I think "the entire system is unneeded" is a bit of a stretch, but I agree that, outside of cities, most routes don't need to be paved - you can safely travel 50 mph on a flat, straight gravel road. Of course the main arteries - Hwy 52, Hwy 20, I-80, and many others need to stay maintained. But there are so many small roads that, although quaint and a pleasure to drive, are probably unnecessary from a utilitarian/practical point of view.
Not surprisingly, most Iowa folks are good drivers in bad weather. Generally it's avoided altogether. When it has to be done, most people are smart enough to slow down and be careful, or pull over and wait it out. There will still be accidents, but less cars slide off icy gravel roads since they seldom exist.
I am actually a little ticked that the northern states are not doing research on alternate materials / surfacing technology.
1) western North Dakota now has traffic such that I find Minneapolis / St. Paul during rush hour relaxing in comparison. I would hope for more rail, but they seem to keep crashing and I guess a pipeline isn't going to happen.
Now that I'm in MA, I have heard several people say that concrete highways do not last through the winter, despite the large number of concrete-type highways in good condition in MN. Maybe this is the result of careful local road surface research? Roads are certainly better in MN than they are in MA, even though MN has colder and snowier winters. That could just be anti-highway spending sentiment from the big dig though...
I read that differently than you, I think. I read it not as "we don't need roads" but as "we don't need all of the roads we currently have, we can get rid of some of them." I don't know if that's true, even with reduced demand, there are a lot of small towns that only have one main road going in or out of them. (I also am from Iowa.)
Lots of small towns are nice and scenic. Lots of other ones are vestigial organs of some long forgotten economy and would better disappear.
Sure, the people who frequently use those roads are the ones who will know them best and be able to predict their condition, but your stopping/maneuvering power is so much worse on gravel that assuming an average speed of anything greater than, maybe even near 50 mph seems pretty reckless.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washboarding [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Fear . The protagonist drove a load of nitroglycerin over washboard by going fast enough to float over the bumps.
How does the maintenance per mile between gravel roads and paved roads compare? Does this article apply to both?
Certainly like the idea of cutting back unnecessary expenses, but I'd also like to see some data on this.
You also need to take into account that many of these roads are used to transport agricultural products, so the roads are in effect an agricultural subsidy (though not necessarily a bad one).
I also grew up in Iowa, and the difference between the gravel roads I took to get to my friends houses there, and the gravel roads we have here in AZ is night and day.
Do you know if any in your area might have been a part of that, and if so, how it worked out?
It also tends to be the case that going faster can reduce the effects of the washboarding (given a reasonable vehicle).
Iowa: 114,429 miles of roads
Wisconsin: 115,145 miles of roads
Source: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/hm10.cfm
Unpaved Functional Length:
Iowa: 13,363 miles
Wisconsin: 566 miles
Paved Functional Length:
Iowa: 81,273 miles
Wisconsin: 102,482 miles
Source: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/hm51.cfm
Population:
Iowa: 3.107 million
Wisconsin: 5.758 million
Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iowa+wisconsin+population
Square miles:
Iowa: 56,270 sq mi
Wisconsin: 65,500 sq mi
Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wisconsin+square+miles
Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iowa+square+milesIn Wisconsin we know that every year there will be snow. Lots and lots of snow. In 18 years of living there I never once remember a time where there was more than half a day of our rural road not being plowed. I remember seeing plows driving around when there was no snow falling because they knew it was coming and as soon as the first flake hit the ground the buckets went down.
In Iowa, ever year there were multiple times when I'd be stuck at home, unable to get to school or work because the roads weren't plowed. Major Highways! I'd call the DOT and their response was "we are just waiting until the snow stops so we don't have to plow multiple times." This was their response in the afternoon having not plowed all morning. One year they ran out of salt for the roads and had to use expired Seasoning Salt from a local manufacturer. Everyone complained because their car smelled like Garlic Bread. No one seemed to care about the fact that Iowa is in the Midwest and for some strange reason the people running the DOT didn't think to have adequate supplies.
Wisconsin has a huge vacation market. A large amount of road usage is by people traveling from out of state up to the north woods for hunting, fishing, camping, etc. Iowa does not have this type of road usage.
