[mholt]

I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than deteriorated pavement and have much lower maintenance costs.

I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch, but I agree that, outside of cities, most routes don't need to be paved - you can safely travel 50 mph on a flat, straight gravel road. Of course the main arteries - Hwy 52, Hwy 20, I-80, and many others need to stay maintained. But there are so many small roads that, although quaint and a pleasure to drive, are probably unnecessary from a utilitarian/practical point of view.

[usaphp]

The problem with gravel roads is that after a heavy rain a lot of potholes appear and some of them can be pretty big, it's relatively ok during the day travel, but driving at night will most certainly cause a lot of car damage and accidents in a long run.

[mholt]

You're right. But the cost is still lower than fixing potholes in asphalt due to wear & tear, freezing and thawing, and slippery ice is less of a problem too.

Not surprisingly, most Iowa folks are good drivers in bad weather. Generally it's avoided altogether. When it has to be done, most people are smart enough to slow down and be careful, or pull over and wait it out. There will still be accidents, but less cars slide off icy gravel roads since they seldom exist.

[pekk]

The cost to the government may be lower than fixing potholes in asphalt, but not necessarily to the people driving cars.

[ObviousScience]

So you're saying the total cost is lower, and borne only by the people incurring it, not every taxpayer?

I... uh... were you disagreeing with the person above you?

[corin_]

No he didn't say the total cost is lower, he said one side is lower and one higher. He was completely ambiguous (and I have no additional knowledge to add) about which cost changed more.

[chongli]

The political cost of accidents and other car damage far exceeds the political cost of a diffuse tax burden for roads which everybody generally agrees are necessary.

[redcalx]

Yeh gravel shifts significantly once you get pools of water forming. Gravel roads need annual levelling work even for low traffic routes.

[icefox]

But that cost is cheaper than repaving right?

[fineman]

In simple terms of time and money, yes. But in terms of not producing mountains of asphalt, especially.

It's merely hot and dusty work, it doesn't stink at all.

[kjs3]

But wouldn't driving a road grader down the route, even once a year, be cheaper than repaving every couple of years? Just in material cost it should be cheaper, not to mention cheaper equipment (grader v. paver+dump trucks) and staffing. I fully confess, however, that I have no objective numbers.

[vidanay]

I live on a gravel road, and I can tell you one thing for certain. Vehicle maintenance costs are noticeably higher when routinely driving on gravel roads. I have to replace brakes and suspension components much more frequently than friends and family who live on paved roads. Also, if you are not careful about washing your vehicle to routinely get the rock dust off, your vehicle will be prone to early rust issues.

[protomyth]

I'm from North Dakota, and yeah, I would rather drive on gravel than ill-maintained pavement. ND has had to go the other way in the west because of the large amount of traffic[1] and pave and maintain some roads that would normally not merit it.

I am actually a little ticked that the northern states are not doing research on alternate materials / surfacing technology.

1) western North Dakota now has traffic such that I find Minneapolis / St. Paul during rush hour relaxing in comparison. I would hope for more rail, but they seem to keep crashing and I guess a pipeline isn't going to happen.

[ccurtsinger]

Minnesota does a significant amount of research on road surface materials. There is a section of I94 northwest of the Twin Cities that has three segments of highway, and traffic can be diverted onto one of the segments to test new road surfaces. Here's the MN DOT site with some test videos: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnroad/testcells/mainline.html (thrilling stuff).

Now that I'm in MA, I have heard several people say that concrete highways do not last through the winter, despite the large number of concrete-type highways in good condition in MN. Maybe this is the result of careful local road surface research? Roads are certainly better in MN than they are in MA, even though MN has colder and snowier winters. That could just be anti-highway spending sentiment from the big dig though...

[kevinr]

Another Midwesterner transplant to MA here -- colder in the winter is actually better for highways. Up and down around the freezing point all winter like Massachusetts does produces massive frost heave that Minnesota roads just don't need to contend with.

[douche]

Building good road-bed underneath helps enormously. Comparing the roads in Maine and Quebec, in Maine it's a mess of frost-heaves and constant repavement. In contrast, the Canadians rip up an old road down to ledge and build back a solid foundation - when a section of road gets rebuilt, it lasts 15-20 years.

