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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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. :-)

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 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.

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

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!

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

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

(At least as of roughly four years ago)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.