Posted on 02/06/2017 4:05:45 PM PST by Lorianne
One place it has been done is Butler County, Alabama
Some cities and counties in the U.S. are avoiding the cost of repaving roads by converting them to unpaved roads.
Among the municipalities in the report is Butler County Alabama, which is listed as having 250 Miles of unpaved roads and spending- $4-Million a year on roads. The county officials say the decision to covert a road from paved to unpaved was made because it was the most cost effective way to deal with a problem road. The report does not identify the road.
In some cases, officials just let the roads deteriorate. In others they crunch up the existing road surface and add gravel to create a new road surface.
There have been about 70 such conversions, stretching along 550 miles of road in at least 27 states, according to a 2015 review of the projects produced by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.
(Excerpt) Read more at alabamanews.net ...
The clay road behind my grandfather’s house sprayed with oil and never got muddy. It smelled like a gas station in the summertime.
The biggest problem with seal coating is that the road surface is like ball bearings for several days after the application of the tar and pea gravel. I had an adventure on Land’s End Road near the ferries one year on my motorbike. The signs warning about the recoating of the road had been removed, and I came around a corner a little bit hot... No damage, but I sold the bike 2 weeks later. Skeered the bejeebers outta myself!
“Oiling the rural roads worked great until a few instances of dumbasses oiling them with PCB contaminated oil occurred.”
I recall reading an article years ago about a cancer cluster somewhere in the south that was tracked to a series of school bus stops on a road where PCB contaminated oil was sprayed.
Careful where you post that, it might make some people uncomfortable and in need of a safe space... ;-)
Right around when I was coming out to CA I remember a big stink fest back there where VDOT oiled a bunch of Shenandoah valley roads with oil containing PCBs.
In CA I was up in the Trinity’s some years back riding up to a spill site with a contractor when I noticed there was an unusual number of deer (some impressive) on the road. It looked like they were licking it. I asked what was up with it, my assumption was the road base was derived from rock with a lot of salt in it or they had made cuts through rock that had it. Contractor replied, no, they are using some kind of dust control formula that has a lot of molasses in it, the deer freakin’ love that stuff...
Dirt bikes.. treacherous little mosquitos.
I’m sorry, but this, to me, is another example of our slide toward a third world country.
See #47.
The windshield replacement businesses love this.
It can do wonders for “traffic calming” /s
Yes. That is the truth. Limited funds, and they they apply them to things that simply aren’t going to fix the issues of travel.
For example, I am all for bike paths. I really am. But I view them as a luxury. And in a time where we are essentially borrowing money to pay for these things, we shouldn’t be doing them.
It is like a family where the breadwinner loses their job, but they are still going to have expensive dinners out or vacations. Normal behavior is to defer those things until you do have money.
Not with these liberal monetary sinkholes.
And what "user fees" ie regisration, fuel taxes, etc do the bikers pay?
{{{crickets}}}
I’m sorry, but to me and many older Freepers all this is the hysterical whining of metrosexual pansies with a case of the vapors.
Much of the nation had dirt roads through the nineteen seventies and we were putting men on the moon then.
The idea that supposed adults could be panicking over the notion of driving on dirt makes me laugh.
I made it through this thread as long as I could without mocking them but enough is enough - this site is not safe space.
America used to be inhabited by actual men.
I thought this was a thread about Detroit and Chicago.
Rokon
Made in New Hampshire.
Who needs a road?
When I lived in Minnesota, we had a dirt road in front of our farm that was pretty swampy. The county came out to fix it, and when they dug a few feet, they found the road was comprised of buried logs. The farmers had laid hundreds of logs perpendicular across the road and then filled over with aggregate.
The logs were ancient, but perfectly preserved from the anaerobic environment. The county just replaced the aggregate and left it, otherwise it would have cost $$$ to stabilize the muck. Sometimes we over think and over engineer things...
That’s a “corduroy road”; occasionally we have droughts here in NJ and when the reservoirs are low some of those old roads are uncovered (the old towns were drowned when the reservoirs were created). Near Giants Stadium we have a “Paterson Plank Road” through the Meadowlands which supposedly derived its name from that a couple of centuries ago...
Turns out the muck was too loose in spots and the trees would sink in - so they added more trees and I think latched them together somehow. I would imagine those trees are still there as the road base. There is a road near me that was built like that back in 1908 or something and it is still okay.
The should have thought of that before adopting the taxpayers as their life-support and retirement plans.
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