[bkjelden]

I had always heard that ND had all concrete interstates (the only state with no asphalt interstates, in fact) because of the harsh winters.

[cwyers]

> I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch

I read that differently than you, I think. I read it not as "we don't need roads" but as "we don't need all of the roads we currently have, we can get rid of some of them." I don't know if that's true, even with reduced demand, there are a lot of small towns that only have one main road going in or out of them. (I also am from Iowa.)

[maxerickson]

A related question is whether (and how) you make the people in those towns bear the cost of the town existing.

Lots of small towns are nice and scenic. Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear.

[jff]

> Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear.

In a big city with rising rents, people who already live somewhere ~have a right to be there~ and shouldn't have to go. In a small town, apparently, there's no possible reason people would want to stay.

[mapt]

It's merely a question of how heavily we subsidize their lifestyle with infrastructure & other spending from the state/federal purse, which ultimately comes from economically productive cities.

One of the things we currently do, through differential housing prices, is send retirees to small towns with dead economies. They get a pension, Social Security, and Medicare, and that income is often the sole thing keeping the town afloat. In more distant reaches (I'm thinking Appalachia and parts of the South), generous welfare policies have enabled people to stay in this excess housing capacity despite the lack of jobs.

But here's the thing - there are costs to this strategy, like greenhouse gasses and children/grandchildren that have to move away and human capital going to waste, and these people could just as easily have public services provided in a metropolitan area where it's much cheaper to reach them all and provide a good quality of life.

The phenomena shows up even at the state level - https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://... but it's much more stark when you start at an older town in the Eastern half of the country and make your way to a productive population center.

Hey, we have a fiscal union, unlike the EU; These places aren't Greece because of all those payments, and I don't support turning them into Greece, but because we have that union it's also on us to make deliberate decisions that concentrate less of the population in Stavrodromi and more in Berlin. The game-theoretically natural strategy of utilizing the entirety of the existing housing stock (stratified by income) no matter how decrepit the location, is a bit of a local optima, and better arrangements are not difficult.

[scarmig]

Isn't Berlin a net-taker compared to other major German cities?

[perfTerm]

Even if it is I think the relevant question here is more: does an elderly person on social security, pension, and medicaide have a greater aggregate cost to federal, state, and local governments in Berlin or in Stravadova (I'm not sure if I got that right)?

It'd be interesting to see if perhaps it's better for the feds if they're in rural towns but not the states.

In Albany, NY where I'm from I used to live right near a major hospital and college Albany Medical Center. And there were helicopters flying to it three or four times a day. I'm sure some of those helicopter rides out to taxi those requiring medical assistance are being borne by tax payers. It's a pretty complex question to wrap your head around when there are so many variables. Does an elderly person living in NYC produce a small drag on the economy because they're not contributing as much as the average young professional and increase the cost of rent for those people?

[maxerickson]

Yeah, your first paragraph is what I was getting at there (but why be clear about it when there is an opportunity to be hackneyed?).

[pekk]

You don't have a right to unlimited quantities of other people's money to support you being there. If we could pull all support for communities which are a persistent drain then maybe you could argue you had a "right to be there" (without subsidies).

We really have much bigger social problems than insufficient subsidies to people who choose of their own volition to live in places which are expensive for everyone else to maintain.

[eli_gottlieb]

I don't think I heard him saying that incumbent renters in a city have a legally-enforceable right of any kind to their apartments.

[fennecfoxen]

Maybe he didn't say that, but the War Emergency Tenant Protection act does say otherwise, at least in the Empire state. (Which war emergency? Why, World War II, of course.) San Francisco's pretty similar.

Not that this has too much direct impact on roads, though :P

[superuser2]

>~have a right to be there~

Rent control causes landlords to fail to realize hypothetical profits; government-subsidized sprawl wastes everyone's money.

[protomyth]

and a lot of those small towns are still active and are gathering centers for a large area producing product to be shipped to urban areas - towns disappear on their own, no need to be forced

[cwyers]

Well, I went ahead and read up on Charles Marohn a bit, and... I think your reading of him is a lot closer to what he believes than mine was.

