some of them." I don't know if that's true, even with reduced demand, there are a lot of small towns that only have one main road going in or out of them. (I also am from Iowa.)

A related question is whether (and how) you make the people in those towns bear the cost of the town existing.

Lots of small towns are nice and scenic. Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear.

> Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear.

In a big city with rising rents, people who already live somewhere ~have a right to be there~ and shouldn't have to go. In a small town, apparently, there's no possible reason people would want to stay.

It's merely a question of how heavily we subsidize their lifestyle with infrastructure & other spending from the state/federal purse, which ultimately comes from economically productive cities.

One of the things we currently do, through differential housing prices, is send retirees to small towns with dead economies. They get a pension, Social Security, and Medicare, and that income is often the sole thing keeping the town afloat. In more distant reaches (I'm thinking Appalachia and parts of the South), generous welfare policies have enabled people to stay in this excess housing capacity despite the lack of jobs.

But here's the thing - there are costs to this strategy, like greenhouse gasses and children/grandchildren that have to move away and human capital going to waste, and these people could just as easily have public services provided in a metropolitan area where it's much cheaper to reach them all and provide a good quality of life.

The phenomena shows up even at the state level - https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://... but it's much more stark when you start at an older town in the Eastern half of the country and make your way to a productive population center.

Hey, we have a fiscal union, unlike the EU; These places aren't Greece because of all those payments, and I don't support turning them into Greece, but because we have that union it's also on us to make deliberate decisions that concentrate less of the population in Stavrodromi and more in Berlin. The game-theoretically natural strategy of utilizing the entirety of the existing housing stock (stratified by income) no matter how decrepit the location, is a bit of a local optima, and better arrangements are not difficult.

Isn't Berlin a net-taker compared to other major German cities?

Even if it is I think the relevant question here is more: does an elderly person on social security, pension, and medicaide have a greater aggregate cost to federal, state, and local governments in Berlin or in Stravadova (I'm not sure if I got that right)?

It'd be interesting to see if perhaps it's better for the feds if they're in rural towns but not the states.

In Albany, NY where I'm from I used to live right near a major hospital and college Albany Medical Center. And there were helicopters flying to it three or four times a day. I'm sure some of those helicopter rides out to taxi those requiring medical assistance are being borne by tax payers. It's a pretty complex question to wrap your head around when there are so many variables. Does an elderly person living in NYC produce a small drag on the economy because they're not contributing as much as the average young professional and increase the cost of rent for those people?

Yeah, your first paragraph is what I was getting at there (but why be clear about it when there is an opportunity to be hackneyed?).

You don't have a right to unlimited quantities of other people's money to support you being there. If we could pull all support for communities which are a persistent drain then maybe you could argue you had a "right to be there" (without subsidies).

We really have much bigger social problems than insufficient subsidies to people who choose of their own volition to live in places which are expensive for everyone else to maintain.

I don't think I heard him saying that incumbent renters in a city have a legally-enforceable right of any kind to their apartments.

Maybe he didn't say that, but the War Emergency Tenant Protection act does say otherwise, at least in the Empire state. (Which war emergency? Why, World War II, of course.) San Francisco's pretty similar.

Not that this has too much direct impact on roads, though :P

>~have a right to be there~

Rent control causes landlords to fail to realize hypothetical profits; government-subsidized sprawl wastes everyone's money.

and a lot of those small towns are still active and are gathering centers for a large area producing product to be shipped to urban areas - towns disappear on their own, no need to be forced

Well, I went ahead and read up on Charles Marohn a bit, and... I think your reading of him is a lot closer to what he believes than mine was.

My first thought on reading the post was to ask whether an analysis of roads strictly in terms of aggregate capacity even makes sense? It seems to me you have to ask where people are, where they need to go and why. Between any two travel points you can perform a capacity analysis, but doing so in the aggregate would, I think, shortchange a lot of smaller places.

