How good are American roads?

> Interestingly, in all cases urban roads are worse quality than rural roads, presumably because they see higher traffic than rural roads.

There's more infrastructure under urban roads. Crews come in to fix some utility, shred a section of a lane, patch it poorly with dissimilar materials, and leave.

Rural roads are often unpaved. The local authority has to come by regularly with a grade to redo things or they become unusable quickly. Overall this is by far the cheapest way to have a road, but it doesn't scale to high use and city folks demand something that makes less dust. Rural roads also includes minimum maintance roads which demand 4wd (real 4wd, many SUVs will have trouble) when the weather is nice and a winch is a must when things get rainy or snowy.

Though given his definition of quality I expect he is actually ignoring all the real rural roads and only talking about major roads which while they get less traffic than urban roads are maintained to similar standards.

In my area the rural roads are typically asphalt. This part of the country receives a lot of precipitation and cold weather and our soils are pretty soft.

They stay in good shape for years, with little maintenance. There aren't many patches because there aren't many utilities. Truck traffic tends to gravitate to the highways, and car and ag traffic are low impact.

Maybe area-dependent? I grew up in an extraordinarily rural area in Tennessee. Most roads were paved (asphalt). Even ones out in the middle of nowhere.

The conditions of some of the remote roads might not have been great, mind you... and some seemed "thinner" almost, maybe paved a long time ago?

You're probably also going to have far fewer massive vehicles on those rural roads. More things like pickups yes, but probably considerably fewer semi-teicks and busses and fire trucks and cement mixers what not. Those big trucks passing through are going to stick to interstates far more often when going through rural areas.

I think it's a snow thing - asphalt seems to wear down really fast in rural PA, probably from freezing at nights and snow and ice, so you can't do paving as cheaply out in the mountains or so on. The county dumps gravel down once a year and let's passing traffic wear it smoother over time, but it sucks to drive on fresh.

On average yea but when a rural road is neglected it's far far worse than any urban road. I'm looking at you Pennsylvania.

We have large farm machinery though.

City buses are what really shred urban roads (and winter plows)

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

There is large machinery. But does it go down the same stretch of road 20 times a day all days of the year though? May also depend on location. You ain't taking the combine down the road several times a day in the middle of winter. So you do get the wear and tear of large farm equipment, but its still probably less than an urban road and not year round.

Of course there are political factors. I have always heard that in Wisconsin many rural roads were paved to better serve dairy farmers beginning in the 1890s - and continued through the WPA program. While in Minnesota, similar rural roads remained unpaved.

Best link I could find to substantiate such a claim

https://www.uwlax.edu/currents/biking-in-the-driftless-regio....

Of course in contemporary times the high maintenance cost has many Wisconsin towns/counties considering returning to gravel.

https://www.wpr.org/economy/taxes/small-wisconsin-towns-pave...

Do those go down the road every 10-20 minutes like the poor bus service on the urban street outside my home does? And that is just the busses. Add 2-3 semi-trucks every five minutes.

Oh, and there's still farm equipment every now and then. I am in Texas after all.

Also their slow speeds and larger tires probably lead to less wear than another vehicle of the same weight traveling at normal highway speeds.

Yeah looking at any road around me it's obvious which lanes the busses prefer.

In the mid-90s, Seattle started excavating its bus-stops-on-a-slope and pouring a new concrete foundation, because the busses were warping the asphalt so badly.

I was just back there this last weekend, and you can no longer see any of the concrete - it has all been coated with asphalt. However, I assume its a rather thin layer because none of the bus stops I checked show the signs of damage that were becoming common in 90-96.

My favorite are the leaky man hole and other infrastructure covers which allow rain to wash the road bed into the pit. Then a void forms and a pothole forms. Then the muni fills the hole only for it to reappear as more road bed is washed away. Then repeat ad nauseam. I sometimes imagine a snake of asphalt all the way to the sewer plant.

Large machinery, but typically very low ground pressure. After all, that same machinery is designed to operate on arable soil without sinking or bogging down. It is my understanding that it is ground pressure more than absolute weight that correlates to road surface damage/erosion.

