HN Reader

> Interestingly, in all cases urban roads are worse quality than rural roads, presumably because they see higher traffic than rural roads.

There's more infrastructure under urban roads. Crews come in to fix some utility, shred a section of a lane, patch it poorly with dissimilar materials, and leave.

This is a great analysis but it does focus exclusively on ‘roughness’, which is obviously important but isn’t the be-all-end-all of road quality.

One area I notice in particular that roads in the northeast US subjectively feel worse than Europe is in quality of road markings. Constant plow scraping and harsh salting seems to destroy markings.

I think it also shows up in the overall fit and finish of road infrastructure - edging and barriers, signage, lighting, maintenance of medians, how curbs and furniture contribute to junction legibility… and of course bridges.

One major reason is that European countries typically have national road agencies and consistent standards across the country (because, generally, smaller and less federal). US’s patchwork of federal, state and local road maintenance leads to vastly different budgets and department priorities across the network.

> Interestingly, I expected cold places to have lower road quality in general due to things like freeze-thaw cycles and the impact of road salting, but there doesn’t seem to be much correlation. Plenty of cold places (North Dakota, Wyoming, Minnesota) have good-quality roads

Not sure about those states in particular, but I have anecdotally noticed that some of the places with the harshest winters do some of the least road salting -- because salt is mostly usable for light to moderate snowfall and the people who live in the harshest climates are often better equipped to drive on hard packed snow.

This explains why there's such a huge and consistent split in how good/crumbling US infrastructure is! It's "lives in a top-10 metro area / doesn't." It's been living rent-free in my head why opinions on this are so unbelievably stark. Turns out you can both be right.

The SFBay I-880 and US-101 are always packed, often under construction, but still pothole-filled, with sections of extreme roughness. Compare this to our OR neighbors, where there are signs saying "your tax dollars at work" by ORDOT everywhere. I used to scoff at this as a display of insecurity, but apparently (from TFA at least), Oregonians' tax dollars _are_ at work.

CA takes so many tax dollars from my hands. Why aren't they "at work"?

Anecdotally, I once shared a house with a Russian student in Monterey, California. He told me he was amazed by the quality of our roads compared to those in his homeland, though I don't recall which part of Russia he was from.

I grew up in rural California. Despite living quite remote—about 25 kilometers from the nearest town—by my standards our main roads were well-maintained. However, numerous smaller side roads branching off to serve sparse residential areas, sometimes leading to just a handful of houses, were another matter. I wonder if California has a larger proportion of these minor roads skewing the results. Yet paradoxically, two major urban centers, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are it would seem quite terrible.

The more important quality metric than “roughness” is infrastructure/safety.

A multi lane road shouldn’t cross another one in a flat traffic light intersection. That risks T-collisions if someone runs a red light.

It’s pretty cheap to keep roads smooth if you skimp on making separated lanes, safe multilevel junctions and roundabouts in every intersection.

How does Hawaii have interstates?

Two thoughts. . .

> California, which is reasonably rural

This kind of remark always makes me think about how such things are defined and about 80-20 rules. Perhaps California is "reasonably rural" in terms of the proportion of its land area that is rural. But population wise it most definitely is not. The [US Census definition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...) has classified California as the most urbanized state every decade since 1980. California has an 80-20 thing going on where almost all of the population lives on a tiny portion of the land, and then there is an enormous amount of land that is almost totally empty. This is different from more prototypical east-coast-style "urban" states with not so much rural land, and also different from prototypically rural states that don't have any very large cities.

It's true that plenty of CA roads are in bad condition. But CA is in a situation where it has miles and miles of roads in remote areas that barely anyone drives on, and then it has roads in dense urban areas that see some of the heaviest traffic in the US. It's just hard to compare things in terms of miles of road.

The other thing that comes to my mind whenever I see comparisons of US roads with those in other countries is the signage. It does vary from place to place in the US, and outside the US my only real experience is with Europe, but I'm amazed at how much better and more consistent signage seems to be on highways in the US compared to Europe. In the US you can be driving through totally empty land dotted with tiny villages, and still you will see a sign "Tiny Village 20" then "Tiny Village 10", then "Tiny Village next exit", and then the exit. In Europe sometimes you can be almost in the town before you see the one and only sign saying "Medium-sized Town right here!"