Another Midwesterner, here (Minnesota, with family in Iowa and South Dakota). I think you're correct on the potential to shortchange a lot of the smaller towns. For example, the high school my dad went to (a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away) has since been consolidated with 2 other school districts, so some of the demand for roads has shifted to more of the main highways instead of a lot of the smaller, more rural roadways. Same thing happened to the school districts my cousins went to in South Dakota. Now, for the most part, they travel on I90 and I29 to Sioux Falls. I think the gp is correct in saying that "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a hyperbole. But I'd be curious to see what their DOT's plans are for collecting data on that capacity usage, and how it will play out, politically, if there are serious proposals to start to rein in spending on rural road upkeep in low usages places.

Fellow Iowan here. I have traveled much faster than 50 mph on gravel roads; straight or not. Definitely a cheaper option that should be preferred in some cases. Even in in the more populated cities, CR, Des Moines, etc... existing road maintenance is always terrible.

I don't know that anecdotal evidence about driving conditions is really a great way to talk about driving on gravel. I'm also an Iowan who grew up on gravel roads and frequently drove faster than 50 mph, but if I'm being totally honest I recognize that it wasn't a great idea. On more than one occasion a loose patch of gravel or surprise deer has nearly sent me into a tree at 60 mph.

Sure, the people who frequently use those roads are the ones who will know them best and be able to predict their condition, but your stopping/maneuvering power is so much worse on gravel that assuming an average speed of anything greater than, maybe even near 50 mph seems pretty reckless.

LOL; you are right there. I was of course I young wreckless driver at the time. Depending on the road condition, visibility and area speeds on gravel probably should be anywhere from 25 to 50mph during good weather.

Both gravel and blacktop are lower cost options that can be used in low traffic areas though. There are certainly large stretches of very low traffic high maintenance roads all over Iowa.

For many of us, the day we were no longer a wreckless driver was also the day we became a less reckless driver.

At least one can hope so!

> Both gravel and blacktop are lower cost options that can be used in low traffic areas though

Blacktop is asphalt (what roads are normally made of). And requires an underlying concrete layer to lengthen it's lifetime (asphalt is a lot "softer" than concrete and more susceptible to ground movement, erosion by the elements and friction from tires, etc...)

Asphalt roads are a type of concrete.

In my area, paved, minor county roads certainly don't have a Portland cement concrete base layer, when they are paving they might add some gravel during the surface preparation and grading, but that is about it. As you say, the ground movement shows through, and they are more susceptible to erosion.

Here too. One of the gravel roads near me was recently paved and they simply flattened it, added some sort of cement + water spray (as opposed to the usual multiple inches thick layer of concrete) and the asphalt placed on top of that. It is definitely better than gravel, but it's already showing some wear in places.

> And requires an underlying concrete layer to lengthen it's lifetime

Depends on the underlying soil. In north Texas it's common when asphalt is laid to pour a Portland cement concrete base, though many roads and highways are just straight concrete. In south Florida, the roadbed is usually just packed limestone, because the land has a rock layer no more than 50 feet down and the sandy soil is pretty incompressible, unlike the constantly expanding and contracting clay in Texas.

You would do excellent transporting nitroglycerin over washboard [1] [2]!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washboarding [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Fear . The protagonist drove a load of nitroglycerin over washboard by going fast enough to float over the bumps.

I spent some time doing work in rural NW Iowa, and I remember the sheer number of gravel roads that are run between the fields. (They are great for running on too)

How does the maintenance per mile between gravel roads and paved roads compare? Does this article apply to both?

From northern Wisconsin here - I always had the impression growing up that gravel roads became gutted with potholes from the snow after a few winters if not maintained, and generally pretty horrible. Especially in WI, our small roads are "milk roads" where they drive the heavy milk trucks in for collection.

Certainly like the idea of cutting back unnecessary expenses, but I'd also like to see some data on this.

In Australia, there are lots of dirt tracks, and it's standard to regrade them ever year after the rainy season. (At which point they're pretty much impassable.)

But those are dirt roads, which are not the same thing as a proper, old-fashioned gravel Macadam road. They can be excellent, and are pretty easy to maintain --- if potholes develop, fill them promptly with the right grade of gravel --- but don't do high speed traffic well. (Gravel is flung up by the wheels, which was why they started gluing it down with tar --- hence tarmac, or tarmacadam.)

