As with any question that goes “What is X like in the US” the answer is always “depends on which state you are talking about.” Here is the recent report. As I drive between 2 states that are 40 ranks apart, the shift in road quality is immediately apparent at the border. I don’t know the answer to why states do very different things (it’s not like Rhode Island has a lot of ground to cover!)
Australia loves chipsealthough. And of course for a country like Australia, the population is rather concentrated on the coasts, so the city experience is potentially different than elsewhere. Though Australian rural roads are made to handle some crazy traffic.
When I lived on the East Coast (Maryland, Virginia, upstate NY and Mass for a year) we had fairly frequent power outage, mainly due to aging power infrastructure that was all above ground. Every time you’d get a strong wind or ice you’d have trees falling on the wires and taking out part of the grid. I never saw anything beyond one really bad ice storm in the 80’s that knocked out power in my neighborhood in Maryland for about 5 days.
Here in New Mexico I can’t recall the last power outage. We did have an issue with gas in one of the counties about a decade ago…low gas pressure due to unusually cold weather and a break in the gas line…but it was only an issue for a few days and only to those at the end of the line, so to speak.
Our roads, however, definitely suck compared to Arizona, but not uniformly. The roads in parts of the state are fine, in others they seem to be constantly under construction (my WAG…someone’s cousin or uncle has the road contract and needs to put his great grand children through college plus mama needs a new pair of shoes). From a telco perspective, it’s also a mixed bag. The old copper is really, REALLY old and just in bad shape. But a number of companies (and some counties or native American reservations) have put in tons of fiber, and our metro optical networks are on par with what I’ve seen in many other states, at least in the big metro areas. Rural areas are, sadly, in much worse shape for most things, including telco here in New Mexico.
But what about safety? It’s hard to find stats on freight rail accidents but there seem to be a lot of them in the news. Railroads in the US are still not required to use positive train control. (It was supposed to be mandatory by 2015 but Congress keeps pushing back the deadline.)
Enjoyed your posts in this thread, but on this point, my experience has been greatly different than yours. I’ve lived in Chicago and the western burbs for all of my 57-year life except for time at college and a 3-year stint in Valparaiso. I can’t remember ever personally experiencing a daylong blackout. Not saying it has NEVER happened, but I sure haven’t experienced it. As I recall, there may be some instances - such as a massive windstorm that knocks down several trees, where folk lose power for an extended period. But I would definitely characterize those as uncommon.
In some places, the power seemed more reliable than others. In Lombard we rarely (if ever) lost power - tho folk across the street would. In Glen Ellyn, it seemed the lights would flicker if the wind blew hard. Now in Elmhurst, maybe once a year I’ll see that the clocks apparently stopped.
In more rural areas, it is not at all uncommon to come across bridges that are either closed to all vehicles, or to trucks.
As others suggested above, one factor is that the US built so much infrastructure earlier than many countries, in a piecemeal fashion, and never had to rebuild it following war. Since building it, no unit of government (local, state, or national) seems willing to commit the funds needed for regular maintenance, improvement and replacement.
If we wait until tomorrow, someone else will have to deal with it. Or, keep using the bridge as it crumbles, and then replace it after it falls down, killing/injuring people. Ain’t the American way great! :rolleyes:
Another utility infrastructure with HUGE variation across the US is internet connectivity. It tends to follow patterns of other utilities in that upload and download speeds are generally much better in developed urban areas. And in some rural areas there simply is not any internet service available that can reasonably be called broadband. Overall internet speeds tend to be slower and costs high in the US than in many other developed countries.
That was a case of a railway deliberately doing the absolute minimum maintainance to keep it rolling. Also known as running the company into the ground and squeezing as much money out of it as they could. It eventually caught up with them, which it always does, although unfortunately other people had to pay the price.
Personally, I’d have given the company president and directors life in front of a firing squad for that, but as is typical of these things, they got off with just losing some money.
NV Energy can’t figure out this rain thing. Goes out a bit every time, although 2018 was pretty good.
Charter internet is happy to say that they are the third least shitty internet provider that starts with “C” (after Cox, and Comcast, who is like the first or second hated company in the country alongside EA).
What were those speeds? I ask because as I was reading this there was a Charter Cable internet commercial playing on the TV behind me, and I notice that they’ve started marketing 100 megabits per second as their base speed instead of their (now) old base speed of 60 megabits per second. (When I first started using Charter, base speed was 768 kilobits per second.)
Apart from public transport I think the US does pretty well overall. Some of the things that stand out - like not having home grocery deliveries - are more a feature of just how much space there is between areas in the US. (Yes, I’m aware that some places in the US do have home grocery deliveries, but not all do, and everywhere in the UK has done for over a decade) - and also are not really that big a deal anyway.
Well, the English one lasted an hour. There probably have been US power outages lasting an hour that you haven’t heard about.
I’ve lived in Seattle for about 20 years now, and have had only a couple unscheduled power outages that I can remember. We have a well-managed public utility in a mild-climate with very rare ice. We do have our own natural disasters, though: a couple years back, a decent chuck of south Seattle lost power when a sea gull dropped a salmon it was carrying on some high-voltage lines.
500mbps fibre to the home goes for about $34 usd per month here in Singapore. It’s the minimum speed, there’s also 1gbps and 2 gbps, and you can get 10gbps if you wanted (but at that point it’s probably your home equipment being the bottleneck).
At that point sanity is the bottleneck. Even your base speed of 500 megabits per second is enough to stream 20 simultaneous 4K video feeds into your house. 10 gigabits per second gets you 400.
:: sob ::
I’m paying $65 Canadian per month for 15 Mb/s with a monthly data-transfer cap of 95 GiB. The same company offers 1 Gb/s with no transfer cap for $149/month.
Canada has expensive Internet (and mobile phones, too).