Absolutely. The freeze thaw cycle is brutal on asphalt in many ways. Surface cracks expand, frost heaves distort and the material itself weakens. This is before any additional damage caused by plowing or ice scraping.

Axle loading limits

Living in a rural northern CA county, the roads are paved, however many are failing. The funny this is, one county over has much better maintained roads (by the state) because they are in a different district.

Freeze thaw and Temp range. MN may experience air temps from -20 to 100 over the course of a year. And you might experience 50 degree swings in a week (-20 to +30).

> Rural roads are often unpaved.

Like the other replies have indicated, I'm not so sure this is the case? I live in very rural northwest Iowa, and while there are certainly plenty of gravel roads around here, I'm only driving on them if I'm intentionally trying to go "off the beaten path." You'll take a gravel road if you live on a farm, or you're trying to get to somewhere secluded such as a lake, campground or maybe a county park; but (imo) it's rare for the average person to drive down a gravel road just going from Point A to Point B on their daily commute.

They opened a new truck stop near me with asphalt roads. 6 months later they tore it up for concrete because the asphalt shifted into lumps where the trucks were turning cono

Montana here. Most of the dirt roads (county roads) have been paved in the 25 years I've been here however there are some left where you can drive 20 miles unpaved. Also recently in Iceland I found a few unpaved roads (or rather "the Google Lady" did. Sorry whichever rental company I used there..

Do most people in rural areas not live on a farm? Excuse my ignorance but genuine question.

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.

The people of the United States are broadly free to build a home wherever they can afford to, comrade, including on land that would otherwise be used for farming.

(Actual answer: I know a bunch of people who live in houses in the middle of seemingly-nowhere in rural Ohio, and almost none of them farm anything at all. They just seem to like the space and the quiet and the desolate isolation.

The only farmer who I know is my parents' neighbor, who has a house few miles away from their place.)

I think other explanations replying are on point. I live in a town that's surrounded by a lot of farm traffic, and most of those roads are in good shape. But there are also routes used heavily by trucks servicing fracking sites, and those roads are TRASHED.

That is a tricky question to answer. Farms need small towns scattered all over - that is where many of the teachers, accountants, mechanics, hired hands, other services, and owners of the stores that serve all of the above live. Often small towns have factories that are not farm related and those employees live someplace. Do you count those small towns as rural? Many of the above have also realized that they can buy some build a house on marginal farmland cheap and so live rural but they are working a small town job - they may have a few goats or something but it isn't how they earn their money - hard they farmers? There are also people who retire to the country, hunting cabins (not residents), camp grounds (the owner lives there), and other non-farmers living in rural areas. Parents generally transfer the farm to the kid who will inherit it over decades, and part of that is the parents move to a small house off the farm but still rural - are they living on a farm?

Depending on how you count the above you can say that most people in rural areas are not living on farms. Even if you don't count small towns residents, there are a lot of people who are not farmers living out there.

This is a reason why buses are not as cheap as they seem at first glance.

Often times, buses are favored because they require low capex (adding lines is easy, politically palatable, etc).

But in practice, on really busy bus lines with high throughput, it shreds the roads, to the point where you really need to re-pave the whole road every 10 years -- in which case, why not just put a rail line in and use a train!

Farmers are using normal semis to move the crops from the field to elsewhere on the road. Farm equipment on the road is generally unloaded.

This happens CONSTANTLY in Atlanta. They'll spend a bunch of money fixing a road, then a month later Public Works digs a huge hole and leaves a steel plate on it for a year, then patch it with either concrete that is an inch or two below the rest of the surface, or they don't pack the earth they put back and in 3 months the patch has sunk into a new pothole in a brand new road. The city has been trying to force public works to go do those things BEFORE road projects, but it's an uphill battle.

yeah, the farm vehicles usually have gigantic tires too, compared to any regular passenger vehicle

I did google "bus-stops-on-a-slope", but nothing jumped out. What are "bus-stops-on-a-slope"?

