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by gtmitchell 745 days ago
Rome had the advantage of access to essentially unlimited forced labor in order to build and maintain their infrastructure. Modern engineering is absolutely superior to Roman engineering, but we do have to contend with budget constraints, at least in part because we're not using slavery to build our roads.
2 comments

They still had to feed the slaves, and they were certainly not unlimited. In fact, many roads were built by Roman legions themselves, not slaves. (the engineers were also soldiers).
Also the types of roads the Romans were building wouldn’t be particularly useful or pleasant to use.