Can find a good video of a grader in action, so here's a bad one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFoN5LD0Q-w

In the parts of the US discussed in this thread - there really isn't a rainy season. They get moisture pretty much year round - snow in the winter, rain in the summer.

So more frequent gradings are needed if the traffic is heavy enough.

Surely you have frost heaves in Wisconsin? Aren't paved roads severely potholed by your winters as well?

oh, definitely! simply trying to remember back to what the gravel roads were like (been a while since I've lived there)

I seem to recall they get pretty awful, and ones that are not proper county roads become impassable at normal driving speeds

http://www.maine.gov/mdot/csd/mlrc/documents/pdf/Richmond199...

So for comparison of 50-yr maintenance costs (in Maine):

- Low-use gravel roads are ~50% of paved road maintenance cost.

- Moderate-use gravel roads are ~350% of paved road maintenance cost.

Yikes.

TL;DR Road maintenance is expensive, and the bill is about to come due.

And the scary thing is that it's not just road maintenance. It's sewer/water, electricity, and bridges, too. There has been so much exurbian expansion in the past two decades where the initial infrastructure costs were paid by the developer but then handed over to the town/county/state for maintenance. The municipalities count on property taxes to cover the cost, but with A) the real estate crash in many markets, and B) a general recession and a move of many younger earners back to urban areas, that money just isn't there.

An untraveled gravel road is likely more expensive to maintain than a paved one, long term, when you factor in watersheds, plant growth, and vehicular damage caused by the road.

You also need to take into account that many of these roads are used to transport agricultural products, so the roads are in effect an agricultural subsidy (though not necessarily a bad one).

Those gravel roads also need some upkeep, though.

I also grew up in Iowa, and the difference between the gravel roads I took to get to my friends houses there, and the gravel roads we have here in AZ is night and day.

About a decade ago, I remember reading about a trial application near me for an unpaved road hardening agent called pavezyme, which I also believe was trialed not long ago in AZ.

Do you know if any in your area might have been a part of that, and if so, how it worked out?

An adjustment in the allocation of funds would allow counties to bring more road graders and operators online. Right now I believe they simply dont have the capacity to do proper maintenance on all of the level A roads on a frequent enough basis. This might also allow for the conversion of some state highway routes and level B roads to level A roads.

Are you sure about 50 mph being a safe speed? It doesn't take much washboarding to all but eliminate traction.

It's usually possible to evaluate the condition of large sections of road at once (since they do maintenance that way). So you don't often unexpectedly hit the washboarding at high speed.

It also tends to be the case that going faster can reduce the effects of the washboarding (given a reasonable vehicle).

>It also tends to be the case that going faster can reduce the effects of the washboarding (given a reasonable vehicle).

offtopic: reminded about this novel - the reasonable vehicle was a truck with several tonnes of nitroglycerin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Fear

ontopic: anyway we'll soon be flying in quad-/octo-copters and the open low-populated spaces like Iowa will be among the most suitable areas for the initial application of those "flying cars".

I'm from Wisconsin. We don't seem to have a problem keeping our roads paved and functional. Assuming I didn't screw up any math reading these tables:

  Iowa: 114,429 miles of roads
  Wisconsin: 115,145 miles of roads
  
  Source: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/hm10.cfm
  
  Unpaved Functional Length:
  Iowa: 13,363 miles
  Wisconsin: 566 miles
  
  Paved Functional Length:
  Iowa: 81,273 miles
  Wisconsin: 102,482 miles
  
  Source: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/hm51.cfm

I think you need a better Department of Transportation, because even the population difference shouldn't really account for that huge of a gap.

  Population:
  Iowa: 3.107 million
  Wisconsin: 5.758 million
  
  Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iowa+wisconsin+population

  Square miles:
  Iowa: 56,270 sq mi
  Wisconsin: 65,500 sq mi
  
  Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wisconsin+square+miles
  Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iowa+square+miles

I grew up in Wisconsin and went to college in Iowa and the one thing I noticed between the two was how horrible the Iowa DOT was.