In my rural area there are tons of gravel pits so the roads take a lot of abuse. However every gravel pit ive seen here open up on a new road has been forced to spend the money on upgrading that road to handle those gravel trucks.

Certainly not. You will be lucky to find an area where 5% of the people living their are farmers or work on farms.

I think they meant that the bus stop is on a hill maybe?

Depends where you live. In my state you pretty much cannot build any kind of residence on land that is zoned for agriculture.

Part of it is funding. Highways are for the most part federally funded, and the feds can print money at will. Urban roads have to be repaired from the city budget, and user fees (fuel taxes) are nowhere near enough to keep them maintained properly.

My grandma used to live close to a road servicing an oil derrick, back in 90's Romania (so 0 infrastructure investments for probably 10 years).

At one point my family was in a Dacia 1310 (crappy and very cheap Romanian car) and we literally went very slowly (probably 10kmph) through a section where the road was basically sunk, there was a "pothole" probably 10-15m long and 80% of the road wide (both lanes), about 1m deep, I think.

The funny thing is that there were potholes inside the uber-pothole :-)))

This happens in other countries too. Some people theorize that it's done because of internal rivalries between dependencies/political factions, but I suspect local governments are just inept at logistics.

Generally you are allowed on resident per 40 acres or something similar - farms are getting larger and that leaves plenty of land that doesn't have a house that could.

That is similar to the reason trackless trams are not economically viable. They are essentially just busses that are guided, but because of their precision the cause really bad erosion on the parts of the road where they drive. At least with busses there is variability on the parts of the road that are eroded and it affects the whole road more evenly

I thought the feds pay a large portion of construction but the states pay most of the maintenance. some states clearly do a worse job of highway maintenance than others. it's like night and day crossing the MD/PA border on I-95.

Born and raised in Pgh, the highways are awful. Always have been.

Chip and Seal is a technique used in a lot of rural areas that comes in with less maintenance than gravel but not as expensive as asphalt. It is basically a a top thin layer of tar with gravel pressed into it.

At the very beginning he separates into:

- freeways

- local roads

- unpaved roads

Obviously the high-clearance-only roads in the mountain West will score poorly here, but when trying to compare US roads to Netherlands roads, those are not useful as the Netherlands has no equivalent.

Its also a difficult problem. They need the right digger and the right crew at the right time and possibly the right weather to get the job done. Many times there will be weeks of juggling around schedules and suddenly the digging started three weeks after the road was finished

Here, the gov gives time windows for utility owners to dig and do maintenance, after which it'll be repaved. If you want to do maintenance on your infra, you request a timeslot and the gov groups the maintenance (eg sewer and gas). You best not miss your window.

Probably everywhere frankly, but Dallas is terrible, too. My wife and I took up skateboarding recently and it became much more obvious. Go out to the suburbs or a running trail or nice park and it's smooth sailing. You can push and coast. Where we live near downtown, it's cracks, rocks, discontinuities, metal plates. The gas company also dug up a bunch of bedrock 7 years ago, left a huge pile of it on the corner, rain came a few days later, and for the last 7 years, our sidewalks have been covered in dirt and the houses and cars all get a thin yellow film on them because there is so much dirt in the air all the time.

That's before considering what regular construction crews do. Most of the sidewalks are closed most of the time. They're routinely torn out and never fixed. There are nails and other debris in the roads all the time. When we first moved to our current address, my wife had all four of her tires go flat within the first year. I didn't own a car until two years ago, but both front tires have gotten nails in them already. That's also on top of the city's contracted out private dump truck crushing my rear windshield and smashing the hatch and leaving a business card with a claim number on one of my front wiper blades. That was nice to walk out to.

Then there was the crew across the street stealing all of my power tools when I accidentally left my garage open one day.

I'm not a NIMBY, but experiencing this makes me weary of the Hacker News zeitgeist railing against communities that don't want their neighborhoods turned into constant construction. There are entirely non-evil reasons homeowners might want that because building where people already live is incredibly disruptive.

Sure, but what happens if you have maintenance issues that arise after the window closes?

