When I drove from New Mexico from New Hampshire I thought roads in the US South were remarkably good. I settled in New York where major roads seemed pretty good but go to Pennsylvania and it seems there are two kinds of roads: bad roads and roads under construction, you never seem to find a good road that was just constructed. A lot of people thought it was frost heaves but this article say it isn’t.
My quality problem in NY is that atlas maps and GPS maps show numerous roads that aren’t really passable or if they are passable are too risky. I never saw ‘minimum maintenance’ or ‘abandoned’ roads before I came to NY and I wish they were so marked in GPS maps. There is a road near me which is sometimes passable in the winter if you have the right kind of vehicle and if you know the road goes downhill and won’t require that much traction… People who don’t have the right kind of vehicle will get led by GPS down this road and think it is OK because there are tracks but halfway through they panic and try to turn around now they are in trouble. That road is passable in the summer except for when it gets washed out.
Also NH is in a class by itself with its motor-oriented infrastructure (in 1980 they rerouted route 93 to go around Manchester and nobody goes there anymore) which is tree-structured as much as possible so you have many levels of hierarchy which can and will jam up. Want to walk? You can’t get there from here. I can go for years in NY without updating my GPS maps but if I drive to NH I will see the road I am got rerouted and there is a shopping center where there used to be a road. And this is in a state that doesn’t have income taxes so I don’t know how they pay for it.