How good are American roads?

Amazing that Minneapolis tops the city road quality chart, despite having the harshest winters. Do southern cities not build their roads so robustly? Or are they not maintained?

I'm guessing not maintained. Minneapolis is forced to spend a lot more on roads just to keep things acceptable. They also have a lot of voters with a memory of how bad things get after a bad winter and so politicians don't dare short road funding let they be voted out over a few potholes. (I've seen roads in Minneapolis that were more pothole than surface)

the south is generally a poor region with terrible public sand social services

> Do southern cities not build their roads so robustly? Or are they not maintained?

Yes

3 of the bottom 4 cities are in California.

I mean, yea? CA has the highest real poverty rate (SPM) in the whole country.

Some of that won't translate as well to road quality due to the fixed cost portion of road repair (because the OPM rate isn't the highest (though still quite high)), but some of it will due to the not fixed cost portion (labor, etc).

But it definitely affects prioritization. People won't care as much about road quality relative to other things.

Maintenence. I grew up in the north (Michigan) and spent time in Massachusetts, living in Texas now it's very different how infrastructure is funded. I'd call it a result of the general politics, no one wants to spend money on infrastructure.

I believe the latest stat I heard was that over 70% of the roads & alleys in the city where I live are >40 years old. That also means all of the infrastructure under the roads (water, conduits, etc.) are also >40 years old.

Not all Southern states.

Florida is an outlier in road quality both anecdotally and from this page - almost equal in quality to blue states of New Hampshire and Maine. Non-interstate Florida roads drop to 74%, lower than Alabama (which has less interstate roadways than Florida) but higher than all other Southern states and most Northern states.

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/florida-ranks-among-top-5....

This does not make a great argument for California. It appears as a failed state compared to others.

There’s a joke in Minnesota about having only two seasons, winter and road construction. As soon as the ground thaws, road construction starts up all over Minnesota.

St Paul is right next door to Mpls and has absolutely terrible roads, but they’re improving. St Paul has full road replacement on a 120 year schedule because they got drunk on TIF over the past few decades and don’t have the money for to schedule full road replacements every 60 years.

St Paul does enough road maintenance and pothole filling that it owns an asphalt batch plant: https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/public-works/street-maint...

My grandpa used to work for the MN highway department. That isn't a joke, it was reality for them. Either the plows are on the truck and they are plowing snow, or the plows are not on and they are fixing roads.

Roads are a tiny % of any government budget. St Paul could have the money to do more if they wanted, and it wouldn't be much of a total budget increase. However it would still increase taxes and so people should debate if it is worth the cost.

When I was driving in Minneapolis a few years ago, you couldn’t drive more than 20 miles an hour because the roads were so bad around the neighborhood. I wonder if they fixed that.

Winnipeg has notoriously bad roads throughout the city, and the harsh winters are always the excuse. But Minneapolis and Fargo don't seem to have these problems!

I think Minneapolis has a citywide 20 mph speed limit for non-arterial roads. They might consider the rough road a feature.

But it may explain road quality, which makes sense to me. MN has some of the lowest poverty rates and is on the opposite end of the scale there