Are we really going to tell people that they can't live without sewer / clean water / electricity / whatever because the window closed 2 months ago and their problem didn't start until today?

Let me ask you: how many buildings collapsed during the reign of Hammurabi?

A lot of that is the road profile. Western NY has notably better county highways than PA because they tend to have wide shoulders that mitigate plow damage and frost heaving on the he edges.

There are certain places/conditions where trackless does make more sense, however. Philadelphia still has several trolleybus lines active for instance, in addition to buses, trolleys, subway, el-train, and traditional rail.

My guess is that it works here because our roads turn to shit anyhow from the freeze/thaw cycle, so it's not adding as much maintenance burden as it would elsewhere.

How did a pile of Rick seven years ago lead to continuous dust even today?

I.. I have no idea. I don't even know who Hammurabi is.

Is there a point you're trying to make? If so, care to enlighten us without assuming we all have history degrees?

He's a rather famous chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammurabi

Regardless, I suspect there's a point being made about the timeless ineptitude of bureaucracy (even if I don't agree with it—some cultures are notably more competent at managing logistics of public works than other are).

> 229 If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.

http://faculty.collin.edu/mbailey/hammurabi%27s%20laws.htm

Not obscure enough of a figure to necessitate a history degree. Well known for being one of the first to establish building codes.

Hammurabi is an ancient ruler of Mesopotamia/Babylon who is famous for establishing a written code of laws, of which copies inscribed in steles have survived to this day). I don't know of it's the earliest example of a written legal code but certainly one of the earliest that we have a record of.

Among these laws were civil penalties for builders who performed shoddy workmanship:

> If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver.

By the way, the Romans also had building codes, and engineers who built bridges and roads were liable for the durability of those structures, thus a tradition of over-engineering.

Asphalt, like glass, is an amorphous solid. When a heavy truck sits still on asphalt, asphalt will flow out from under the tires. Not only do you get a depression and eventually a pot hole where the tire was, and you get a little hill next to it.

You just about need an offroad vehicle to avoid hitting the street.

2 huge pipelines with big enough diameter to fit smaller ones. One for utilities in (gas, electricity, cables, warm water). One for waste (sewage, trash etc)

It's a carrot, not a stick. It's designed to spread the digging.and repaving costs around so the work is cheaper. It's more that the city knows it's doing work in an area, digging up the road, so they tell all the utilities, hey if you are thinking of doing work on Main Ave, we'll be starting work on September 3rd, if tell us now and can get a crew out before September 21st, you won't need to pay to excavate and repave.

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.

one of my classmates really resented having to take GE classes outside his major in order to graduate but looking back on it, he said they really helped him out in ways he didn't expect.

1? 1000?

Regardless the answer, the lack of context makes the figure meaningless.

We were getting our roads redone in my town and the county commissioner ordered an asphalt miller to run on one singular road, when we needed it (and said for it to run) on all of them. It cost us the same to run it on one road or all of them, because most of the costs were transport of machinery. So I definitely lean towards ineptitude.

My city in SF bay area resurfaced some residential streets that way. So far it held on well for 10 years probably because we don't get much truck traffic. Meanwhile the near freeway is a major route for big trucks so after the winter rain its all full of potholes.

That’s part of the reason. The other is that rural roads are mostly county or state funded (often through large Federal appropriations), and draw in a larger tax base and in-house professional engineering.

That’s why you can drive around rust belt areas of Upstate NY on nice roads - NYC Finance bonuses pay for that.

City roads are usually maintained by the city, which has much more limited access to capital. Because of that, in-house work is usually limited to mill and pave work and there’s not enough throughput for an appropriate staff of engineers. Big projects are usually task focus (safety, multi-modal) and are funded by Federal grants and use outside design and build contractors.

For the shared utility work, there is some coordination. My wife worked for a municipal water utility and ran the metering and infrastructure division. They received notice of paving or other jobs and prioritized proactive maintenance to happen while the road was under construction. The city would fine entities for digging up the street for non-emergency purposes for 6-12 months after the project completed. It helps, but broken mains or transformers necessitate the street cut.

