How good are American roads?

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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

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.

> 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.