In urban areas, it's fairly rare in the US to encounter intersections without street signs that are pretty well visible from all sides of an intersection, whereas in Europe many signs are flat against walls, making them hard to see except from certain angles.

There's more to driving than just road miles. :-)

In my area of the US, it seems like every manhole cover was designed to be in the road… and often where ones tires need to be. Makes for a very bumpy ride even when the condition is “perfect”. I’ve driven thousands of miles/km in other countries where the roads have barely any manholes.

Interesting. I traveled 15 years ago around california, over 4000 miles in three weeks. I remember being shocked at the state of the roads - some of them were downright dangerous, the car wouldn’t stay on the road, and I felt I was more or less constantly vibrating. Based on the article I must have driven on non interstate roads which are in california in particular really bad .

A good comparison point would be Germany. It has a very large network of roads too, some designed for very high speeds, and a strong driving culture (perhaps stronger than the continental US).

> but this is based on a survey of the perceptions of business leaders about road quality, not actual road data

Like... business leaders specifically in the freight and transport industry, or just _in general_? The first seems like it might be _marginally_ useful; the second is just nonsensical.

This is a really great bit of analysis. I wish more things like it existed. I wonder if something similar exists for a utility comparison of roads? Something like average economic value/waste generated per mile of road? Probably not that exactly, but something that gets to not how well they are built, but instead how well they are implemented.

> IRI measures how much a car moves vertically as it travels over a given distance, and is typically given in units like “inches per mile” or “millimeters per meter.

How accurate are phone accelerometers these days? Could Uber/Lyft/etc. start collecting that data from drivers phones.

> And here again we see that cold climate doesn’t seem to have much impact on road quality, with cold places like Minneapolis and New York near the top, while warm cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Dallas are near the bottom.

This stuck out to me. I wonder what NYC and Minneapolis are doing right that California should be doing to better maintain their roads?

I heard a civil engineer make a claim once that the dust on the side of the road is about 300% more laden with precious metals like platinum, than random mining. I suppose this is all roads and not just American roads, though.

I'm from South Carolina, pretty close to the border with North Carolina. All my life i've heard that South Carolina's roads are terrible, especially compared to North Carolina's _amazing_ roads.

Looking at this data though, it seems while NC edges out SC by a small margin on interstate roads, SC actually beats NC on local roads.

Take that, North Carolina!

Interstate road quality chart is rough... It's like somebody dropped the ball on maintenance of those exactly 30 years ago.

Amazing that Minneapolis tops the city road quality chart, despite having the harshest winters. Do southern cities not build their roads so robustly? Or are they not maintained?

I'm surprised AZ is at 82%. I've driven all over the country and the very worst highway I've ever experienced, by far, is the drive from Las Vegas to Flagstaff.

Our roads shouldn't be problems anymore. Didn't we pass a $1+ trillion infrastructure bill in 2021 or is that just getting pilfered by contractors? I have 0 faith in the federal government to do anything at scale anymore.

as a brit I've driven through most of the US states and major cities, and they were generally comparable to what I was used to at home and throughout continental europe

Los Angeles though was something else, giant gouges on 12 lane highways every few feet for miles on end

and on sliproads, sudden surprise vertical walls with right angled bends

was like something out of the third world

Massachusetts in nearly last place, right where I expected it to be but always assumed that was just "everyone thinks their own is the worst".

As an American living in the North East, I'd say American roads are crap. I'm not sure if construction methods are part of it, but it seems to largely be down to absurdly shoddy repairs.

Growing up in the UK (which has similar winter freeze-thaw cycles to contend with), I was used to seeing pothole repairs done with hot asphalt, jackhammer-like packing down of repair material, and steam rollers. In the US it's quite common to see them just throw few shovels of loose material into a pothole and pat it down with the back of a hammer - or sometimes just leave it loose for the next car's tires to throw right back out again.