In Wisconsin we know that every year there will be snow. Lots and lots of snow. In 18 years of living there I never once remember a time where there was more than half a day of our rural road not being plowed. I remember seeing plows driving around when there was no snow falling because they knew it was coming and as soon as the first flake hit the ground the buckets went down.

In Iowa, ever year there were multiple times when I'd be stuck at home, unable to get to school or work because the roads weren't plowed. Major Highways! I'd call the DOT and their response was "we are just waiting until the snow stops so we don't have to plow multiple times." This was their response in the afternoon having not plowed all morning. One year they ran out of salt for the roads and had to use expired Seasoning Salt from a local manufacturer. Everyone complained because their car smelled like Garlic Bread. No one seemed to care about the fact that Iowa is in the Midwest and for some strange reason the people running the DOT didn't think to have adequate supplies.

Wisconsin has a huge vacation market. A large amount of road usage is by people traveling from out of state up to the north woods for hunting, fishing, camping, etc. Iowa does not have this type of road usage.

Iowa has two main highways. Hwy 80 is a shipping lane that connects Chicago to the western half of the US. Hwy 35 is a north south route going from Minneapolis/St. Paul all the way down to Austin Texas and connects a lot of major cities along the way.

Hwy 80 (and hwy 88) are used so much in Illinois that Illinois actually charges you a toll to use it. Iowa has the same traffic on 80 but does not charge a toll. One state has figured out how to pay for their road usage while the other has not. THIS is the real issue with why Iowa's DOT can't do anything right. They spend money in the wrong places, don't get enough income to pay for things they should and for some strange reason don't understand that they have a problem.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9852951...

I wonder if residual garlic had any effect on insects/pests

> you can safely travel 50 mph on a flat, straight gravel road

You obviously haven't lived on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. People book through there are much faster than 50mph. ;)

How does this work in the context of motorcycles?

Do you think motorcyclists can't travel on gravel roads? I do frequently.

Stay on the throttle.

That's what's happened in the city of Toronto and surrounding areas; some of the roads are gravel but for the most part they're paved and it's a pain in the butt when you drive on pot-holed roads. There's some suburban streets that would do better to be gravel.

When it snows, how effective is it to shovel the gravel roads?

Better, in many cases actually. The gravel mixes with the snow, and for added traction you just run a sander in your road plows (with actual sand, not that calcium chloride/salt mix they mostly use on pavement now). Fun fact about putting salt on the roads to melt snow and ice: when it gets cold enough, it starts refreezing and gets slippery than a bastard.

Gravel roads can be plowed like a regular road.

If given a choice, I think I prefer driving on poorly plowed gravel roads over well plowed paved roads in snow storms. Gravel roads don't seem to ice up as easily, and the gravel and dirt helps with traction.

Plowing gravel roads works fine.

I think the word is "plow"...

Not gravel roads but stretched dust generator.

Charles Marohn of Strong Towns (http://www.strongtowns.org/), who is quoted in the article, did a great podcast interview a while back on "how the post-World War II approach to town and city planning has led to debt problems and wasteful infrastructure investments": http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html

"The [Iowa] primary highway system makes up over 9,000 miles (14,000 km), a mere 8 percent of the U.S. state of Iowa's public road system." [0]

So while laudable, it would be very nice if North Carolina followed suit with its ~79,000 miles of maintained roads (largest of any state) [1]. But I doubt that would happen, my friend at NCDOT says the culture emphasizes building new roads (or the ones that get wiped out by hurricanes out on the outer banks), and change intersections in a manner that borders on the whimsical.

We like to build roads in challenging places, it seems [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Primary_Highway_System

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_System

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_12

North Carolina does not have the most maintained roads of any state, they have "largest state maintained highway network in the United States."

This is a function of them choosing to maintain roads at the state level instead of the county level. If you look at road miles by state [0] regardless of the actual entity that maintains them, they are 16th.

[0] http://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/

Their highway network is still pretty large, though.

Texas also has an all-state-maintained system (except for toll roads, which are private, but the free service roads are still state-maintained... and Texas tends to favor adding service roads wherever possible), and their road network is the second-largest state-maintained highway network in the US. When you compare the physical size of the two states, NC really comes off as having an excessive amount of roads.