Moreover, when a heavy vehicle like a loaded passenger bus has to accelerate from stationary on a hill, it exerts incredible force on the asphalt below it.

It's kind of maddening how often blogs like this will make motions towards developing an educated opinion (citing multiple reports, researching stats from public datassets, etc.) but don't seem to have bothered to actually talk to any of the people who are invovled in the practice they describe in their post (in this case, building roads).

Hence why U.S. roads are not built to last in the long term.

They put in new pavement in my neighborhood explicitly to fix some sewer issues. They ended up redoing several sections as the contractors paved over 3 access points (manhole covers). I'm not sure how you pave over a man-hole cover when it's sticking up 6 inches from the rest of the street.

He reigned for 42 years (1792–1750 BC), so I hope not too many.

This trope that rich cities pay for everything needs to be taken out and shot. Yes, there is a cash flow there but it's nickels or dimes on the dollar, not a huge amount compared to variances in budget and expenditures. Buffalo would not turn into Mogadishu without NYC paying for the privilege of ordering it around by proxy of Albany.

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.

At some point axle load starts mattering more than ground pressure because whatever's below the pavement itself starts being extruded. I don't think that matters in most cases though.

I don't have any real numbers to back this up, but I don't think so. Even in my quite rural area, most people live in towns despite the relatively vast, open farmland. My town's population is between 3-4000 people, but some are as small as 500. It'd take a lot of farms to spread all the people in my town out.

Yet many including myself have never heard of him.

Would it have been so much to ask to put a Wikipedia link and nerd-snipe some of us in the process?

interesting. I noticed something similar in the UK but not in Germany. Maybe some simple change in the way these utility repairs are regulated is to blame?

While interstates are nice, cities are where people live, so the quality of urban roads matters and is maybe the reason for the perception of US roads?

Anyone with a basic high school education should have heard of him.

And how hard it is for you to google for "wikipedia hammurabi" anyway?

>Hammurabi is best known for having issued the Code of Hammurabi, which he claimed to have received from Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice. Unlike earlier Sumerian law codes, such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, which had focused on compensating the victim of the crime, the Law of Hammurabi was one of the first law codes to place greater emphasis on the physical punishment of the perpetrator.

I don't think Wikipedia gets to the point quickly enough for this context to be relevant.

Rural around here in the PNW, the vast majority of rural roads are paved, except for forest service roads and the odd road here or there. I do a lot of countryside cycling and it's rare that I encounter a gravel road.

What they don't always have is the smooth surface found on highways; it's paved but of a bit of a rougher type (don't know all the technical differences, but it's noticeable on a road bike).

I don't think so. I grew up only in rural areas. We had plenty of roads, the vast majority of public roads were blacktop. The only dirt roads I recall were on private property.

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.

If it's crunched up fine limestone it has a hard time growing plant cover. Instead it will be loose debris that easily breaks down and produces dust.

That's a valid point, but I was just responding to someone who claimed that Hammurabi was so obscure that (in their minds) no one had heard of him, and additionally complained that there was no Wikipedia link. I feel like I should have used LMGTFY.

Whether the OP was making a poorly-articulated point by merely bringing up Hammurabi and expecting the reader to know about his history with building codes, I think, is a separate issue. Anyone with a basic education should have heard of Hammurabi, though they may have forgotten the specifics about him. And finding a Wikipedia link on your own is trivial.

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

In New York, companies doing road work are required to leave a small plastic circle embedded in their patch that can be used to identify who did the work. They seem to most often be blue though I’m not sure the color is a requirement. Once you see it, you’ll notice them everywhere.

Would it be so hard to google an unknown figure? Jesus christ, open the schools. If you're confused there's much less hostile ways to indicate you want explanation.

I did not claim that he was obscure nor that no one had heard of him.

I merely mentioned that your and other claims that "anyone with a high school education has to have heard of him" is bollocks.

I have both a high school and university degree and have never heard of him and don't think I need to have.