Iowa has two main highways. Hwy 80 is a shipping lane that connects Chicago to the western half of the US. Hwy 35 is a north south route going from Minneapolis/St. Paul all the way down to Austin Texas and connects a lot of major cities along the way.
Hwy 80 (and hwy 88) are used so much in Illinois that Illinois actually charges you a toll to use it. Iowa has the same traffic on 80 but does not charge a toll. One state has figured out how to pay for their road usage while the other has not. THIS is the real issue with why Iowa's DOT can't do anything right. They spend money in the wrong places, don't get enough income to pay for things they should and for some strange reason don't understand that they have a problem.
You obviously haven't lived on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. People book through there are much faster than 50mph. ;)
If given a choice, I think I prefer driving on poorly plowed gravel roads over well plowed paved roads in snow storms. Gravel roads don't seem to ice up as easily, and the gravel and dirt helps with traction.
So while laudable, it would be very nice if North Carolina followed suit with its ~79,000 miles of maintained roads (largest of any state) [1]. But I doubt that would happen, my friend at NCDOT says the culture emphasizes building new roads (or the ones that get wiped out by hurricanes out on the outer banks), and change intersections in a manner that borders on the whimsical.
We like to build roads in challenging places, it seems [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Primary_Highway_System
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Highway_System
This is a function of them choosing to maintain roads at the state level instead of the county level. If you look at road miles by state [0] regardless of the actual entity that maintains them, they are 16th.
[0] http://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/
Texas also has an all-state-maintained system (except for toll roads, which are private, but the free service roads are still state-maintained... and Texas tends to favor adding service roads wherever possible), and their road network is the second-largest state-maintained highway network in the US. When you compare the physical size of the two states, NC really comes off as having an excessive amount of roads.
The same thing happened with Railroads during their heyday. I remember seeing an old railroad map with stops at all these small towns in Nebraska. Now, railroads are almost entirely commercial with very few passenger stops in small towns.
It makes sense that at some point you just don't have the need for so many roads. If more people move to urban or even suburban city centers, things like public transportation, ride sharing, Uber, and even self-driving vehicles start to make a lot of sense and cut down a lot on driving volume and the need for roads.
As long as those drivers can afford the tax burden to maintain the aging infrastructure, sure.
I'd be much more worried about the tax burden due to entitlement spending than I would about transportation infrastructure.
[1]http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-fede...
What kind of roads would they abandon? I didn't click through to all the references, but this article doesn't give any solutions.
Iowa's road map was drawn from afar, before any surveyors could look at it, so there are a lot of bridges keeping the road grid continuous over rivers, creeks and dry streambeds.
I'm really curious about whether this has happened in San Francisco.
By 2010- 2012 or so, actual fuel use was ~50% of year 2000 forecast estimates.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2015/03/dot-vehicle-miles-...
> However gasoline prices are just part of the story. The lack of growth in miles driven over the last 7 years was probably also due to the lingering effects of the great recession (lack of wage growth), the aging of the overall population (over 55 drivers drive fewer miles) and changing driving habits of young drivers.
That being said, I live in CA and would love a model much like Germany, with unrestricted freeways in the rural areas and speed limits around 15-20 mph in towns and cities. Going down I-5 to socal? Sure, do 150. Driving in a town where there could be people walking, cyclists, vehicles stopping often, etc,? Maybe 15 makes more sense.
Of course, not giving a license to just anyone with a pulse would be a start. My grandmother (lovely woman, but 91 and clearly past her driving years) failed her written driving test a few weeks ago. What did the DMV do? They _extended_ her license another two months, for reasons that escape me. "You can continue to drive despite a demonstrated ignorance of driving law" is pretty much what we're saying there.
Also, California is big. A lot of it probably resembles Iowa more than SF in terms of road infrastructure - ever head out to the more remote parts?
The German Bundesstrasse (equivalent to U.S. or state highways?) does have highly variable speed limits, as you describe, and I found them correspondingly maddening to drive on, due to the incessant need to accelerate or decelerate.
Relying on friends and "taxis", I had to go through negative temperatures to get a simple can of soda.
After that, I could never complain about BART.
But on the plus side, cars are a lot easier to own in those areas. Parking is usually free/cheap. Traffic is very low, etc.
I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that if heavily loaded trucks are causing a disproportionate amount of damage they should be taxed at a rate which allows for proper maintenance of those roads.
They're not decorative.