Texas as roughly 5x the size of NC by landmass, and has approximately 3x the number of road miles. However, NC is more densely populated than TX. If you look at it by road mile per person they are almost identical.

And North Carolina places a particular emphasis on paving every road. It's pretty much impossible to find a public road in NC that has street signs and stop signs but is unpaved. The only ones I can think of offhand are in state parks. By contrast, on a recent trip through western Maryland there were about two major roads that were paved for their entire length and the rest reverted to gravel in the more remote areas.

At one point in time an extensive road system is a competitive advantage. At another, it makes less sense.

The same thing happened with Railroads during their heyday. I remember seeing an old railroad map with stops at all these small towns in Nebraska. Now, railroads are almost entirely commercial with very few passenger stops in small towns.

It makes sense that at some point you just don't have the need for so many roads. If more people move to urban or even suburban city centers, things like public transportation, ride sharing, Uber, and even self-driving vehicles start to make a lot of sense and cut down a lot on driving volume and the need for roads.

Well, to be fair, the history of railroads in the US is kinda crackheaded.

What do you mean by that?

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Pre-Amtrak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_t...

Basically, an ongoing waterfall of corruption, regulation, NIMBYism, unfair (arguably) competition from other sectors, and a lot else.

It's not quite accurate to just say "Well, passenger rail is dead" as though it was some natural progression of things--especially when you look at it working in other nations.

Show me another nation /of our geographical size/ with active well used long distance passenger rail outside of a few highly dense corridors - a hint, it doesn't exist - people will nearly always choose speed. There are very few passenger rail systems with higher than 90% farebox recovery - and none in a country of our geographical size.

That said, I'm in favor of keeping amtrak for strategic reasons (a trained pool of operating talent for national emergencies).

What kind of emergencies? Ones where we suddenly have to run a lot of passenger trains?

Ones where for a variety of reasons airspace is closed - WWII would not have been possible for us without railroads - the railroads moves huge numbers of men and materiel cross country faster than aircraft could - railroads also use much less fuel to do it than nearly any method of transport. While I cant think of a tactical situation where we couldn't airlift troops inside the continental US - the skills pool is worthwhile to keep for the 500 million a year is costs the country (a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the rest of the federal government).

WWII wasn't possible without the railroads because the interstate highways hadn't been built yet. They are now, and as a result our rail network has become useless for personnel and troop transport. Sure, we can press our amazing freight network into service for logistics, but there's no reason to prop up Amtrak to keep those skills and infrastructure around, since the freight carriers show no signs of being in danger of extinction anytime soon.

But that's freight. If there's really a situation where we need to move vast numbers of /people/ around the country, the few dozen passenger consists that Amtrak owns or leases are just not gonna do the job. It would need to be the highways (probably pressing transit and school buses into service) or nothing.

It's possible that the NE corridor services could be helpful in an emergency, but for the vast majority of the country, the idea that Amtrak could be pressed into service as anything other than a minor sideline during a major evacuation or emergency is a just a weird fantasy.

On the west coast Amtrak is more of an amusement park ride than a practical transportation option. If you want to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles the Amtrak trip planner has you on two trains and two buses before you arrive after nine hours. If you want to take a train the whole way there's only one each day and it takes 12 hours (as compared to about 6.5 driving).

It's kind of a joke. We should either get serious about a rail system or kill Amtrak altogether.

Well a high speed rail like the TGV going ~300-350km/h would cut that down to roughly 2.5 hours, admittedly that is still higher than going by air, but a lot better than 12 hours.

Flying isn't any faster than 2.5 hours once you figure in the extra time at the airport.

In any event I would be happy to take a conventional train if took less than about eight hours. I don't like flying and the drive is grueling, particularly in traffic.

The problem is AFAIK Amtrak doesn't own any track on the west coast. It's all single track, routing is optimized for freight, and passenger trains have a lower priority than freight trains.

For starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

A lot of the removal of rail capacity has been short-sighted, and often for the gain of automobile manufacturers.

