alt Hacker NewsRural roads are often unpaved. The local authority has to come by regularly with a grade to redo things or they become unusable quickly. Overall this is by far the cheapest way to have a road, but it doesn't scale to high use and city folks demand something that makes less dust. Rural roads also includes minimum maintance roads which demand 4wd (real 4wd, many SUVs will have trouble) when the weather is nice and a winch is a must when things get rainy or snowy.
Though given his definition of quality I expect he is actually ignoring all the real rural roads and only talking about major roads which while they get less traffic than urban roads are maintained to similar standards.
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In my area the rural roads are typically asphalt. This part of the country receives a lot of precipitation and cold weather and our soils are pretty soft.
They stay in good shape for years, with little maintenance. There aren't many patches because there aren't many utilities. Truck traffic tends to gravitate to the highways, and car and ag traffic are low impact.
Maybe area-dependent? I grew up in an extraordinarily rural area in Tennessee. Most roads were paved (asphalt). Even ones out in the middle of nowhere.
The conditions of some of the remote roads might not have been great, mind you... and some seemed "thinner" almost, maybe paved a long time ago?
Living in a rural northern CA county, the roads are paved, however many are failing. The funny this is, one county over has much better maintained roads (by the state) because they are in a different district.
Rural around here in the PNW, the vast majority of rural roads are paved, except for forest service roads and the odd road here or there. I do a lot of countryside cycling and it's rare that I encounter a gravel road.
What they don't always have is the smooth surface found on highways; it's paved but of a bit of a rougher type (don't know all the technical differences, but it's noticeable on a road bike).
At the very beginning he separates into:
- freeways
- local roads
- unpaved roads
Obviously the high-clearance-only roads in the mountain West will score poorly here, but when trying to compare US roads to Netherlands roads, those are not useful as the Netherlands has no equivalent.
I don't think so. I grew up only in rural areas. We had plenty of roads, the vast majority of public roads were blacktop. The only dirt roads I recall were on private property.
> Rural roads are often unpaved.
Like the other replies have indicated, I'm not so sure this is the case? I live in very rural northwest Iowa, and while there are certainly plenty of gravel roads around here, I'm only driving on them if I'm intentionally trying to go "off the beaten path." You'll take a gravel road if you live on a farm, or you're trying to get to somewhere secluded such as a lake, campground or maybe a county park; but (imo) it's rare for the average person to drive down a gravel road just going from Point A to Point B on their daily commute.