I live on a dirt road in Vermont which gets rutted and muddy during long periods of heavy rain and especially during freeze-thaw cycles during winter and in early spring. I am interested to know what it would cost to prepare and pave this 1.25 mile road. There are probably 100 trees to remove to widen it, a tight turn and and S-turn to straighten out, and some guardrail needed as well. Can anyone estimate the cost to turn a dirt, Class 3 road into a paved Class 2 road in Vermont. A per foot estimate would be more than adequate. Thanks.
It all depends on the details … here’s a breakdown of how the costs would be estimated: “ESTIMATING ROAD CONSTRUCTION UNIT COSTS”
$10,000 for your road would be a very rough estimate … how much earth-moving, how many culverts, how thick the asphalt, etc etc etc …
I think your best bet is to call a road construction company and ask them this question. But I’m pretty sure it’s going to cost a mint to do what you’re describing.
I live on a private street. Our small neighborhood association is responsible for road maintenance, up to and including periodic repaving. When I first moved in, ISTR hearing that the estimated cost for repaving our 800-foot-long neighborhood street (incl. removing/disposing of old asphalt) was on the order of $50,000. You’ve got 6X the distance, plus a bunch of other improvements. Brace yourself for sticker shock…
That seems impossibly low. You’d use up 15% of that budget just getting planning and permits in place.
I dug up some numbers from an old project: a 3-mile road in a rural setting. In today’s dollars it was about $300k per mile just for the paving – none of the other civil construction – although it’s a wider and nicer road than you probably require so let’s cut that number in half. There was substantial clearing to be done in this project, so the overall cost isn’t directly translatable to your case.
$100k would have been my guess before doing any research, and that still seems like the right ballpark, but if an expert said $200k I wouldn’t be shocked. Hopefully some firmer numbers arrive in the thread soon.
:dubious: That page cites the cost of a survey crew at $10 per hour. It’s hard to find one guy who will flip burgers for $10 an hour, let alone an entire crew of surveyors.
Surveyor salary is about $60K/year, so figure $75K with benefits, for an hourly rate of $37 per person. A crew is at least two surveyors, so we’re talking about the surveyor crew being more like $75 per hour, including transport time to/from the job. So instead of the $200/km cited on that page, it’s more like $1500 per kilometer, at a bare minimum.
For your 1.25-mile road, surveying costs would be at least $3000.
The machine costs also seem low. A grader for $30/hour? Tractor for $80/hr? Maybe, if the operators work for free.
TL,DR: $10,000 is way too low an estimate.
I was curious as to why this cite would be so off-base, but a few clicks reveals it to be a United Nations document from a quarter century ago directed at forestry operations in regions across the globe. It has little to do with present-day Vermont.
Also you’d need to factor in maintenance costs. With frost heaves and pot holes, maintaining a paved road in VT is considerably more expensive that running a road grader over a dirt road every spring.
I used to live in rural Vermont myself. What you are talking about isn’t affordable to the average person. I would guess that a road 1 1/4 miles long would be in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars at best especially if you are thinking about things like guard rails. Have you petitioned the town to improve the road if it isn’t all private?
However, Vermonters are infamous about improvising. It would be much cheaper to just buy a used bulldozer or road grader possibly shared with a neighbor or three and regrade the road yourself every year. You can remove the trees yourself as well over time. All it takes is a quality chainsaw and a lot of work. If you don’t want to do that, it may be possible to get someone to fell them for you for the firewood value for little or no money but it depends on the type of wood.
BTW, terrible rural roads are part of Vermont’s charm. It is 9 months of winter followed by 3 months of terrible sledding. It is a gorgeous state but the only rural roads I have seen that bad were in the developing parts of Costa Rica. When I lived there, I had no phone, no mailing address and iffy electricity. The closest I could get to my farm house by driving was about 1/2 mile because the mountain road I lived on was impassible. I just parked at the base and walked the rest of the way. This was in 1996, not 1920 but it might have well have been. I loved it.
Estimator for a civil highway contractor here.
Road length = 1.25 miles = 6600 ft
Road width = 25 ft (assumed, two 11’ lanes with 1.5 each side for shoulder)
Area = 18,500 SY
2" thick asphalt surface = 2100 tons @ $75/ ton = $157,500
6" thick asphalt base = 6325 tons @ $70/ton = $442,750 (maybe only 4" needed depending on local requirements)
6" aggregate base = 18,500 SY @ $7.5/SY = $137,500
Total = $739,000
This is only the cost of the paving and does not include grading or excavation, clearing, any drainage pipe and structures, line striping, traffic control, not to mention planning, permits, reviews, etc.
