The submitted URL was https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-those-dents-in-i-... but our software replaced it with https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-those-dents-in-i-... because that's what the page says is its canonical URL. I've reverted it now.

But the top comment at the /30 URL is not the actual answer either...

Yep. Hilariously it was literally the first reply, which was promptly ignored by everyone.

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-those-dents-in-i-...

Because the original poster replied in #3 that it wasn't that.

I asked someone at WADOT about the very same thing and was told they were to create an irregular surface in one or two of the lanes (notice the street view from down thread they are only in the right most/truck lane) to prevent perfect ice sheets from forming.

Seems awful coincidental that they'd be exactly at the joints between the concrete, as they are in that Street View, if they were added just to make an irregular surface as you say.

Maybe it's both things: they're holes from dowel bar retrofits as their look and placement sure seems to indicate, but they're only visible in one lane because the lane was purposely re- (de-?) surfaced. Or alternatively only the slow lane needed the retrofit at the time it was done just because it carried more of the heavy loads.

What is the best URL?

If a Wikipedia page about a technological topic (so not a person, place etc) has a very few languages available (in this case 2) then it always makes me wonder how other countries in the World solve the same issue. This seems like a very US thing for example but maybe I’m wrong

There's one bit of jointed concrete road that I know of in the UK, a few miles where I live on the A90 near Laurencekirk.

It's bloody awful, like driving over smashed paving slabs. In my big old Range Rover with its off-road air suspension and massive reinforced tyres it's a noisy and uncomfortable couple of miles. In a modern vehicle with ultra-low profile tyres and incredibly stiff "sporty" suspension it must be like being rolled down a hill in old washing machine.

So yeah it's entirely possible that it's a very US thing, I've never seen it anywhere else.

Edit: here you can see a section, with repairs showing up as dark lines across it.

https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=55db8ed6-35d8-4916-82c3-14131...

The US interstate moves insane numbers of huge ass-trucks that weight one billion metric pounds each or something.

Anything less than airport-grade concrete dies instantly, and then dies again when it invariably freezes to -40° Kelvin, because fuck physics when shit gets cold.

The reason for the interstate trucks is the taxation system that punishes railroads for owning their right-of-way. The trucks cause by far the most damage to the highways, but taxpayers subsidize that with the gas tax. Trucks also do not pay property tax on the highways.

Long haul freight should be done by loading the semi's trailer onto a flat car, and picking it up near the destination.

Another myopic government decision is to try to replace the diesel trucks with electric ones, you know, for the environment. Far better for the environment would be to do away with long haul trucking and use freight trains instead, which are far more efficient. Trains also do not spread tire and brake dust all over the place, either.

Trucks pay much higher tolls. Tolls are based on axles and weight.

But not nearly higher enough. Driving on roads damages them in proportion to the fourth power of per-axle weight, which is about 17,000lbs for a fully loaded semi and 2,000lbs for a car. To put that in perspective, if the toll for the car were $0.25, it'd have to be over $1,300 for the truck for it to be fair in that sense.

It will just raise shipping costs and therefore raise the cost of goods. By charging trucks more it creates a regressive tax effectively. By subsidizing them this is a way we utilize socialism to ensure lower wage people have access.

That's why move the freight by rail.

They move a bunch of freight by rail, nobody wants to pay someone a bunch of money to drive it when they can just throw it on a train.

And trains are relatively time inefficient so people in Maine couldn’t have their fresh Californian strawberries a couple days after they are plucked out of the field.

Maybe people don’t deserve to have fresh produce but that’s another discussion altogether.

Did you know that one of the very first uses of the first transcontinental railroad was shipping fresh California produce back east? And this was a century and a half ago.

They still do…depends on the shelf life of whatever they’re shipping.

They used ice in the old days. Strawberries will last up to 6 days if you refrigerate them coming home from the store, I don't know how long that is since they were picked.

A lot of fresh produce comes in by jet.

It’s quite common for me to show up at a shipper in the morning and whatever I’m picking up is still in the field. I’ve even had stuff loaded straight into the trailer out of the field a few times.

Uh, who doesn't deserve to have fresh produce??

