[stevenwoo]

I recall there was an article on the front page of hacker news not long ago that argued that it was a better use of public money to not pave every road and to let some roads just be dirt roads because the maintenance cost was not justified by the amount of road traffic. This was not the article but similar to it: https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-...

[detaro]

That's how it seems to work with smaller roads in northern Sweden. They have a surface which is kind of compacted sand/gravel, which isn't all that robust long-term but can't really crack and is very easy to fix: a specialized machine drives over it and basically breaks up the top layer, re-applies it and smoothly and compacts everything again, and the road is good again.