How good are American roads?

> The US has the largest road network in the world, about 4.3 million miles of road, and Americans drive much more than residents in most other countries

This is insane. This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation. We spend trillions in building, subsidizing, and maintaining this infrastructure. Only for this cycle to repeat itself in 25 years as the roads/highways breakdown and people move further out (induced demand). Then there’s the billions in lost productivity due to traffic. Significant decrease in activity and increase in obesity.

Then the increased emissions from vehicles result in poor air quality. Then there is decreasing water and food quality as tire and brake particles make its way into the water and food supplies.

You're right that car centric transportation is entrenched, but this is the wrong statistic to prove that point. The US is a huge country and the overall density of roads (km/100km2) is lower than Europe.

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

man is measure of all things. its density of people is lower too.

You should compare EU to the US before you comment on roads. The US is much larger than any EU country and so of course we will have a lot more roads.

Europe isn't a country though - difficult to do a comparison as a about 40% of Europe is the European part of Russia which has a much lower road density than the US, mind you European Russia is going to be the part that has the highest road density of that country.

Couldn’t driving more be a sign of a strong and productive economy? Other large countries like Russia or Australia or something that drive less have smaller GFP as well.

Can we make a better comparison of how much Americans drive, plus total travel, vs total travel for other countries of similar density and size?

And almost 20% of the US is a former part of eastern Russia with really low density. :)

For your critique, you'd want to break out urban+suburban road networks from regional and rural ones. The US was a frontier country that grew on top of continent-spanning trails with pockets of community cropping up everywhere there were agricultural, material, or strategic resources, or the need for a travel rest. It's to be expected that we have many miles of road and mostly a good thing that our communities are so well-connected and traversable.

It's what happens inside those communities, when they could be designed with better concern for local community or sustainability, that warrants the critique. And it's a good and fair critique. Just not one directly spoken to by the quoted statistic.

I imagine you'd have to weigh this against alternative forms of transit. The freight rail industry is the largest in the world and directly represents (presumably productive) economic activity. Personal transit makes up a much larger percentage of road usage, even in metro areas with healthy public transit. It's hard not to see this as some form of inefficiency.

The National Forest Service alone maintains 265,000 miles of roads.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technology/infrastructure/ro...

> This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation

How? We’re big, rich and sparsely populated. I’m not saying that means we must have this system. But the longest road network doesn’t prove that’s wrong.

I wonder if it would make sense to base the comparison on road network density in areas that are above some threshold for population density?

i.e. Try and measure how many roads there are in areas where most people actually live?

Only if you're trying to intentionally cherry pick the data. Population density inherently affects road networks, and that will be reflected in the data.

This is called an "Argument from Incredulity" and it's a fallacy. Pointing to a large number without any basis of comparison does not make any statement about whether it is too large or too small. You also have billions of cells in your body! Is that too many?