Well the tax increase on trucks can be accompanied by some other tax decrease that mostly affects poorer people, such as a sales tax decrease or an income tax rate decrease in the lowest bracket.

The USA has possibly the best freight rail system in the world and it’s used extensively. Trucks pay a ton of tolls, licenses, and fuel tax.

The interstates are a constant stream of freight trucks. Trucks cause 4x the pollution of trains. Trucks spew tire and brake dust all over the countryside. Most of the maintenance on highways are the result of trucks, and this is paid for by taxpayers.

Trucks are what get goods to their destination. Rail can only get you so close.

Right. For a 3,000 mile journey, 2,998 of those miles can be by rail with the trailer set on a flatcar. The mile in and the last mile the trailer is picked off the flatbed and hooked up to the semi.

In what sense does the US have the best freight rail system in the world? Not trying to be antagonistic, here---just want to know why you think this.

Regarding your other comment ("trucks get the goods where they have to go"): in other countries, such as Switzerland, many buildings (think an Ikea store) are required to be reachable by rail, in which case regional trains can deliver goods to a hub, and then local trains can take goods from the hub to the store. No need for trucks in this case.

The absolute amount of freight moved by rail in the US is insane. But the US is also roughly the size of Europe and is shaped so there are many population centers far from the ocean.

If you remove bulk freight it’s quite a bit of a difference but still massive.

Much of European freight goes by boat and truck without much train.

I don't see how that relates to the US freight system being the best.

Can the efficiency of trains and trucks be quantified? It might make your argument stronger

"On average, rail is four times more fuel efficient than trucks, and emit 75% fewer GHG emissions. This fuel-efficiency can also help to reduce transportation costs significantly, while giving the business a promotional platform for sustainability initiatives."

   --- google "efficiency of trains vs trucks

> Trucks also do not pay property tax on the highways.

Why would they pay property tax on a highway they don’t own?

What they do pay is a per mile tax that is collected at the pump and divided up to the states through IFTA. Every single mile a truck travels is taxed by some state even if it’s just using it for personal use like shopping at Walmart.

Taxation of electric trucks is something that hasn’t been resolved quite yet.

Yes, they do pay a use tax. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the tax is far too low to account for the damage caused by the weight of the truck.

People make the assumption that the roads aren’t designed with truck travel in mind methinks.

The other option, making trucks pay their “fair share”, would just get passed along to consumers as higher prices and nothing would change. Like when fuel prices go up, truck drivers don’t eat those costs but they get a higher fuel surcharge which just gets accounted for when they’re pricing the goods on the grocery store shelves.

I also don’t think you fully understand how massively huge the transportation system is in the US. Assuming they could switch over to trains and assuming you live in the Bay Area they’d just have the trains deliver to Tracy or Stockton (where all the big warehouses currently are) and still have trucks deliver to the store down the street. Same amount of trucks you currently see with the only difference being the long haul truckers now doing local work.

Keeping with the Bay Area example, the last three times I delivered there two loads were going overseas out of Oakland and the third was a super small warehouse in San Leandro which didn’t even have a dock and I had to back a half mile down this tiny street — twice because there wasn’t anywhere to turn around and I was originally facing the wrong direction. I deliver to California all the time and all the warehouses are outside of the big cities. Well, except in LA but they’re just generally wrong about most things.

> People make the assumption that the roads aren’t designed with truck travel in mind methinks.

Fatigue damage is the biggest problem. A heavy truck pushes down on the asphalt/concrete, flexing it. Eventually, it cracks and crumbles away. As mentioned elsewhere, fatigue damage goes up as the 4th power of the load.

Railroad tracks are made of steel, and steel flexes nicely without crumbling away. If you stand next to the tracks, you can feel the earth go down as the wheels pass. Steel rails with the load spread out with ties are an effective solution.

The main issue, I think, is the entire economy would have to be changed on a massive, global scale.

I had this job 20 ago delivering for one of the major grocery chains. Southern Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona were all covered out of a single warehouse in Phoenix. That place is a shitshow and that’s with them having a couple hundred docks to unload trucks, lucky to get out of there in seven hours. If they were unloading train cars I couldn’t even imagine how bad it would be. Or the local drivers wasting a whole shift after getting a container out of the train yard.