Don't conflate streetcars and interurban's with all passenger rail.

Per capita driving may have peaked, but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road.

> but as long as the capita is still growing there will still be more and more cars on the road.

As long as those drivers can afford the tax burden to maintain the aging infrastructure, sure.

Transportation infrastructure spending at the federal level is currently 3%.[1] You could always argue that is low due to a lack of investment, but it pales in comparison to federal entitlement spending (59%).

I'd be much more worried about the tax burden due to entitlement spending than I would about transportation infrastructure.

[1]http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-fede...

The highway trust fund goes broke this month:

http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker

It would cost $3.6 trillion to bring infrastructure back up to par:

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/time-fix-americas-infrastructur...

> Unfortunately, highway fund revenues have been insufficient to fully fund existing highway spending, with Congress authorizing billions of dollars in transfers from the US Treasury’s General Fund into the Highway Trust Fund to keep it solvent, including a $10.8 billion transfer last August. It has ongoing funding needs that will continue unless a more permanent solution can be found, either by raising the national gas tax (which hasn’t been increased since 1993), or some other funding measure. The Congressional Budget Office expects the Highway Trust Fund to have an annual shortfall of $15 billion.

Gasoline prices in the US are very low compared to what you pay in Europe, maybe if the government increased the taxation of gasoline they could make up for that shortfall. In Germany they added ~17 billion to the budget that way per year since 1999. With the usage pattern in the US you could probably make significantly more.

I don't disagree. We should be raising taxes on fuel to pay for infrastructure, but people are stupid and politicians prefer to stay in office, so raising taxes is verboten.

The social good supported by entitlement spending is sick people not dying and poor people not starving or being homeless.

The social "good" supported by highways is geographical separation between the middle class and the poor (which largely means the white and everyone else.)

  > which largely means the white and everyone else.

Ah, that explains why highways only exist in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Roads

> AND everyone else

They weren't saying what you are suggesting they were saying.

Wow.

So how do you let roads "deteriorate and go away"? Wouldn't there be huge unsafe potholes in the transition?

What kind of roads would they abandon? I didn't click through to all the references, but this article doesn't give any solutions.

Huge chunks of the midwest are a paved checkerboard of roads spaced at 1 mile intervals. Many of these get 3-5 cars passing a day, if that. There is no need for a lot of these to be paved, as they serve as field access roads. The houses off these roads are farm houses, and most of the farmers I know don't mind either way if it's a gravel or paved road. Some actually prefer gravel, as in the winter, when it is icy, the gravel can provide better traction, and the county doesn't do a good job plowing.

That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are definitely roads checkerboarded at 1 mile intervals, but most are gravel in between some paved ones.

This may vary state to state. I know that in IL it seems that well over half of them are paved, or tarred gravel. The southern end of IL has less of this tho... but the amount paved is increasing. When I was a kid visiting relatives, I learned to drive on a lot of gravel roads, but heading down there for a funeral not long ago, most of the gravel I learned to drive on is paved now.

Paving rate varies but can be quite high. The one mile grid though is quite prevalent.

It's not so much the roads as the BRIDGES.

Iowa's road map was drawn from afar, before any surveyors could look at it, so there are a lot of bridges keeping the road grid continuous over rivers, creeks and dry streambeds.

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The article is referring to Iowa not Kansas.

The article has a map showing which states have already hit peak traffic; does anyone know of a per-municipality or per-county list?

I'm really curious about whether this has happened in San Francisco.

Yep, it's unclear how it's measured and if the metric applied correctly. For example, in Seattle traffic jams get only worse over years. Clearly it hasn't "peaked". Yet map from the article shows that it peaked in the Washington state as a whole.

Hilariously, the graph in the article is "Vehicle Miles Travelled" not "Hours spent in vehicle" which could be increasing while the other decreases.

Yeah, something like "average highway speed" would be a better metric.

I think the a lot of places should focus on expanding major roads/thoroughfares, and cities.. But look into bricks/dirt/gravel for country/side roads. would be nice if after self-driving cars, comes self-flying aerocars, cause then we won't need roads at all except in the city where air traffic would get super bogged down.

