[beerandt]

This is wrong in every way possible. The entire concept of road surface preservation revolves around a sufficiently resilient but elastic (non-brittle) impermeable coating. Equally important is a well drained base.

The whole point is to keep the water away from the dirt, and when it's not possible, minimize (distribute) loads from the tires across as large as area as possible.

They tested alternatives extensively in the 50's, driving trucks in circles on different test tracks for literally weeks and months at a time. As poorly planned as some people believe the interstate system to be, the government didn't throw billions of dollars at it blindly.

[bluGill]

True, but irrelevant: there are very few delivery trucks in the scheme of things, if that is your only use for roads a dirt track is good enough. 4 wheel drive and a winch are a must of course to get around on them. Some of the particularly bad one would be paved - though more as a bridge over streams.

Remember I carefully excluded everything except delivery from roads - this is horribly unrealistic. You can call it a strawman.

[zaroth]

It's entirely false even as a strawman. 18-wheeler delivery trucks carrying 80,000 lbs of cargo (or even 1000 pounds of sensitive equipment) are not going cross country on dirt roads. Trying to maintain unpaved surfaces for that kind of usage pattern would cost exponentially more than paving the roads and providing for proper drainage.

Trucking is responsible for transporting roughly 12 billion tons of cargo annually, with an estimated value of $9 trillion dollars. As a total share of goods transported by value, trucking makes up about 70%, and 60% by weight. The trucking industry employs 10 million people (3.5 million of which are drivers), and directly contributes to about 5% of GDP, to say nothing of the share of GDP which indirectly depends on trucking, which would be roughly... all of it.

The United States' $20 trillion GDP is entirely dependent on a functioning and well maintained highway system, and it is absolutely irreplaceable as a means of economically and rapidly transporting goods throughout the country.

In that context, the roads that regular everyday taxpayers get to drive are basically free and paid for, because most of them would have needed to be built anyway for the basic provisioning of goods and services, health & safety, building materials and as a right-of-way for water, sewer, electrical, data, and communications infrastructure.