As a Minnesotan, I'm both surprised and not surprised that Minnesota has some of the highest quality roads. The roads take a beating but MNDot is pretty high tech in their road quality monitoring. Our company makes a tool that automates road quality assessments using computer vision and machine learning straight from a smart phone camera. It's pretty mind blowing and hopefullyis somethingmore municipalities will adopt. If you are curious, check it out, xweather.com/roadai.

>rough roads inflict costs in the form of reduced vehicle speeds.

I mean, this seems like a benefit in disguise in many urban areas. The idea that we want high speeds is a real premise that needs to be defended.

The arm-pit state of Oklahoma, where I live, is considering a "mile tax" to support the maintenance of our road system. Of course we know it's also to offset EV vehicles gas tax loss. (which EV owners already have) Our roads are terrible and don't usually get repaired until they're almost dangerous.

This tax will hurt fixed income and poorer people the most. As Thomas Jefferson said: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” My state is so red, it's scarlet.

There is great variation between states. A good example is driving from Phoenix to San Diego via Yuma - the Arizona side is much better maintained, and the rougher California roads continue all the way to the city.

(At least as of roughly four years ago)

Great analysis! In last decade I have seen road quality of California degrade like crazy. It used to have clean, open roads now the quality has gone down to trash. Hwy 101 feels like you are in New Jersey.

"Overall, the quality of US interstates is very high, while the quality of roads in major cities is quite poor."

Is this really true? Coming from a country with alot of ice, American cities I've worked in seemed to have prestine roads.

Interesting article. I would have loved to see the quality ratings weighted by how many people drive the roads, not by road-mile.

I bet it would look a lot worse. It seems like low traffic roads out in the middle of nowhere are pretty decent, while the multi lane juggernauts in downtown that everyone spend their time on are disasters.

Greatly depends on the state. Louisiana interstates still haven't recovered from the fallout from the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed in 1984, which raised the legal drinking age to 21 as a condition of receiving annual federal highway funds. Louisiana was the last state in the U.S. to have a legal drinking age of 18. Louisiana experienced about 9 years of reduced highway funds as a result.

I’m currently in Albania, a country famous for shit roads. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, really), their roads are better than LA roads.

Love that I live in California pay out my ass in property AND state tax and get the worst roads in America despite the fact that we barely deal with ice, snow, or rain.

The article, and as of this comment, this thread, don't seem to contain particularly deep (ahem) comparisons of road construction, such as this article from Nature about bridge layer differences between US, Germany, England, and France:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12987-8

For roadbeds, here's Canada versus various EU countries, unfortunately US isn't included:

https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl07027/llcp_07_03.c...

This piece starts with 4 different paving approaches, relatively distinct, yet each having ~40 year lifespans (US old and new, France, Germany):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209575642...

The discussion goes into what might we mean by "how good"?

PS. US road builders better hope the measure is never total quality divided by time-to-construct. They'd have some real ground to cover (ahem):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw3K_obepyo&t=1s

Rich for someone to say "roads don't get a lot of attention" when they literally pulls billions every year whereas transit gets a pittance.

Quality of roads in a city/town typically correlate with the income and socioeconomic status of the location. In the Bay area, affluent suburban areas have pretty good roads (believe taxes have an effect). While cities like Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond have streets full of potholes and very bumpy roads that can even damage your car while driving at a normal speed. For state with the highest income tax wonder where the funds go to. Good article on current state of US roads. I've seen other countries in EU and they seem to have much better or comparable roads in rural areas than the US.

I once drove across the US-Canadian border during a snowstorm. On the Canadian side, the road was a slew of white slush that had us hydroplaning on and off. But as soon as we crossed back into the States, it was like a switch flipped. The road went from a slushy bog to a pristine surface with zero snow accumulation, just a slight gleam of moisture.

I bet the proportion of unpaved roads would look a lot less bad if it was done by lane-miles rather than road-miles.

> Colorado near the absolute bottom for road quality

> Kansas and Wyoming have much better road quality

Absolutely zero surprise there. It's amazing the moment you cross the Kansas-Colorado border on I-70, for example, how the interstate goes from very good to immediately extremely bad.

