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Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel
To save money, more than 20 Michigan counties have decided to turn deteriorating paved roads back to gravel. Montcalm County estimates that repaving a road costs more than $100,000 a mile. Grinding the same mile of road up and turning it into gravel costs $10,000. At least 50 miles of road have been reverted to gravel in Michigan the past three years. I can't wait until we revert back to whale oil lighting and can finally be rid of this electricity fad.
Other big downside: the stones that get caught between truck dual tires. They tend to get loose in perfect timing to crash your windshield.
I imagine the biggest factor in reverting a road is the amount of traffic it sees. Having visited family in rural MI thirty years ago and recently a few years back there are a LOT more paved roads. A lot of these paved roads are lucky to see 10 cars a day.
In Idaho and maybe other states, other issues also come into play. A gravel road does not get sampled which is good for the county because it means it won't be considered deficient. However, a gravel road also does not get state & federal monies (some exceptions apply). So, although they will be saving money, they won't be getting any for that road either.
Gravel roads have an increased stopping distance over asphalt or concrete ones. They also contribute much more to vehicle wear and tear - not only as far as nicks and dings, but also tires and shocks. (though the later part is just as true of badly potholed roads) They are significantly dirtier than asphalt or concrete roads, both for the vehicle (small concern) but also for the surrounding homes and businesses. When I lived on Middle Bass Island, it was quite common for neighbors to band together to pave their section of road just to cut down on the fine dust which accumulated inside their homes.
Actually, the very points you bring out about gravel (cheap to build but requires more maintenance) also applies to asphalt as compared to concrete. That is why they're in this mess to begin with: a properly constructed concrete road costs more up front, but lasts for decades. The part the politicians hear is, "costs more up front".
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
that happens on paved roads here anyway... due to the gravel we use to grit the roads in winter
Yep - you could see that when they redid I-88 near Chicago: they only put maybe a foot of gravel instead of the three needed to get drainage below frost level - this guarantees frost damage and the next rebuilding contract.
This has nothing to do with planning or investment- these municipalities are just plain out of money and cannot afford to repave.
love is just extroverted narcissism
In the UK we had a series of ads on keeping your distance and the tag line was "Only a fool breaks the three second rule".
3 seconds.
If a stone is thrown hard enough, how high would it have to go to be at windscreen height 3 seconds later? About 12m.
Unlikely.
So if you're 3 seconds or more behind the car in front, you won't be hit by gravel.
My state was introduced to a miracle material called asphalt several years ago. Recently they realized that they were repairing the roads constantly compared to the previous concrete; the worst case being a road that had to be repaved before it was open to the public. The normal crew of paving companies is up in arms because the state is bidding out new concrete-only bids to reduce maintenance costs and the work is going out of state because no one in the state uses concrete anymore for roadwork. The problem being that the state thinks that one type of material can build every type of road imaginable, and the officials can ride the resulting fame to godhood.
A more complete article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-mi-revertingroads,0,1719061.story
"Santa Feans have unique tastes"
Santa Feans -- at least the imported ones -- are flipping crazy, and will pay top dollar prices for anything that looks broken, old, and rusted out. (It's can't actually *be* broken, old, and rusted out. It just has to *look* it.)
This drives up the taxes for properties which actually *are* broken, old, and rusted out. That's where people who were actually born in Santa Fe tend to live, and that's how they get shuffled out of town. Nobody who was born there can afford to live there any more.
The New Mexico state capital has more Californians, Texans, and East Coast turquoise fetishists living there than actual New Mexicans. The community's "character" is valued far more than the community is. It's sad.
> When it snows a small amount, sure, you don't have to plow, but when there are more than
> a couple of inches you have to plow the road anyway. The problem then is that the plows
> also take layers off the roads when they plow them, meaning that through the winter, the
> roads become less safe as the gravel disappears and the dirt below is left.
I live on a gravel road. This is nonsense.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Preach on brother deKernel she can't be gone soon enough. I can blame everything on her and be happy about it.
A fine example was Benton Harbor, when there was cameras for her to look into she was all about helping poor Benton Harbor but as soon as the cameras were gone so was she.
She needs to GO AWAY and the rest of them as well. The state banked put all their eggs in the auto industry basked and can't figure out where they went wrong.
They also are oiled in front of properties to control dust (often something like Dustlock [soybean oil soapstock], since crude oil spraying is banned in many states). From what I remember this is done a couple of times a year (I lived on a gravel road from age 6 to 7, and then they paved it), but sometimes they will do an extra coat if extra traffic is expected (say, a county fair) or if some sort of festival uses the roads (e.g. something like Woodstock).
Alternatives blacktop requires yearly maintenance like seal-coating and has a lifespan of only about 25-30 years and concrete is expensive (especially in northern climates where it is prone to cracking and can deteriorate due to salt exposure.
Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north...
You don't even need it to freeze. Here in Western Australia, the surface of a road can get to as much as 70 deg. C on a summer day, but cool to 15 degrees overnight. Even in winter the temperatures can vary from 3 to 30 degrees C. I suspect it might be a tall order to expect a concrete road to put up with that kind of stress unless you put in a lot of expansion joints.
Indeed - for concrete, the cracking is worse, and harder to fix - also, the sodium chloride in the road salt would speed up the deterioration in the winter months. This is why manufacturers sell alternative ice melt for your sidewalk that is based on calcium chloride, etc.
I live in NW Washington State. When I drive down to Seattle, I dread the parts of the freeway that are concrete. Thump, thump, thump, thump, and the surface itself is loud so you get general roar behind the periodic thumping. Worse still, when you get to the north side of Seattle it gets really loud. I've been stuck in traffic there a few times, and the road bed that gets ground by tires has worn away to reveal the "gravel" -- the stones they used in the concrete are as big as a full size computer mouse. With the cement worn away, it's like driving on cobblestones. No wonder the freeway is so loud. The grooves in other areas really suck with a motorcycle. And then in other places, there are other types of grindings, 3 parallell strips about 3" wide and 12" long spaced in each tire well of the lane, each set about 12-18" from the other longitudinally. So here you get zipzipzipzipzipTHUMPzipzipzipzipzipTHUM.
I love blacktop.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
> California has been growing in population at an incredible rate.
Not quite. California is starting to experience net negative population growth, even allowing for illegals to make up some of the losses. California has gained house seats in every Census from 1930 forward... but probably won't in 2010 and will more than likely lose one.
And then you start making my point for me while thinking you are disagreeing.
> The blue parts of Colorado are growing the fastest and gaining the most jobs.
Yes, and a good many of that growth is coming at California's expense as people and jobs flee from the asylum. And as I said origionally they are bringing the problem with them in that they are still voting blue team. Because bluntly, THEY are the problem. Classic case of the problem with intellectuals. Yes you need them but if you get too many of them they cause Socialism and ruin for reasons which have been explored in enough depth in the literature that I won't bother with a Cliff's Notes summary here.
Democrat delenda est
I'm (almost) a civil engineer and so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
Concrete roads aren't indestructible. In fact, roads with rigid and semi-rigid pavements (concert layer without and with a gravel layer between the road bed) have only a slightly longer life expectancy (40 years) than regular flexible pavements (asphalt and bitumen-based rolling layer) (30 years). Just because concrete is seen as an artificial stone it doesn't mean it is eternal. Far from it. It does degrade and it degrades even faster when structures are designed to last just a few decades or so.
To make matters worse, rigid and semi-rigid pavements are much more expensive and labour-consuming than their flexible counterpart not only when building but also maintaining. They are also more prone to erosion due to water circulation in the road bed and all those regular problems related to concrete structures (carbonation, steel corrosion, those pesky freeze/thaw cycles, other nasty buggers).
So you may believe that concrete, just because it is concrete, ends up being an excellent solution but hey, there is a reason that it's only applied in very specific roads such as airport runways and parking lots (they withstand the forces from the landing impacts and don't degrade when in contact with fuel). It's a solution that is far too expensive and suffers from far too many problems than regular flexible pavement solutions, which means it is only used when it is absolutely necessary.
On the other hand, macadame roads are a time-tested technology. Although they don't make it possible to run around in high speeds they are one of the best road technologies developed up to this day. They are extremely easy to build, they are low-maintenance, they are cheap and sometimes they can even be built from the materials mined exactly from the construction site. In fact, flexible pavements are basically nothing more than macadame roads with an extra layer made out of some fancy material such as asphalt, bitumen, concrete or some other "glue" such as plaster. They may look "old school" but don't believe for a moment that them old time folk weren't smart or couldn't develop great stuff.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Most of the schools in California are closing because they have few students. Yes, there is less money being spent on fewer students, but claiming that the schools are closing because of improper funding is a strawman at best. Heck, the single largest line item in the California budget is education. One of the schools here in my town has a damn water slide. Yes, a three story amusement park style water slide in a public school. That is NOT a problem with underfunding.
A few years ago I ran EMS in Monroe County. Depending on where the call was, your choices were either (poorly maintained) paved road, gravel road, or dirt road. In some cases, it was actually preferable to go down the gravel or dirt roads... if you weren't 100% sure on an address, you could just look for the dust clouds from the first responders' vehicles. Some of the "paved" roads actually rode worse than the other roads, it got to the point where if you were trying to start an IV while going down the road, you had to time the bumps in the road with your needle stick.