Unloading trains is actually very efficient. If you have a train yard with many trains lined up next to each other and with box cars aligned, you can easily carry goods from train to train, through the box cars. This is far more space efficient than the huge parking lot which is needed to accommodate the wide turns that trucks have to make in order back up to a delivery zone.

I also don't see why it would be necessary to revamp the global economy to start using trains more.

It isn't necessary to revamp the entire economy. Things can be done one line at a time. All that's necessary is realigning cost and tax incentives so the costs reflect the actual cost (including externalities like pollution) rather than the grossly distorted subsidy system we currently have. The rest will take care of itself.

I love the hyperbole in this comment! :D

Allow me to single out the metric pound, which is defined as precisely a billionth of the weight the local road surface can withstand. Noteworthy for being one of the few units that work for both mass and weight because the local gravity is conveniently factored in.

You might be surprised to know that we have trucks in the UK, too.

That road is nose-to-tail 40-tonne trucks every night, because everything that goes to the north of Scotland from anywhere else in the UK goes up it.

To give you an idea of scale, Scotland has an area about the same as Alabama, but in terms of getting around you'd have to think along the lines of several times bigger than Texas.

> huge ass-trucks

https://xkcd.com/37/

There’s an interesting blog post about the UK’s unloved and out of fashion concrete Motorways here: https://www.roads.org.uk/blog/diamond-rough which notes that the US seems to occasionally grind the surface of concrete roads, whilst in the UK [INSERT WHATEVER THE HIGHWAYS AGENCY IS CALLED THIS WEEK][1] don’t (barring recent trials) leading to people driving on rough decades old surfaces. Although ISTR it was the expansion joints that were the real annoyance? But I haven’t personally encountered concrete roads in the UK in decades, it’s more of a thing from when I was a kid.

[1] Or local / devolved authorities etc.

In the Netherlands we don't use concrete plates. Just asphalt, usually the highly absorbent type. It wears very quickly and ice buildup damages it so it gets replaced a lot.

But this is the advantage of a small country with many people. Good infrastructure.

Many roads are composite here. They have a sub-road made of reenforced concrete that creates a stable layer and then asphalt is laid on top. Because the asphalt wears out it is easily ripped off the concrete layer and repaved.

In the PNW we commonly use porous asphalt (so the rain doesn't build up and cause hydroplaning) as well. A few interstates still use concrete. I wouldn't be surprised if that had something to do with weather and related maintenance requirements. I-90 being a pretty good example.

I5 through all of king county is concrete plate. The boundary at Pierce and Snohomish is clear. Odd.

Same in Australia. Concrete is seldom used, usually asphalt or similar. Lots of patchwork or total resurfacing being done.

It does rain a good amount in the populated parts of Australia so water shedding is one part, and resistance to temperature changes is another. The myths are true though, it does sometimes melt under high heat and heavy load.

And the best thing: new top layers are applied frequently (sometimes yearly). And they are literally applied overnight: construction starts at 23:00 and is completed before 06:00. And even better, the road isn't even closed. One night they pave the right lane and the next the left lane is paved. Complete road closures for maintenance are exceedingly rare. And if they happen, it will be at night and/or in the weekend. Compared to any place I've been Dutch road infrastructure and maintenance is really on another level. Not just some roads, but pretty much all roads in the entire country are designed and maintained to an entirely adequate baseline (not saying there is no room for improvement, just that the baseline is so much higher than anywhere else).

And then they limit you to 80km/h on any highways (even huge 5 lane ones) because of trying to fight emissions, instead of 120km/h as almost everywhere else. It's more frustrating than a few holes in the tarmac. I mean sure reduce emissions, but when you have private jets flying all the time and huge steel factories it's a bit frustrating to be told a motorcycle needs to stay at 80km/h to protect the environment.

The limit is 100kph during the day, and 130kph at night. The reason isn't so much emissions as it is a royal fuckup on all sides around nitrogen compounds and biodiversity.

There are also a few cities where speed limits drop below a 100 when passing through. That is about health. Specifically noise and fine particles.

None of this is about greenhouse gasses.

Well, technically nitrogen is also emissions. But yeah it's been so badly handled this whole thing. The whole country is at a standstill and the housing crisis is only accelerating.

