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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: 0.023s | 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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FuriouslyAdrift ◴[20 Nov 24 18:52 UTC] No.42196979[source]▶
City buses are what really shred urban roads (and winter plows)

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

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mlsu ◴[20 Nov 24 20:38 UTC] No.42197867[source]▶
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!

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1. animal_spirits ◴[20 Nov 24 21:10 UTC] No.42198141[source]▶
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
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2. entropicdrifter ◴[20 Nov 24 21:47 UTC] No.42198459[source]▶
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.