Now you even claim someone with a "basic education" should've heard of him (meaning someone that didn't even finish high school). If you doubt that, Google about different countries' school systems and what would go for "basic" education.

That said you definitely would've nerd sniped me with a link and if these replies here on HN hadn't been there to catch my interest first I would have just googled him.

Basically by trying to be a smart ass and belittling others you harmed your own cause so to speak.

>I have both a high school and university degree and have never heard of him

I question the value of your education.

Have you also never heard of Shakespeare or Bach?

For me it's not so much about that but the "how".

Parent definitely would've nerd sniped me with a link and if these replies here on HN hadn't been there to catch my interest first I would have just googled him.

Basically by trying to be a smart ass and belittling others they harmed their own cause of making Hammurabi more widely known.

Very much have. Don't care much for one, do care for some of the other.

The belittling continues I see.

Have you heard of Terry Fox? Anyone with an elementary school education surely has.

I like your version of America. Sadly, California's not that free. Some billionaire can't just buy up some land and just put in apartment/office/factory tower as they please, the local government and residents just aren't going to stand for that.

The antithesis to the "limited liability corporation".

That billionaire can probably just buy up some land and put their house there, though, since "affordability" is not part of the equation.

(Some adjustments may have to be made, but that's only another also-irrelevant expense.)

> Basically by trying to be a smart ass and belittling others

You are reading way too much into someone not documenting their comment.

> they harmed their own cause

To me it looks like you and others paid even more attention this way.

> their own cause of making Hammurabi more widely known

I don't think that was their goal?

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-22/silicon-... is what I'm referring to

That’s not a trope.

In New York, 2/3 of tax revenue is personal income taxes, and about 40% of that revenue is for filers making over $1M. Pretty sure 80% of those filers, which include non-human entities domiciled in NYC, are in the NY Metro and Long Island, depending on how you measure it.

The percentage of tax revenue just from NYC financial services is very significant, and is very volatile. Because it’s difficult to issue general obligation debt, most NY bonds are revenue bonds secured by PIT. So when there’s a market downturn that impacts bonuses, there is a very significant impact on the state balance sheet, as debt service has a higher precedence than government operations.

Buffalo would not turn into Mogadishu without NYC, more like Mississippi with snow. You’d probably see a significant reduction in services, especially Medicaid, child health plus, and schools, and 30-40% increase in property taxes. NYC moderated the impact of western and central New York’s unfortunate rust belt state as industry was wiped out in the 80s and 90s.

With respect to roads, every state or US highway outside of city limits is maintained at state expense. Most counties get state aid for county highways as well. That state revenue isn’t coming Erie county.

I might actually agree with you if I hadn't read all the other replies shiroiushi has made since. I firmly believe he's out on some crusade to belittle everyone he can now that didn't have the exact same education as him.

Or just do it for kicks and to feel better about himself.

Buffalo is a city, and therefore probably is profitable for New York State. It's rural and suburban areas that are money pits.

No, in fact, many rural areas are not economical for farming. But in those areas they may have other extractive industries to support a population.

>>This happens in other countries too.

This is everyday life in India. A big budget is sanctioned to build a road. Road gets built, then a month or two later, some body forgets they didn't do the sanitary/sewage pipes well enough and manholes are now overflowing, they tear down the whole road and then just leave it as is.

The process restarts again in two years or so. Here is the rub- The guy who builds it at the first place knows all this so builds it as cheaply as they can get away with.

Its just how corruption works, and money flow from tax payers to politically well connected contractors(often the politicians themselves, as the contractors are just shell companies owned by contractors). Even if the company is black listed a new one can always be floated next time.

>>I suspect local governments are just inept at logistics.

No they are just corrupt. Its easy money. No audits, no accountability and no questions of any kind.

> all the other replies shiroiushi has made

But it's lo_zamoyski that made the reference.

Funny enough San Francisco Public Utilities coordinates with SF Streets to replace water/sewer lines prior to planned repaving work specifically to avoid this problem. They are clear that need and scheduling sometimes don't allow it but wherever possible they do.

