6 years ago
1
Bumpy Ride: Why America’s roads are in tatters
One sunny winter afternoon in western Michigan, I took a ride with Leon Slater, a slight sixty-four-year-old man with a neatly trimmed white beard and intense eyes behind his spectacles. He wore a faded blue baseball cap, so formed to his head that it seemed he slept with it on. Brickyard Road, the street in front of Slater’s home, was a mess of soupy dirt and water-filled craters. The muffler of his mud-splattered maroon pickup was loose, and exhaust fumes choked the cab. He gripped the wheel with hands leathery not from age but from decades moving earth with big machines for a living...
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This was an interesting read, I can see this becoming a major problem, I've driven on dirt, gravel, and asphalt and a properly maintained dirt or gravel road is as good as any asphalt road, the only problem is on days with bad storms that neither dirt or gravel always hold up well. I would love to see local governments go in and say look, we either raise taxes or agree to a gravel system, you get one or the other, but that can never happen when everybody wants to be reelected and anybody seeing people voted out will usually vote the opposite of what got the other removed. All I know for sure is that we are in for a bad future with infrastructure in trouble, and it's not just roads but pipes and all underneath us too that are 100 or more years old.