How good are American roads?

> 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.

This happens CONSTANTLY in Atlanta. They'll spend a bunch of money fixing a road, then a month later Public Works digs a huge hole and leaves a steel plate on it for a year, then patch it with either concrete that is an inch or two below the rest of the surface, or they don't pack the earth they put back and in 3 months the patch has sunk into a new pothole in a brand new road. The city has been trying to force public works to go do those things BEFORE road projects, but it's an uphill battle.

This happens in other countries too. Some people theorize that it's done because of internal rivalries between dependencies/political factions, but I suspect local governments are just inept at logistics.

Here, the gov gives time windows for utility owners to dig and do maintenance, after which it'll be repaved. If you want to do maintenance on your infra, you request a timeslot and the gov groups the maintenance (eg sewer and gas). You best not miss your window.

Sure, but what happens if you have maintenance issues that arise after the window closes?

Are we really going to tell people that they can't live without sewer / clean water / electricity / whatever because the window closed 2 months ago and their problem didn't start until today?