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.
I... uh... were you disagreeing with the person above you?
It's merely hot and dusty work, it doesn't stink at all.
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.
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...
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.)
Lots of small towns are nice and scenic. 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.
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.
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?
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.
Not that this has too much direct impact on roads, though :P
Rent control causes landlords to fail to realize hypothetical profits; government-subsidized sprawl wastes everyone's money.
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.
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.
At least one can hope so!
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...)
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.
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.
[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.
How does the maintenance per mile between gravel roads and paved roads compare? Does this article apply to both?
Certainly like the idea of cutting back unnecessary expenses, but I'd also like to see some data on this.
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:
So more frequent gradings are needed if the traffic is heavy enough.
I seem to recall they get pretty awful, and ones that are not proper county roads become impassable at normal driving speeds
- Low-use gravel roads are ~50% of paved road maintenance cost.
- Moderate-use gravel roads are ~350% of paved road maintenance cost.
Yikes.
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).
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.
Do you know if any in your area might have been a part of that, and if so, how it worked out?
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".
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
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+milesIn 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.
I wonder if residual garlic had any effect on insects/pests
You obviously haven't lived on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. People book through there are much faster than 50mph. ;)
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.
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.