The roads on Guam are insane. When I used to live there the roads became treacherous, like black ice, every time it rained. And rain is not rare there (the rainy season is half the year).
The problem is that they mix oil and coral to make the roads. Why coral? It’s because the island is on a coral reef and it’s everywhere, so it’s extremely cheap to use.
So yes, cost is going to be the #1 factor when people are paving roads, and quality is going to take a back seat, because you have to pave a lot of roads no matter where you are, the cost comes from taxes, and people hate to pay taxes.
Flying cars require runways, which as mentioned above, are even more expensive to build and maintain. So now you know why we don’t have flying cars yet.
my wife and I were having this conversation today. We’ve had a week in Italy and today we were in the Ostia Antica, the old Roman port (a wonderful place and nicely off the tourist trail).
The thing that struck us was the 2000 year-old roads still being in pretty good nick. You could certainly drive cars down it even though it’d be noisy and a little bumpy.
As as already been said up thread, the limiting factor is money. The Romans had an exacting standard for roads. They knew the importance of quality construction and stuck to it. The surface slabs we saw today were either basalt or granite and obviously chosen for their durability. I should imagine that to replicate such road construction today would be ruinously expensive to our modern thinking.
Having established that asphalt is cheaper, here are some cases other than airport runways where concrete’s expense is usually worth it:
Roads with heavy truck or bus traffic, especially where the traffic will be braking and stopping (this action will shift around the asphalt under your tires if your vehicle is heavy enough - this is why some roads have one-off concrete sections called bus pads for bus stops on fixed routes)
Gas stations (spilled gasoline will dissolve asphalt)
It seems I’ve heard at times that there is also an element of “planned obsolescence” - building roads that will need regular rebuilding, as a sop to - I don’t know exactly who - paving associations? Jimmy Hoffa? I’m somewhat dubious of such claims, but wondered if any of you had any reasons to accept/reject that factor.
Sure, there would always be infrastructure to be rebuilt. But cheap, shortsighted governments will tend to ignore anything that is not in-your-face and that can be ignored, until you get a catastrophic bridge failure or such. Meanwhile, you can count on constituents bitching about potholes they drive over every day. ISTR hearing that pothole repair was an insanely huge percentage of constituent services here in Chicago…
Some of the repaving is due to politics of a different sort.
Sometimes you have corrupt local politics where someone who coincidentally gave a lot of money to a particular campaign suddenly gets some lucrative repaving contracts after said official gets elected.
And then you’ve got cases like I-70 on the western end of PA that was constantly under construction back in the 80’s. After it was all completed and looked all nice and pretty, they repaved it a few years later even though there was still a lot of life left in the road, just because PA needed to spend all of its federal highway funding so that they didn’t lose it the next year.
If they are repaving every year, I would suspect something of this nature rather than the use of cheap materials just to make a smaller dent in the yearly budget. Even the cheap stuff should last for several years.
airport runways wouldn’t begin to support the weight of a large plane. And the cement used is of a different mixture. You can’t have large rocks in the mix (at least on the surface) because they break loose and are pulled into engines.
There are certainly better mixes of asphalt that could be used and are used in different countries. what would be interesting is a newer version of the macadam process that uses binder in the final layer. As it is the stuff is pretty sturdy and easy to fix. They make far better park trails then blacktop.
One advantage to asphalt pavement is that you can usually mill only about the top few inches off of the pavement and repave the road with the final friction course for rehabilitating the road. No need to rebuild the entire road if the base course, drainage, etc. is still in good condition.
The problem with simply putting asphalt over concrete is that the concrete sections are not always stable. That “whump-whump-whump” noise you hear on some roads is because the ends of the sections are not level with each other. If you just pave over that, you get cracks in the asphalt at those places, water gets in and freezes, and then the asphalt starts breaking off.
A process called dowel bar retrofit is used to fix the position of the slabs relative to each other. Combined with grinding of the road surface to even things out, it can greatly improve the lifespan of the road and outlasts asphalt resurfacing of a non-retrofitted road.
Politician has the choice to build 20 miles of middling constructed road that will last 20 years or 10 miles of well constructed road that will last 100 they will choose the 20 miles of middling road every time.
State budgets are getting major hits every single year. People scream to cut “excess State spending,” but by Golly, don’t touch their projects!
I retired after 20 years at CalTrans (State of California Department of Transportation) and I saw a LOT of the nonsense to “save money.” What used to be done “in house” is contracted out to allegedly save money (because lawmakers can’t abide the thought of paying for State retirement!). Contracted jobs took longer, kept getting sent back to the contractor to fix, and then resulted in a much, much lower quality end product. Personnel cuts were brutal, and many services were consolidated and moved to Sacramento. Is it any wonder your call to any State agency is sent immediately to voice mail hell, to be answered sometime next millennium?
What does this mean for drivers? Fewer improvements, fewer new roads, less maintenance, and more congestion. The highways and freeways you are driving on today were built on the needs projected 30 years ago. The crystal ball has gotten pretty cracked and foggy over the years, while the number of licensed drivers and registered vehicles have increased exponentially.
One of the first places the highway agencies cut spending is on routine maintenance. For the first five or ten years following this “cost saving measure,” it’s not too bad. When the big stuff starts falling apart, it’s too late for the small repairs that should have been done on an annual basis. Whether it’s highways, bridges, electrical grids, water mains, whatever–throughout the United States this infrastructure is decaying, because it has not been adequately maintained. You would be horrified to know how many major bridges are doomed to fail very soon. Ah, but the taxpayers are tired of footing the bill!
While you are tangled up in traffic, or waiting to have your shocks and tires replaced, or you’re fed up with bouncing on highways that feel like driving over railroad tracks, ask yourself if you voted for that last transportation measure. When you see the tables set up in front of the supermarket with the petitions to “Tell the State Legislators to Lower our Taxes,” just remember you get what you pay for!
~VOW
You can structure your contract bidding by insisting on, say, a 20 year guarantee. Trouble is that when the piper calls in the guarantee, the construction company is usually out of business (and often reconstitued as a “new” company with no legal connection to the old one).
I have to ask my son about this. He is director of traffic for a small city, a job he started only last spring. He says a big difference with private enterprise is that it is hard to fire an incompetents, which means that incompetents tend to accumulate.