How good are American roads?
construction-physics.com252 points by chmaynard 7 months ago
252 points by chmaynard 7 months ago
> 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.
This happens CONSTANTLY in Atlanta. They'll spend a bunch of money fixing a road, then a month later Public Works digs a huge hole and leaves a steel plate on it for a year, then patch it with either concrete that is an inch or two below the rest of the surface, or they don't pack the earth they put back and in 3 months the patch has sunk into a new pothole in a brand new road. The city has been trying to force public works to go do those things BEFORE road projects, but it's an uphill battle.
The solution to this problem is utility tunnels. A tunnel network under road surface just for plumbing and cabling. Maintenance crews can just drive through in cars and do their jobs, without stopping traffic and digging out pipes. Many ultra-modern cities have one.
> The solution to this problem is utility tunnels. A tunnel network under road surface just for plumbing and cabling. Maintenance crews can just drive through in cars and do their jobs, without stopping traffic and digging out pipes. Many ultra-modern cities have one [empahsis mine].
That does not sound like a general solution to the problem, because it would be fantastically, unreasonably expensive to put one under every road. Seems like something that would only be reasonable in a 1) particularly expensive central business district of a 2) city being built from scratch.
IIRC, some of the biggest US cities don't have separate storm and sanitary sewers, because the cost of retrofitting an existing city would be prohibitively expensive. Installing utility tunnels everywhere would be even moreso.
They don't have COMPLETE and PERFECT separation of storm and sanitary sewers, but they are substantially separate systems at this time almost everywhere. They just have a finite capacity, and the overflow often ends up mixing in older cities during storms or "floods" (defined tautologically).
The cost of retrofitting an existing city aside, the sanitary sewer is a subgrade utility tunnel, by design and by cost footprint. If you're already digging a big ditch and installing infrastructure there, it doesn't cost much more to have space for other utilities. We're not talking about building a basement for the entire roadway, we're talking about dropping modest size pipes under the sidewalks (or in many places, the lack of sidewalks) and enabling access through manholes.
> We're not talking about building a basement for the entire roadway
We are talking about a basement for the entire roadway if "[m]aintenance crews can just drive through in cars and do their jobs, without stopping traffic and digging out pipes," like the GGP was talking about. Also, that's what all the pictures in the previously linked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_tunnel look like.
> ...we're talking about dropping modest size pipes under the sidewalks (or in many places, the lack of sidewalks) and enabling access through manholes.
I think you have a different idea, which sounds like conduit or something between conduit and a full tunnel.
> substantially separate systems at this time almost everywhere
1) You don't really need drivable tunnels, just tunnels big enough to get to the stuff without digging it up.
2) Don't retrofit. Rather, if you dig up a street you put in the tunnel while you're doing it. Eventually all the important roads end up with tunnels.
Or you can just run through a city core from one side to the other side like subways. It doesn't have to strictly follow topside road networks, it's just that roads are easy target for permitting purposes.
You've got to be kidding. Utility tunnels are not even remotely a viable solution for Atlanta outside of maybe a few streets in the downtown area. The city (and wider metro area) is huge with thousands of miles of roads. They can't afford to dig utility tunnels.
This happens in other countries too. Some people theorize that it's done because of internal rivalries between dependencies/political factions, but I suspect local governments are just inept at logistics.
Its also a difficult problem. They need the right digger and the right crew at the right time and possibly the right weather to get the job done. Many times there will be weeks of juggling around schedules and suddenly the digging started three weeks after the road was finished
Let me ask you: how many buildings collapsed during the reign of Hammurabi?
I.. I have no idea. I don't even know who Hammurabi is.
Is there a point you're trying to make? If so, care to enlighten us without assuming we all have history degrees?
Hammurabi is an ancient ruler of Mesopotamia/Babylon who is famous for establishing a written code of laws, of which copies inscribed in steles have survived to this day). I don't know of it's the earliest example of a written legal code but certainly one of the earliest that we have a record of.
Among these laws were civil penalties for builders who performed shoddy workmanship:
> If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver.
By the way, the Romans also had building codes, and engineers who built bridges and roads were liable for the durability of those structures, thus a tradition of over-engineering.
> I don't know if it's the earliest example of a written legal code but certainly one of the earliest that we have a record of.
It isn't, but it was discovered early and benefited from intense popular interest in the Bible. Popular interest in Mesopotamian history fell off sharply as it turned out that history generally differed from what the Bible said.
It's still very early, roughly the 18th century BC.
>> If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver.
This is obviously a statement about who bears liability for fixing the wall, but it's funnier if you imagine it as a requirement for the builder to repair the wall with silver bricks, as a penalty for the original shoddy work.
> 229 If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
Thus the builders guild began to charge 50 silver for insurrance yearly from its members, which resulted to all road projects having a yearly 100 silver talent cost-addition on start. 5 years after the code, the empire went bankrupt
Not obscure enough of a figure to necessitate a history degree. Well known for being one of the first to establish building codes.
Yet many including myself have never heard of him.
Would it have been so much to ask to put a Wikipedia link and nerd-snipe some of us in the process?