You'll find zero references to greenhouse gasses in my comment.

The difference between the quality of the infrastructure (esp. roads and rail) in the Netherlands and Belgium must surely be the most convincing testament to what a country loses from even relatively mild (from a worldwide point-of-view) levels of interethnic squabbling!

The massive amount of government money that has been earned from natural gas in the Netherlands also surely plays a role.

It's not just that, it's also a conceptual difference. Belgium is a tax haven compared to the Netherlands and there are whole towns made up of rich Dutch tax evaders just across the border. Less taxes, less money for infrastructure.

Funnily enough the Netherlands is also a tax haven but it's only for large megacorporations, not people. They wouldn't be based there at all if it wasn't for the tax benefits so they don't lose out by offering it, they just screw the rest of Europe over by allowing companies to evade taxes in the whole EU.

This is true lol. There is no need for signs at the border because you will know the second you enter Belgium :D

Complete roading closing for just (re-)paving is not common nowadays in many countries.

I remembered having them a lot in my childhood, but not in recent 10 years. If a road is closed totally there usually something beyond paving going on.

Sadly our bridges don't seem to be doing very well.

I was wondering the same thing recently. In Austria and some countries around a pretty popular road replacement system is called "fly over"[1] which has nothing to do with an overpass in the US, but is basically a small bridge put on top of a highway to repair the road surface underneath without interrupting traffic.

It was mislinked on Wikipedia to overpass and while trying to figure out what it should link to I learned that this concept just does not really exist in other countries.

[1]: https://www.waagnerbiro-bridgesystems.com/references/fly-ove...

That's just a way to get traffic off the surface while work is done, though. The dowel bar retrofit is the work itself being done.

I imagine a flyover ramp is more appealing in areas where there isn't a lot of alternate routes available. The US is considerably less dense than Europe so rerouting traffic while a section is closed for major work isn't a big deal. If it's going to last a while, we just pave over a section around the part being worked on.

Until now, I wasn't aware USA makes highways with concrete. As far as I know, in Poland vast majority of paved roads is made with asphalt, rarely bricks.

In Middle TN, at least, asphalt is coming back in favor. Apparently concrete doesn’t handle the freeze/thaw cycle very well, and is harder to repair than asphalt.

In a side note, TN Department of Transportation recently experimented with a more porous asphalt variant on some major roadways, which was supposed to help with drainage. But in the winter, rain soaked deeper into the porous asphalt, causing much larger pot holes than expected. They repaired this with more traditional asphalt, which really stands out next to the more porous type, when it’s raining. I don’t know what the final fix will be, but it seemed odd that they wouldn’t have tested that scenario more fully.

That’s porous asphalt, developed in the Netherlands and used on 90% of the roads here. It is fantastic when it’s raining and it gets damaged really quickly when it’s freezing. In our climate the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides and we just apply a new top layer very often (once every 1 - 5 years).

The potholes here were so big that it burst car tires and dented rims. The idea seems great, but not sure why it was so bad here.

Only the busiest roads are made with concrete. Most roads are asphalt.

It depends on the use. Both asphalt and concrete are widely used in the US, depending on the engineering demands.

Depends where in the USA you are. Most of the Northeast is asphalt.

Some highways (eg. west part of A2) in Poland are concrete too. (not to mention post-German concrete highways, but I think they are already gone)

The vast majority of paved roads in the US are asphalt.

My understanding is that concrete is generally not used for highways in Canada because it doesn't hold up well in the yearly freeze-thaw cycle that the majority of the country experiences. Asphalt is used as it is more flexible, and also easier to repair (generally just filling cracks with tar) when the inevitable frost heave damage occurs.

Concrete is more durable (but it still needs to be maintained) and that is probably why it is used in parts of the U.S. where this is less of an issue. I can't make much comment on what other countries do though I have only noticed concrete roads in the US.

Maybe this is true. But honestly, we don't have that many roads in the PNW that are concrete. It was when I lived in the midwest that I noticed them everywhere. I really don't care for them. In the PNW we have relatively few, but the weather here is milder than the midwest. Not sure what that says about the freeze-thaw hypothesis.

I live in Seattle and almost every single road I drive on is at least concrete base.