This estimate is based on NJ average costs because that’s what I’m familiar with ( http://www.state.nj.us/transportation/business/trnsport/pdf/report2013.pdf)
NJ is an expensive state for labor, but Vermont’s costs don’t seem too different (http://vtrans.vermont.gov/sites/aot/files/estimating/documents/5YearEnglishAveragedPriceList11.pdf)
So I think the bare bones price might be $750k, but more likely it will be up about $1.5 million.
Finally ARTBA (American Road & Transportation Builders of America) in their FAQ give an estimate that rural roads cost $2-$3 million per mile. (http://www.artba.org/about/faq/) So my 1.5 million estimate may be a little low, but might be reasonable since this is a light duty, low traffic road.
Wow. A sort of related question would “How does any town manage to afford paved roads?”
New roads are often paid for by developers as part of the permitting process.
I was only off a half million or so …
Alright, alright, alright … a little more than a half million off …
And there’s some federal money available for maintenance. Not enough to keep any city’s roads maintained, but some. Beyond that, there are computer programs that will tell you how much you need to spend per year and which roads need maintenance how badly, but like they say: “Maintenance isn’t sexy.”
A couple of things. My numbers are based on statewide numbers for DOT work. Those projects are usually more complex than a simple municipal road might be. So you might be able to shave some money off there, maybe 25% or a little more. But again when all the incidental costs are added in you’re probably still looking at $750k to $1 million for that 1.25 miles.
And as others have said in new developments it’s usually the developers that cover the bulk of the new road and utility costs, with the municipality then picking up the maintenance.
Most local roads don’t really need too much maintenance unless they are subject to heavy traffic or flooding or other rough conditions. My local road where I’ve lived for over 30 years was just resurfaced last year (and that was just the top 2" riding surface). Other than patch repairs for utility installation, I don’t think it had been paved in probably about 40 years.
And then most highway, bridge or other major construction gets federal funding of one sort or another.
Facing the sort of money that Medellin Mike suggests, would be useful to ask two questions:
Why?
Why now?
Is the problem the road surface or the management of snowmelt and other drainage? Will a spring grading and patching fix things sufficiently? Will Straight Dope get a question in 2027 on how much it costs to replace a badly degraded paved road in rural Vermont because all the money was spent in building it and none on maintenance?
Easy fixes are often neither easy nor fix the intended problem.
about a million bucks.
in my area (Metro Detroit) there was a ~1 mile section of Mound Road in northern Macomb county which was still dirt/gravel. A few years ago when the polar vortexes wreaked havoc, there were stretches where the county just gave up and posted “ROAD IMPASSABLE” signs on either end.
It was finally paved a few years ago at a cost of $1.6 million.
it’s the road surface. even as hard-packed as it is, an unpaved road is still “soft.” the year before Mound Road was paved, it got totally bombed out by a harsh winter. I’m talking holes and divots which I thought my 4x4 Ranger Sport was going to fall into. I had to stop and help an elderly lady whose Chevy Malibu caught a particularly deep hole and lost the front fascia.
If you live in a region where you get real winter, paved roads last about 10-25 years before they need resurfacing. dirt/gravel roads need resurfacing multiple times a year.
I live on a private road in the mountains northern California. Our mountains are rather similar in topography to Vermont, except steeper. All we get is a lot of rain. When I moved here 40 years ago, there were five families. Two of them had small tractors, and there’s a gravel quarry 15 minutes away. We’d hire a guy with a bobtail and dump many tons of granite baserock on the road every spring, spread with the tractors and by hand.
Slowly over the decades all the parcels were developed and then people rented out their barns and outhouses and hauled in trailers and now we have cars and trucks going up and down all day, although nominally there are only 13 houses. The hardy souls with rakes got old and died, and so did the tractors. So bit by bit over 40 years we have paved most of the road except the flattest places that don’t wash as much. Eventually we’ll pave those too. Paving is really really expensive, but you don’t have to do it all in one go. Do the worst parts first.
Our road is one sometimes narrow lane, with turnouts. Sometimes I have to get out and back strangers’ cars into the turnouts for them.
Don’t get me started about the bridge.
Now I gotta know. What about…the bridge? :dubious: