Modern roads are designed to take serious abuse. 50 years of load cycling 20 ton semi at highway speeds causes mechanical damage which Roman concrete wouldn’t be effective in preventing. In ancient sites you can sometimes see the walls in high traffic areas have gotten smoothed and indented from hundreds of years worth of people gently dragging their fingertips across the surface as they walk by, tires are less gentile.
Also, people vastly underestimate how cheap road surfaces need to be. Try and calculate the volume of material making up the US road system.
A fun exercise is to calcualte the cost of some road in a neighboorhood, and compare that to the total collected property tax of all the homes along that road.
Then multiple that by 20 (the lifetime of the road surface) and factor in that the resurfacing is significantly cheaper than the initial build and you quickly find roads are easily subsidized by property taxes.
There are two sides to this coin. The roads need repair continually and resurfacing eventually, yes. What happens when property values and the local economy begin to deteriorate instead of prosper? All those utilities and public rights of way still need those repairs, but there's no appetite to raise property taxes, and the tax base is dwindling, and there's little reason to keep paying the mortgage on a depreciating house, especially once 2/3rds of your street is gone.
How sustainable is a system that requires perpetual good times?
Also easy expansion is more a function of interest rates than anything. Municipal bonds buy everything and there’s been very little interest on them. This means fewer taxes to buy things. And new bonds can be sold down the road as the town increases tax base and interest rates fall.
I live in a semi-rural area. There's no utility gas near me; we're too sparse for that to make sense. I'd guess most of the houses have big propane tanks (i've got two 250 gallon tanks) and there's several different companies that will come out and fill the tanks. In the nearby urban area, there's utility gas, but then they're trying to outlaw that for indoor air quality reasons.
I don't have utility water; it's available on my street, but it doesn't run by my house, it stops at a much lower elevation, our well water is fine (although we had to replace the well pump recently which was expensive). No utility sewer either, that's available in parts of my area, but mostly places with density or poor site conditions for septic or both.
Electricity is mostly overhead, with a little bit of underground telephone has a lot of undergrounding, but some overhead, cable and municipal fiber are almost all overhead. But when those are undergrounded here, they're on the sides of the road (directly under the overhead path) not under the road. That way it's easier to get to them for maintenance when needed.
Over their lifetime, easily. The pipes for those will last 100 years, easily. The maintenance of them are paid for by the delivery costs you pay in your bill.
As for rural I think there's 2 distinctions. 1 is we need rural communities because they produce our food and other things. Secondly, rural areas are between 2 or more populated areas. We need to connect populated areas so by necessity there are roads. Rural communities are built off of those.
The other distinction where you may be closer is exuburban communities built into rural areas. These may or may not be fully covered. Not initially anyways, but you'd assume the property taxes would cover in time.
My wife served on a sanitary district board. Decent underground sewer mains have an expected service life of 70 years. Some will last longer, some won't hit the expectation. It depends on site conditions, materials, etc, etc. Many will probably last to 100 years, but I wouldn't expect it to be easy. Especially if you had any of the not decent materials (Orangeburg pipe was common in some areas and is basically wood pulp/fibers mixed with hot tar; service life could vary between 10 and 50 years; the major manufacturer went out of business in 1974, as PVC and ABS pipes rapidly replaced Orangeburg in the materials markerplace).
Actually there was a huge nationwide boom in sewer building post WWII, especially in the 50s, and you can expect that infrastructure to need some largescale replacement over the next 20 years or so. Depending on system design and how housing and industry developed, some systems will be able to just inspect periodically and replace as needed, and some systems will probably take the opportunity to do a more modern redesign (older cities tend to have combined sanitary sewers and storm/runoff drainage; if you're tearing up all the streets to replace the sanitary sewer, it might be a good time to put in a parallel storm drain system)
I'm not sure about water mains, I'd guess they need more frequent replacement since they operate at pressure.
It depends. Where I live the roads in our neighborhoods are paid for by the town (property taxes) and many roads that run through the town are paid for by the county (income taxes) and then the highways are paid for by the state in part via tolls and other ones by the Federal Government via taxes.
A relative of mine who's otherwise a smart guy was lamenting rural broadband as an Obama boondoggle since it's never going to pay for itself to run fiber to all of the remote communities in our state... he didn't want to hear about the "P&L" for the road capital/maintenance costs.
I live in Montreal; many of the concrete structures in my city are crumbling and decaying due to the constant freeze/thaw temperature cycling that they're exposed to.
I wonder if the self-healing property of this new advanced concrete would help to avoid some of the cracking & flaking we're seeing in constructions from the 60s & 70s.
I live in Montreal too, and while all what you say is true ... the same is not true for the xUSSR cold cities I lived before immigration. So quality makes difference. Also planing and designing for less maintenance. Concrete structures from the same era across xUSSR are in way better shape.
Only if you take out the rebar. Concrete is porous, water penetrates to the rebar inside, the rebar rusts and expands, cracking the concrete. But if you remove the rebar, you remove much of the tensile strength of the structure, which means you need to use way more concrete to compensate (via the sheer compressive force of its own weight).
I worked at a geo-polymer start-up. One huge hurdle is sourcing the right kind of ash, and other ingredients, in sufficient quantities and with the right level of quality. Building a kiln or a launch pad is one thing, but building a road is orders of magnitude more expensive. Like, it's humanly possible, but it's not economically possible.
Only some bridge designs can use un-reinforced concrete. Many (most?) modern bridges need reinforced concrete to allow the concrete to bear tensile loads. Reinforcing concrete introduces new ways that concrete can degrade such as rusting of the reinforcing elements. I'm not really sure Roman concrete would be much help here.
modern roads and bridges are designed to decay at the rate they decay, because building in longevity is far more expensive than simply replacing the road surface or replacing the bridge at the end of its life.
what we don't do today is follow through on the maintenance and replacement schedules, in an attempt to save money. we try to repeat our tradeoff after the infrastructure is built, again trading away longevity in favor of money. well, infrastructure decays if you don't maintain it or build it to last longer.
skimping on maintenance after you skimped on longevity is trying to eat the cake, and still have it after you've eaten it. it doesn't work that way.
for slow neighborhood roads I see no reason why brick isn't used more often. my hometown had brick roads everywhere and once every 3-5 years a few bricks would get replaced here and there. in the 1990s I'd look around and see a lot of the bricks on those roads that were made in the 1930s, and there were probably older bricks to be found if I'd looked harder.
the rough ride kept speeding down a lot more than the police could, because I watched people scream through my neighborhood all the time after they paved over the bricks.
plowing snow is harder on brick roads, but it isn't so hard that it is an unsolvable problem.
Speaking as someone who grew up in a neighborhood with brick streets,...
They're insanely slippery when wet. A freeze-thaw cycle tends to make them move, eventually leading to weird dips and ridges. They're expensive to install and more expensive to maintain.
they were not slippery that I noticed in my town. not sure why.
my town used dirt as the "mortar" between bricks, so there was no solid joint to degrade over time. I do remember crews going around and spreading small amounts of dirt on those roads, to refill what little rinsed away after spring thaw. they'd just have a guy following behind the truck with a push broom moving the dirt so it fell between bricks.
It's not the plowing that gets bricks in winter, or not plowing exclusively, it's the freeze-thaw cycling that kills anything with joints. Every grout joint / polymeric sand joint is an opportunity for moisture intrusion and in any climate zone that gets cold enough to freeze, those joints are going to degrade incredibly quickly. Bricks may make sense in the South, but definitely not in most of the US.
I’m not sure how this applies. Most joints are meant to flex, reducing the breakage of actual paving elements significantly. It also means that an area with significant heaving can be repaired more easily by only needing to service the affected area, and the repair has minimal impact to the surface quality, unlike concrete patching or pothole filling.
> In 2012, Paul Lecroart, of the institute of planning and development of the Île-de-France, wrote that "Despite initial fears, the removal of main roads does not cause deterioration of traffic conditions beyond the starting adjustments. The traffic transfer are limited and below expectations".[4] He also notes that some private vehicle trips (and related economic activity) are not transferred to public transport and simply disappear ("evaporate").[4]
> The same phenomenon was also observed when road closing was not part of an urban project but the consequence of an accident. In 2012 in Rouen, a bridge was destroyed by fire. Over the next two years, other bridges were used more, but the total number of cars crossing bridges was reduced.[4]
It seems a lot like the real-world examples of the phenomenon look like close cousins of "if you remove the smallest values in a set, the average goes up".
it's not so bad; where I grew up in France many streets were cobblestone and it was fine. It's pretty rare in the US though except I've noticed it in streets where they have trams running--presumably to reduce the need for maintenance on those streets.