[markbnj]

My first thought on reading the post was to ask whether an analysis of roads strictly in terms of aggregate capacity even makes sense? It seems to me you have to ask where people are, where they need to go and why. Between any two travel points you can perform a capacity analysis, but doing so in the aggregate would, I think, shortchange a lot of smaller places.

[remarkEon]

Another Midwesterner, here (Minnesota, with family in Iowa and South Dakota). I think you're correct on the potential to shortchange a lot of the smaller towns. For example, the high school my dad went to (a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away) has since been consolidated with 2 other school districts, so some of the demand for roads has shifted to more of the main highways instead of a lot of the smaller, more rural roadways. Same thing happened to the school districts my cousins went to in South Dakota. Now, for the most part, they travel on I90 and I29 to Sioux Falls. I think the gp is correct in saying that "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a hyperbole. But I'd be curious to see what their DOT's plans are for collecting data on that capacity usage, and how it will play out, politically, if there are serious proposals to start to rein in spending on rural road upkeep in low usages places.

[bigtunacan]

Fellow Iowan here. I have traveled much faster than 50 mph on gravel roads; straight or not. Definitely a cheaper option that should be preferred in some cases. Even in in the more populated cities, CR, Des Moines, etc... existing road maintenance is always terrible.

[Roodgorf]

I don't know that anecdotal evidence about driving conditions is really a great way to talk about driving on gravel. I'm also an Iowan who grew up on gravel roads and frequently drove faster than 50 mph, but if I'm being totally honest I recognize that it wasn't a great idea. On more than one occasion a loose patch of gravel or surprise deer has nearly sent me into a tree at 60 mph.

Sure, the people who frequently use those roads are the ones who will know them best and be able to predict their condition, but your stopping/maneuvering power is so much worse on gravel that assuming an average speed of anything greater than, maybe even near 50 mph seems pretty reckless.

[bigtunacan]

LOL; you are right there. I was of course I young wreckless driver at the time. Depending on the road condition, visibility and area speeds on gravel probably should be anywhere from 25 to 50mph during good weather.

Both gravel and blacktop are lower cost options that can be used in low traffic areas though. There are certainly large stretches of very low traffic high maintenance roads all over Iowa.

[Stratoscope]

For many of us, the day we were no longer a wreckless driver was also the day we became a less reckless driver.

At least one can hope so!

[Alupis]

> Both gravel and blacktop are lower cost options that can be used in low traffic areas though

Blacktop is asphalt (what roads are normally made of). And requires an underlying concrete layer to lengthen it's lifetime (asphalt is a lot "softer" than concrete and more susceptible to ground movement, erosion by the elements and friction from tires, etc...)

[maxerickson]

Asphalt roads are a type of concrete.

In my area, paved, minor county roads certainly don't have a Portland cement concrete base layer, when they are paving they might add some gravel during the surface preparation and grading, but that is about it. As you say, the ground movement shows through, and they are more susceptible to erosion.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Here too. One of the gravel roads near me was recently paved and they simply flattened it, added some sort of cement + water spray (as opposed to the usual multiple inches thick layer of concrete) and the asphalt placed on top of that. It is definitely better than gravel, but it's already showing some wear in places.

[vonmoltke]

> And requires an underlying concrete layer to lengthen it's lifetime

Depends on the underlying soil. In north Texas it's common when asphalt is laid to pour a Portland cement concrete base, though many roads and highways are just straight concrete. In south Florida, the roadbed is usually just packed limestone, because the land has a rock layer no more than 50 feet down and the sandy soil is pretty incompressible, unlike the constantly expanding and contracting clay in Texas.

[foobarian]

You would do excellent transporting nitroglycerin over washboard [1] [2]!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washboarding [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Fear . The protagonist drove a load of nitroglycerin over washboard by going fast enough to float over the bumps.

[bduerst]

I spent some time doing work in rural NW Iowa, and I remember the sheer number of gravel roads that are run between the fields. (They are great for running on too)

How does the maintenance per mile between gravel roads and paved roads compare? Does this article apply to both?