And yulker is the one that I replied to. That's all fair enough and yes yulker had quite some passive aggressiveness swinging in that "doesn't need a history degree" to start with.

Yet shiroiushi is the one directly insulting my (and others that I'm referencing as not having had to have heard of him)'s education without knowing anything about said education.

Depending on very specific and exact place of upbringing and schooling, there are a myriad of differences in what is regular curriculum or not. This is a global forum too, so it's even "worse" in that sense for making very absolute statements like shiroiushi has.

Has every Bachelor of Computer Science had to take a course that included learning about how regular expressions are implemented and had to implement a regular expression parser? I sure did, mandatory course and wouldn't have been able to get the BA and then go on from that even further without it at my university. Yet I've met people from other universities that didn't. Do I insult them and their education for it? I don't!

I'm guessing exactly equal to the number of building contractors he or his donors had beef with

Well you said "parent" so I thought you didn't mean shiroiushi. Yes shiroiushi is being belittling, thanks for the clarification of what you meant then.

The solution to this problem is utility tunnels. A tunnel network under road surface just for plumbing and cabling. Maintenance crews can just drive through in cars and do their jobs, without stopping traffic and digging out pipes. Many ultra-modern cities have one.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_tunnel

I remember the neighbourhood where I grew up. The roads were great until the cable TV company slices them all open to put their cables in. Then the patches would never hold, water would get in and under the road when it rained, and the roads were terrible for years.

> The city has been trying to force public works to go do those things BEFORE road projects, but it's an uphill battle.

Is Public Works a state agency? I would have expected them to be subordinate to the city.

> I don't know if it's the earliest example of a written legal code but certainly one of the earliest that we have a record of.

It isn't, but it was discovered early and benefited from intense popular interest in the Bible. Popular interest in Mesopotamian history fell off sharply as it turned out that history generally differed from what the Bible said.

It's still very early, roughly the 18th century BC.

>> If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver.

This is obviously a statement about who bears liability for fixing the wall, but it's funnier if you imagine it as a requirement for the builder to repair the wall with silver bricks, as a penalty for the original shoddy work.

> I merely mentioned that your and other claims that "anyone with a high school education has to have heard of him" is bollocks.

> I have both a high school and university degree and have never heard of him

With all due respect, it's far more likely that you have heard of him, but you didn't retain the information.

> That billionaire can probably just buy up some land and put their house there, though, since "affordability" is not part of the equation.

Not in California; we have an entire bureau, the Coastal Commission, that exists to prevent that very thing.

Urban roads face a unique set of challenges beyond just higher traffic volumes

I like the 7 years bedrock story. Doesn't Dallas have the equivalent of New York City 311 complaints hotline? Literally, you call it for anything annoying / loud / dangerous, and the operator will help you raise the issue to the correct department.

To me, the trick about allowing more construction in established neighborhoods: Make the noise rules incredibly strict. Tokyo has non-stop construction everywhere. And the noise rules are very strict. It works. In Japan, I assume, for cultural reasons, most construction corps follow the rules. In other places ("The West"), you probably need expensive fines along with manual/automatic on-site inspections.

Simply forcing the utilities people to properly repair roads after they have been dug up would be sufficient.

> Some people theorize that it's done because of internal rivalries between dependencies/political factions

Or maybe corruption ? All utility builders have to fix the road -> more work -> more profit.

It happens in Germany as well though, not even that infrequently. It’s particularly common with the recent push for FTTH connections.

At my parents place, they resurfaced to road a few years ago. Only for Deutsche Telekom to swoop in a year later and dig in their FTTC gear. Street was patched after, but reasonably well. At least we got faster internet back then

You just described the process in a big central european country. I was wondering why a company from 300 km away fixes the local road ( an almost insignificant road).

If a society can't do construction without leaving nails in the road(!!!) there seem to be some more fundamental issues going on

No.

Another side of the problem is how often we need close a road to dig it up. If we just enforce the quality, we will just wasting more time and money for more works and less time actually using them .

Proper solution would be a utility duct or tunnel.

To be fair, Hammurabi’s code is often taught in middle/high school social studies (history).