Related: I need to confirm the trend held, but as of a year or two ago, US FAA RITA data showed peak aviation fuel in 2000. Total departures and passenger miles have been higher since, but due to smaller and more fully loaded aircraft.

By 2010- 2012 or so, actual fuel use was ~50% of year 2000 forecast estimates.

I've always thought that total vehicle miles are capped by the availability of gas. Since fracking has expanded that supply, at least in the short term, I'd expect those mileage charts to start upticking again.

Total vehicle miles are goverened by both oil prices and demographics. You're seeing a huge shift in demographics currently in the US, which will drive down vehicle miles.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2015/03/dot-vehicle-miles-...

> However gasoline prices are just part of the story. The lack of growth in miles driven over the last 7 years was probably also due to the lingering effects of the great recession (lack of wage growth), the aging of the overall population (over 55 drivers drive fewer miles) and changing driving habits of young drivers.

Gasoline usage is pretty inelastic in the US:

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19191

This may make sense in Iowa but it makes no sense in California. Gravel roads would would slow the effective max speed down to a crawl which would further exasperate traffic. If anything we need a higher driving speeds.

Higher speeds generally increase traffic rather than decrease it, as following distance increases (or, if it doesn't, traffic due to wrecks will slow you down anyway).

That being said, I live in CA and would love a model much like Germany, with unrestricted freeways in the rural areas and speed limits around 15-20 mph in towns and cities. Going down I-5 to socal? Sure, do 150. Driving in a town where there could be people walking, cyclists, vehicles stopping often, etc,? Maybe 15 makes more sense.

Of course, not giving a license to just anyone with a pulse would be a start. My grandmother (lovely woman, but 91 and clearly past her driving years) failed her written driving test a few weeks ago. What did the DMV do? They _extended_ her license another two months, for reasons that escape me. "You can continue to drive despite a demonstrated ignorance of driving law" is pretty much what we're saying there.

Also, California is big. A lot of it probably resembles Iowa more than SF in terms of road infrastructure - ever head out to the more remote parts?

The German Autobahn (equivalent to Interstate highways here) is entirely limited-access, high-speed (minimum speed limit 100 km/h; often no speed limit).

The German Bundesstrasse (equivalent to U.S. or state highways?) does have highly variable speed limits, as you describe, and I found them correspondingly maddening to drive on, due to the incessant need to accelerate or decelerate.

Indeed - in my view this correlates to one of the best places in the world to drive. Variable limits seem more logical than assuming one speed can always be the best for current conditions. Road throughput (vehicle-miles per hour) can be maximized at a lower speed when traffic is heavy, so limits are reduced. Conversely, when traffic is light the minimization of individual travel time can be prioritized, so limits can be raised.

Really does depend on the location of the road. Yeah, turning I-80 to gravel would be a bad idea, but what about the multitudinous little mountain roads? Speed limits there tend to be in the 25-35mph range anyways, and are lightly traveled. There would be little effect on traffic aside from concentrating the expensive parts of maintenance on the roads that actually need it.

I briefly studied in South Dakota and Iowa without a car and it was a living nightmare.

Relying on friends and "taxis", I had to go through negative temperatures to get a simple can of soda.

After that, I could never complain about BART.

Cars are pretty much a requirement in a rural area like that.

But on the plus side, cars are a lot easier to own in those areas. Parking is usually free/cheap. Traffic is very low, etc.

One thing I learned, whether accurate or not, from the original SimCity is road maintenance is expensive. I almost invariably ended up peaking city size as the roads entered a constant state of disrepair.

A bit old, but still relevant - http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf

I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that if heavily loaded trucks are causing a disproportionate amount of damage they should be taxed at a rate which allows for proper maintenance of those roads.

You know all those weigh stations you see on the road and don't have to stop at?

They're not decorative.

Trucks are taxed more already. The problem is legislatures using those tax revenues for other pork and then claiming to not have enough money for roads.

Semi trucks reduce the quality of the roads much more than lighter vehicles do. The slightly greater tax they pay doesn't begin to make up for it.

http://fhwicsint01.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/hcas/addendum.cfm

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