[jmadsen]

From northern Wisconsin here - I always had the impression growing up that gravel roads became gutted with potholes from the snow after a few winters if not maintained, and generally pretty horrible. Especially in WI, our small roads are "milk roads" where they drive the heavy milk trucks in for collection.

Certainly like the idea of cutting back unnecessary expenses, but I'd also like to see some data on this.

[david-given]

In Australia, there are lots of dirt tracks, and it's standard to regrade them ever year after the rainy season. (At which point they're pretty much impassable.)

But those are dirt roads, which are not the same thing as a proper, old-fashioned gravel Macadam road. They can be excellent, and are pretty easy to maintain --- if potholes develop, fill them promptly with the right grade of gravel --- but don't do high speed traffic well. (Gravel is flung up by the wheels, which was why they started gluing it down with tar --- hence tarmac, or tarmacadam.)

Can find a good video of a grader in action, so here's a bad one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFoN5LD0Q-w

[bkjelden]

In the parts of the US discussed in this thread - there really isn't a rainy season. They get moisture pretty much year round - snow in the winter, rain in the summer.

So more frequent gradings are needed if the traffic is heavy enough.

[stephencanon]

Surely you have frost heaves in Wisconsin? Aren't paved roads severely potholed by your winters as well?

[jmadsen]

oh, definitely! simply trying to remember back to what the gravel roads were like (been a while since I've lived there)

I seem to recall they get pretty awful, and ones that are not proper county roads become impassable at normal driving speeds

[toomuchtodo]

http://www.maine.gov/mdot/csd/mlrc/documents/pdf/Richmond199...

[bduerst]

So for comparison of 50-yr maintenance costs (in Maine):

- Low-use gravel roads are ~50% of paved road maintenance cost.

- Moderate-use gravel roads are ~350% of paved road maintenance cost.

Yikes.

[toomuchtodo]

TL;DR Road maintenance is expensive, and the bill is about to come due.

[eitally]

And the scary thing is that it's not just road maintenance. It's sewer/water, electricity, and bridges, too. There has been so much exurbian expansion in the past two decades where the initial infrastructure costs were paid by the developer but then handed over to the town/county/state for maintenance. The municipalities count on property taxes to cover the cost, but with A) the real estate crash in many markets, and B) a general recession and a move of many younger earners back to urban areas, that money just isn't there.

[debacle]

An untraveled gravel road is likely more expensive to maintain than a paved one, long term, when you factor in watersheds, plant growth, and vehicular damage caused by the road.

You also need to take into account that many of these roads are used to transport agricultural products, so the roads are in effect an agricultural subsidy (though not necessarily a bad one).

[blhack]

Those gravel roads also need some upkeep, though.

I also grew up in Iowa, and the difference between the gravel roads I took to get to my friends houses there, and the gravel roads we have here in AZ is night and day.

[washadjeffmad]

About a decade ago, I remember reading about a trial application near me for an unpaved road hardening agent called pavezyme, which I also believe was trialed not long ago in AZ.

Do you know if any in your area might have been a part of that, and if so, how it worked out?

[efiftythree]

An adjustment in the allocation of funds would allow counties to bring more road graders and operators online. Right now I believe they simply dont have the capacity to do proper maintenance on all of the level A roads on a frequent enough basis. This might also allow for the conversion of some state highway routes and level B roads to level A roads.

[sprucely]

Are you sure about 50 mph being a safe speed? It doesn't take much washboarding to all but eliminate traction.

[maxerickson]

It's usually possible to evaluate the condition of large sections of road at once (since they do maintenance that way). So you don't often unexpectedly hit the washboarding at high speed.

It also tends to be the case that going faster can reduce the effects of the washboarding (given a reasonable vehicle).

[trhway]

>It also tends to be the case that going faster can reduce the effects of the washboarding (given a reasonable vehicle).

offtopic: reminded about this novel - the reasonable vehicle was a truck with several tonnes of nitroglycerin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Fear

ontopic: anyway we'll soon be flying in quad-/octo-copters and the open low-populated spaces like Iowa will be among the most suitable areas for the initial application of those "flying cars".

