The solution to this problem is utility tunnels. A tunnel network under road surface just for plumbing and cabling. Maintenance crews can just drive through in cars and do their jobs, without stopping traffic and digging out pipes. Many ultra-modern cities have one.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_tunnel

This happens in other countries too. Some people theorize that it's done because of internal rivalries between dependencies/political factions, but I suspect local governments are just inept at logistics.

I remember the neighbourhood where I grew up. The roads were great until the cable TV company slices them all open to put their cables in. Then the patches would never hold, water would get in and under the road when it rained, and the roads were terrible for years.

> The city has been trying to force public works to go do those things BEFORE road projects, but it's an uphill battle.

Is Public Works a state agency? I would have expected them to be subordinate to the city.

interesting. I noticed something similar in the UK but not in Germany. Maybe some simple change in the way these utility repairs are regulated is to blame?

While interstates are nice, cities are where people live, so the quality of urban roads matters and is maybe the reason for the perception of US roads?

Probably everywhere frankly, but Dallas is terrible, too. My wife and I took up skateboarding recently and it became much more obvious. Go out to the suburbs or a running trail or nice park and it's smooth sailing. You can push and coast. Where we live near downtown, it's cracks, rocks, discontinuities, metal plates. The gas company also dug up a bunch of bedrock 7 years ago, left a huge pile of it on the corner, rain came a few days later, and for the last 7 years, our sidewalks have been covered in dirt and the houses and cars all get a thin yellow film on them because there is so much dirt in the air all the time.

That's before considering what regular construction crews do. Most of the sidewalks are closed most of the time. They're routinely torn out and never fixed. There are nails and other debris in the roads all the time. When we first moved to our current address, my wife had all four of her tires go flat within the first year. I didn't own a car until two years ago, but both front tires have gotten nails in them already. That's also on top of the city's contracted out private dump truck crushing my rear windshield and smashing the hatch and leaving a business card with a claim number on one of my front wiper blades. That was nice to walk out to.

Then there was the crew across the street stealing all of my power tools when I accidentally left my garage open one day.

I'm not a NIMBY, but experiencing this makes me weary of the Hacker News zeitgeist railing against communities that don't want their neighborhoods turned into constant construction. There are entirely non-evil reasons homeowners might want that because building where people already live is incredibly disruptive.