How good are American roads?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Axle loading limits

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 :-)))

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.