[feld]

I'm from Wisconsin. We don't seem to have a problem keeping our roads paved and functional. Assuming I didn't screw up any math reading these tables:

  Iowa: 114,429 miles of roads
  Wisconsin: 115,145 miles of roads
  
  Source: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/hm10.cfm
  
  Unpaved Functional Length:
  Iowa: 13,363 miles
  Wisconsin: 566 miles
  
  Paved Functional Length:
  Iowa: 81,273 miles
  Wisconsin: 102,482 miles
  
  Source: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/hm51.cfm
  

I think you need a better Department of Transportation, because even the population difference shouldn't really account for that huge of a gap.

  Population:
  Iowa: 3.107 million
  Wisconsin: 5.758 million
  
  Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iowa+wisconsin+population

  Square miles:
  Iowa: 56,270 sq mi
  Wisconsin: 65,500 sq mi
  
  Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wisconsin+square+miles
  Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iowa+square+miles

[jecxjo]

I grew up in Wisconsin and went to college in Iowa and the one thing I noticed between the two was how horrible the Iowa DOT was.

In Wisconsin we know that every year there will be snow. Lots and lots of snow. In 18 years of living there I never once remember a time where there was more than half a day of our rural road not being plowed. I remember seeing plows driving around when there was no snow falling because they knew it was coming and as soon as the first flake hit the ground the buckets went down.

In Iowa, ever year there were multiple times when I'd be stuck at home, unable to get to school or work because the roads weren't plowed. Major Highways! I'd call the DOT and their response was "we are just waiting until the snow stops so we don't have to plow multiple times." This was their response in the afternoon having not plowed all morning. One year they ran out of salt for the roads and had to use expired Seasoning Salt from a local manufacturer. Everyone complained because their car smelled like Garlic Bread. No one seemed to care about the fact that Iowa is in the Midwest and for some strange reason the people running the DOT didn't think to have adequate supplies.

Wisconsin has a huge vacation market. A large amount of road usage is by people traveling from out of state up to the north woods for hunting, fishing, camping, etc. Iowa does not have this type of road usage.

Iowa has two main highways. Hwy 80 is a shipping lane that connects Chicago to the western half of the US. Hwy 35 is a north south route going from Minneapolis/St. Paul all the way down to Austin Texas and connects a lot of major cities along the way.

Hwy 80 (and hwy 88) are used so much in Illinois that Illinois actually charges you a toll to use it. Iowa has the same traffic on 80 but does not charge a toll. One state has figured out how to pay for their road usage while the other has not. THIS is the real issue with why Iowa's DOT can't do anything right. They spend money in the wrong places, don't get enough income to pay for things they should and for some strange reason don't understand that they have a problem.

[feld]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9852951...

I wonder if residual garlic had any effect on insects/pests

[pyre]

> you can safely travel 50 mph on a flat, straight gravel road

You obviously haven't lived on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. People book through there are much faster than 50mph. ;)

[jdhendrickson]

How does this work in the context of motorcycles?

[thrownaway2424]

Do you think motorcyclists can't travel on gravel roads? I do frequently.

[rconti]

Stay on the throttle.

[omouse]

That's what's happened in the city of Toronto and surrounding areas; some of the roads are gravel but for the most part they're paved and it's a pain in the butt when you drive on pot-holed roads. There's some suburban streets that would do better to be gravel.

[ryen]

When it snows, how effective is it to shovel the gravel roads?

[douche]

Better, in many cases actually. The gravel mixes with the snow, and for added traction you just run a sander in your road plows (with actual sand, not that calcium chloride/salt mix they mostly use on pavement now). Fun fact about putting salt on the roads to melt snow and ice: when it gets cold enough, it starts refreezing and gets slippery than a bastard.

[jlarocco]

Gravel roads can be plowed like a regular road.

If given a choice, I think I prefer driving on poorly plowed gravel roads over well plowed paved roads in snow storms. Gravel roads don't seem to ice up as easily, and the gravel and dirt helps with traction.

[goodcanadian]

Plowing gravel roads works fine.

[bostonpete]

I think the word is "plow"...

[eveningcoffee]

Not gravel roads but stretched dust generator.