It's interesting New Hampshire leads the way for interstate highways and it is a 0% income tax state.

I live in NY but I went to New Hampshire last month for the first time. I have to say the roads were really good, even in more remote areas in the White Mountain region. Heck even the dirt road I had to go on for 1.5 miles was in good shape for a Hyundai Elantra rental car.

On the flip side, the roads near me are really bad in some spots. It's torn up pavement with massive pot holes for years in a decently trafficked area literally 1 minute away from a major highway.

> rough roads inflict costs in the form of reduced vehicle speeds.

Most non-rural places do this on purpose in concert with not ticketing noisy (eg - exhaust notes) cars and trucks. Really makes for a sadistic feel when noise machines are prevented from leaving the area quickly.

Traffic "calming" is another deplorable initiative. Nothing better than exerting ultimate control over the roads to sadistically keep them filled with traffic at all times so that peace and quiet never surmise.

And, people still believe they have the freedom to drive wherever they want, anytime they choose. Sure, but you're basically on a bus schedule now with all the added stops and flow control.

Say, can y'all figure out how to create road surfaces that actually dissipate noise (like blacktop), but not for a limited time or limited ideal operating envelope?

There is more than one kind of quality.

When I drove from New Mexico from New Hampshire I thought roads in the US South were remarkably good. I settled in New York where major roads seemed pretty good but go to Pennsylvania and it seems there are two kinds of roads: bad roads and roads under construction, you never seem to find a good road that was just constructed. A lot of people thought it was frost heaves but this article say it isn’t.

My quality problem in NY is that atlas maps and GPS maps show numerous roads that aren’t really passable or if they are passable are too risky. I never saw ‘minimum maintenance’ or ‘abandoned’ roads before I came to NY and I wish they were so marked in GPS maps. There is a road near me which is sometimes passable in the winter if you have the right kind of vehicle and if you know the road goes downhill and won’t require that much traction… People who don’t have the right kind of vehicle will get led by GPS down this road and think it is OK because there are tracks but halfway through they panic and try to turn around now they are in trouble. That road is passable in the summer except for when it gets washed out.

Also NH is in a class by itself with its motor-oriented infrastructure (in 1980 they rerouted route 93 to go around Manchester and nobody goes there anymore) which is tree-structured as much as possible so you have many levels of hierarchy which can and will jam up. Want to walk? You can’t get there from here. I can go for years in NY without updating my GPS maps but if I drive to NH I will see the road I am got rerouted and there is a shopping center where there used to be a road. And this is in a state that doesn’t have income taxes so I don’t know how they pay for it.

I just drove across ten US states and five Canadian provinces from the West to East Coast, shipped my Jeep to Europe by way of Iceland, then drove 100 miles through Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

Driving on the freeways in those mainland European countries was immensely relaxing and easy - the road quality is vastly, vastly better than the US or Canada. Expansion gaps, cracks and imperfections are almost imperceptible.

Anecdotal, of course.

I have a strong memory of Driving I-40 from Cali into Arizona and not being able to maintain 60mph because the potholes were so big I though I was going to break the suspension on my Jeep.

> The US has the largest road network in the world, about 4.3 million miles of road, and Americans drive much more than residents in most other countries

This is insane. This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation. We spend trillions in building, subsidizing, and maintaining this infrastructure. Only for this cycle to repeat itself in 25 years as the roads/highways breakdown and people move further out (induced demand). Then there’s the billions in lost productivity due to traffic. Significant decrease in activity and increase in obesity.

Then the increased emissions from vehicles result in poor air quality. Then there is decreasing water and food quality as tire and brake particles make its way into the water and food supplies.

Not surprised to see California and Californian cities near the bottom of all the lists.

Shitty in Silicon Valley and most of Texas, places that don't even receive snow.

Does this statistics include private roads? Or it is only roads accessible to public?

> Overall, my main takeaway is that roads in major US cities are often shockingly bad

My main takeaway is that the US relies too much on cars and trucks relative to rail and bike (and perhaps one should say walking). I took that away from the first few lines though.

Title is for 'American' roads.

I'd like to see some of these charts with other countries included like Germany, or some country from each continent.