I drove around Dallas on vacation and then drove back to Chicago. It’s striking how all the roads and bridges in Chicago look so old by comparison.
You drop the same climate on top of Dallas and you'd get the same sort of surfaces, particularly if you used salt to clear the ice.
FReepers like to beat up on Detroit but its going to look like a utopia compared to Chicago when somebody finally cuts the umbilical.
It’s been like that for a long time. Winter is rough on roads. Chicago has plenty of it, Dallas not so much. Chicago on the whole is a much older place, too. Chicago is well kept compared to Philadelphia, though. There are sections in town where it is impossible to dodge the steel plates bolted over giant potholes. There’s something very Blade Runner-ish about crossing that bridge ocer the Schuykill into New Jersey. Maybe it’s all the barrel fires and street bums in every nook and cranny. Had a flat tire with a rental car on that bridge once. I wouldn’t stop until I got off the bridge and to something clean and well lit. I’d never seen a Pep Boys store at the time but man was I ever relieved.
Same in Buffalo, and Detroit. One of the things that has always bugged me about “investing in infrastructure” was that governments should be maintainng roads and bridges on a contiuous basis. There are ostensibly plenty of dedicated revenue sources to keep these thing in good repair (fuel taxes, registration fees, tolls, milage fees, etc). Yet the liberals have to raid these revenue streams to fund their welfare state. As Maggie Thatcher once famously said, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. Socialists raid funds meant for infrastructure maintenance, they tax everything that moves, and some things that don’t, they borrow until the lending window slams shut, and they still need more. THEN they try to tell you that borrowing money to upgrade infrastucture is some wonderful, bold initiative. It is, in my opinion, a damning indication of poor stewardship on the part of government.
All this after the GOP hack/criminal govenor Ryan spent billions on roads.