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.

Rural roads are often unpaved. The local authority has to come by regularly with a grade to redo things or they become unusable quickly. Overall this is by far the cheapest way to have a road, but it doesn't scale to high use and city folks demand something that makes less dust. Rural roads also includes minimum maintance roads which demand 4wd (real 4wd, many SUVs will have trouble) when the weather is nice and a winch is a must when things get rainy or snowy.

Though given his definition of quality I expect he is actually ignoring all the real rural roads and only talking about major roads which while they get less traffic than urban roads are maintained to similar standards.

> Rural roads are often unpaved.

Like the other replies have indicated, I'm not so sure this is the case? I live in very rural northwest Iowa, and while there are certainly plenty of gravel roads around here, I'm only driving on them if I'm intentionally trying to go "off the beaten path." You'll take a gravel road if you live on a farm, or you're trying to get to somewhere secluded such as a lake, campground or maybe a county park; but (imo) it's rare for the average person to drive down a gravel road just going from Point A to Point B on their daily commute.

"New Mexico has 25,000 miles of unpaved roads. Dirt, sand, clay, stone, and caliche constitute up to 75 percent of our roads." https://www.newmexicomagazine.org/blog/post/100th-anniversar...

"Santa Fe has a higher percentage of dirt roads than any other state capital in the nation. Unless they are well graded and graveled, avoid these unpaved roads when they are wet. The soil contains a lot of caliche, or clay, which gets very slick when mixed with water. During winter storms roads may be shut down entirely." - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/fodors/top/featu...

With Google Maps, the dirt road closest to the center of town that I found is Del Norte Lane, at about 1/2 mile, with more dirt roads just north of it.

Santa Fe also has a lot of multi-million dollar homes on dirt roads.

Santa Fe is a special place, and not indicative of "average".

It's also funny that the article calls New Mexico a "warm place" considering I had to plow a 2-foot accumulation of snow off my driveway a couple weeks ago. New Mexico's climate is neither warm nor cold but diverse.