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How good are American roads?

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193 points chmaynard | 2 comments | 20 Nov 24 14:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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rconti ◴[20 Nov 24 17:52 UTC] No.42196461[source]▶
> 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.

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vel0city ◴[20 Nov 24 18:24 UTC] No.42196736[source]▶
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.
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Loughla ◴[20 Nov 24 18:47 UTC] No.42196937[source]▶
We have large farm machinery though.
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1. macksd ◴[20 Nov 24 20:32 UTC] No.42197822[source]▶
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.
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2. oblio ◴[20 Nov 24 20:55 UTC] No.42198021[source]▶
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 :-)))