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How good are American roads?

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193 points chmaynard | 4 comments | 20 Nov 24 14:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.009s | source
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xyst ◴[20 Nov 24 15:17 UTC] No.42194608[source]▶
> 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.

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O5vYtytb ◴[20 Nov 24 15:35 UTC] No.42194800[source]▶
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...

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1. arethuza ◴[20 Nov 24 15:51 UTC] No.42195019[source]▶
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.
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2. kube-system ◴[20 Nov 24 15:54 UTC] No.42195054[source]▶
And almost 20% of the US is a former part of eastern Russia with really low density. :)
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3. arethuza ◴[20 Nov 24 16:27 UTC] No.42195520[source]▶
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?

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4. kube-system ◴[20 Nov 24 16:37 UTC] No.42195639{3}[source]▶
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.