Many Interstates and other divided highways have wide, well-kept grassy medians and margins. However - I don’t ever recall seeing a mower doing their job. How is the grass so well kept in most places? How often is it mowed, and presumably each mower has a territory? (you can only do so many miles/acres in a day, and you have to take into account slopes and ditches as well). Some stretches would be narrow enough to be done in one pass; others could take more than one (unless your mower has a wide cutting area).
Curious - I’ve seen mowers regularly. Often with signs ont he shoulder saying “Mowing ahead”. Sorry I don’t have data on exactly how it is handled.
I don’t know about interstates specifically but in Massachusetts the state Department of Transportation has some kind of landscaping corps that maintains the medians and roadsides. I have seen them working many times. Sometimes just mowing, but other times clearing brush, trimming trees or even felling them using heavy equipment.
There are detailed guidelines on how they work. What is to be cut, what is to be planted, conservation, biodiversity, etc.
I winder where the OP lives?
When I’ve lived where grass grows well absent irrigation, I’ve often seen mowers on interstate medians or shoulders.
OTOH, it isn’t “well kept” like a golf course or suburban lawn. The stuff grows to be 6-12" high, then a tractor towing a brush hog comes by and scalps it. It just looks smooth since you’re looking at it sliding past at 60mph. If you do happen upon the area they’re working, the before-after difference is stark and it’s obvious they’re taking off a lot of growth all at once.
In the parts of the country with 4 seasons and enough rainfall, they might need to hit every spot about every 2 months. So maybe 5 mowings over 8 months then a 4-month dormant winter season.
We’ve either covered it here or I read/saw something about it years ago, but IIRC, in addition to actually cutting the grass, they try to plant grasses, or other ground covers, that don’t grow as fast and require less maintenance.
Edit, there’s quite a few websites discussing grass used along highways:
Yeah, if you drive through Texas in the spring, you’ll notice that the Texas Department of Transportation has seeded the medians with wildflowers.
It’s undeniably pretty, but the thing is, a fully grown bluebonnet plant is at least eight inches tall, usually more. Same with indian paintbrushes.
It just looks short because you’re typically looking at it from pretty far away at speed.
There have been plans to re-plant prairie grasses along various parts of the interstate system where those grasses grew natively. Here is one such project, currently inactive:
and a Federal DOT report:
In California, the mowers are often at the end of an arm attached to a vehicle on the highway. The left lane will be temporarily closed for several miles while this operation takes place. None our highway medians can be described as well groomed grass. It’s scrub and small trees if not just naked dirt, concrete or asphalt.
Meanwhile - in Florida (I-4): Drivers Complain About High Grass In Medians
Coincidentally, just this morning I saw them mowing the S side of the Ike on the W side of Chicago. The weeds they were mowing looked knee to waist high.
Here in New York I’ve seen mowers frequently. There are maintenance depots along the New York State Thruway that house them. Presumably they have divided the whole into sections that they are responsible for.
For highways and similar infrastructure, part of the design process is to have plans reviewed by maintenance engineers, whose min task is to finesse the design to make continuing maintenance simpler and easier. This can range from reducing the number and types of widgets required to be kept as spared to making sure that you can reach a bolt without a ladder. For highway roadsides keeping them clear so that they can be mown quickly by large machines is a quick win. It can’t be done on long-established roads but a newly-built highway will inevitably be designed with as much of it as possible that can be maintained without the need to close lanes or doing much handwork.
When was the last time we actually built a new highway in this country? It seems like decades. In California, we have solved the whole median maintenance thing by repurposing them as new lanes.
Speaking from Australian experience where they try to spend their way out of fiscal chaos by building more infrastructure, so perhaps not transferrable.
I apologize for presuming you were in the US. I wish we actually had something to show for all of our talk about spending on infrastructure here in the US.
There’s some new highways going in in the South. Freeways, not just a two lane road. I can’t remember specifics off-hand, but some in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Probably other states too.
I will add that the mowing crews bill by the “berm-mile”, one of the more obscure units of measurements.
In the area around Washington DC, infrastructure money has been spent on expanding existing highways, and adding tolled express lanes to the existing system.
One new highway, MD 200, did open in the 2010s, after decades of planning.