Even if I couldn't tell for other reasons, I've seen enough sections replaced for water or gas line maintenance; I've never seen one without concrete, from my side street all the way to the freeway.

Maybe that's a Washington thing, then. In the Portland area it's nearly all asphalt, or asphalt-over-concrete. Concrete is terrible in places where it rains a lot, which is one reason I'm surprised you'd find so much of it in Seattle. We have porous asphalt that never has any standing water even in a downpour. At least when it's maintained, which isn't always a guarantee on some lesser used roads.

Older Seattle area roads tend to be concrete; newer roads are more frequently asphalt. It was definitely very popular here in recent memory — I could name tons of concrete Seattle roads off the top of my head — but my impression is it is no longer as popular in new construction.

There's some real old roads that are bricks under asphalt. That's a trip. Some of the real steep stuff like Bell or Blanchard at Western, IIRC.

PS if you like brick roads, there's a big (flat) one out in Redmond I accidently drove on once that someone made a nice post about https://www.dadlogic.net/old-red-brick-road-redmond/

Yeah, sometimes you see the brick where the asphalt has worn away. There's a bunch of that in Pioneer Square, I think.

I've actually been out to the Redmond brick road before (on a bicycle -- it was unpleasant).

Mostly asphalt here in Melbourne. No freeze-thaw cycle, but anecdotally the few concrete roads I have driven on are pretty rough and the repairs don't appear to be very effective.

(Westall road outside the ikea and Dandenong road in Caulfield where it goes under the train line, if anyone in the know is able to comment)

That's funny, my understanding was the exact opposite,that concrete was used more frequently in the northern US states because it can be plowed, where asphalt is cheaper but easily damaged.

That's interesting because in the part of the northeast where I live, northern new england, all the roads are asphalt with only a few exceptions. And I would guess that it's easy on the plows, because the asphalt will give where as concrete will not which would damage the plows.

Australia is Asphalt for suburban and urban roads or compacted gravel for the majority of remote roads.

Driving on concrete roads when I visited the USA was an eye opening experience on just how bad they are for road noise and comfort.

The idea that there are "webs" I am simply not privvy too thanks to language excites me for some reason. Even down to those webs having all their own memes and cultural hotspots etc.

The only other "web" I do have a small window into is the Japanese language web, thanks to importing cars and car parts, I have been learning Japanese. Web design there is incredibly different, and the approach to social forums like car clubs seems pretty novel too. One thing that transcends the language barrier seems to be information hierarchy which is cool. Parts don't have cars, cars always have parts, small example but that kind of thing.

It's not completely inaccessible. If you've ever lived abroad you quickly start using auto-google-translate in Chrome as second nature and finding out which are "the internet places to be" isn't that hard in the first place. Then having lived in about 3 non-english speaking countries I'm sad to report that half the content is ripped out of "English speaking" internet, including memes, but then obviously there's regional culture that varies per website. The subreddit for a specific country + google translate is a good start, but for some countries you'll miss their biggest hangout in reddit (ie: spain with the forocoches forum). That being said you can always Google "top sites by country" and immerse yourself. It's like traveling but for free.

All of this is super obvious but maybe someone that only speaks english is genuinely interested and hasn't thought about doing it regardless.

Looks like filler is gone from these on I-90 because driving in motorhome over them (V-8 F-53 chassis) leads to crazy vibration. Regular car is fine.

That's interesting, I'd never have guessed. They always seem to be just the right lane, so I figured there must be some other explanation.

On mobile and no time to correct it myself, but I think there's a consistency mistake in that article:

  The retrofit begins with cutting of six slots (three in each wheel path) across all transverse joints or cracks. The slots are cut with ganged diamond saws that make six cuts in each wheel path.

The only other explanation I can think of is that the each slot is made with two cuts, each one starting at the crack and moving outward from it. So then the three slots in the wheel path takes six cuts to make (two cuts per slot, outward from the crack). (Or perhaps the opposite; maybe the cuts start away from the crack, and stop at the crack.)

But yeah, also perfectly possible it's just an error in the article :)

Each slot takes two cuts indeed, but the cuts are parallel, one on each “side” of the slot.

Source: have cut concrete it sucks.

Neat, thanks!