How good are American roads?

Love that I live in California pay out my ass in property AND state tax and get the worst roads in America despite the fact that we barely deal with ice, snow, or rain.

You personally may pay lots of property taxes but California's Prop 13 means that people who have been here for a long time and kept property within the family are paying significantly less. Our average tax rate is 35th in the nation - https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/high-state-property.... I grew up in New Jersey originally so I have an admittedly warped view of property taxes, though.

Keeping roads perfect requires taking them out of commission for repair... which is a disaster on California freeways that have constant traffic. I think CA does a fair job of balancing that with road condition, and I assume they are already using more durable and expensive road construction methods than other areas that lacks so much constant heavy traffic.

I wonder if California would be better off with more Carmageddon type projects like when they shut down the 405 for like a week and hammered out necessary work.

I'm not sure what the solution is but there is a gross misallocation of housing in California... the suburban family homes with 4 bedrooms and massive yards designed for kids to play outside are almost exclusively occupied by retired childless people that only use the rooms when the grandkids visit, and tiny apartments are packed with families that are paying 4x+ for housing what the retired people in large homes are paying.

Prop. 19 was supposed to fix this but clearly did not- I rent in a suburb and have a young kid, but there are almost no other people under 65 or so within a large radius of my home.

If you shut down one freeway in the LA or SF area, every other one grinds to a halt also- including essentially all non-dead-end local roads... you might as well shut them all down at once, but there aren't enough road crews to repave them all in a week.

Above a certain population density there isn't really any way to use cars that isn't awful. When I was in Socal I would often meet people 10-20 miles away, e.g. for an after work bar trip and ride my bicycle - and beat all of the car drivers by a long wait.

Yes prop 13 is truly disgusting