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.

Probably everywhere frankly, but Dallas is terrible, too. My wife and I took up skateboarding recently and it became much more obvious. Go out to the suburbs or a running trail or nice park and it's smooth sailing. You can push and coast. Where we live near downtown, it's cracks, rocks, discontinuities, metal plates. The gas company also dug up a bunch of bedrock 7 years ago, left a huge pile of it on the corner, rain came a few days later, and for the last 7 years, our sidewalks have been covered in dirt and the houses and cars all get a thin yellow film on them because there is so much dirt in the air all the time.

That's before considering what regular construction crews do. Most of the sidewalks are closed most of the time. They're routinely torn out and never fixed. There are nails and other debris in the roads all the time. When we first moved to our current address, my wife had all four of her tires go flat within the first year. I didn't own a car until two years ago, but both front tires have gotten nails in them already. That's also on top of the city's contracted out private dump truck crushing my rear windshield and smashing the hatch and leaving a business card with a claim number on one of my front wiper blades. That was nice to walk out to.

Then there was the crew across the street stealing all of my power tools when I accidentally left my garage open one day.

I'm not a NIMBY, but experiencing this makes me weary of the Hacker News zeitgeist railing against communities that don't want their neighborhoods turned into constant construction. There are entirely non-evil reasons homeowners might want that because building where people already live is incredibly disruptive.