by theluckycountry » Fri 09 Jan 2026, 20:26:46
It's an old old story, and it starts in the rural areas and works it's way back to the cities.
Guide to Converting Distressed Low-Volume Paved Roads to Unpaved Roadshttps://lrrb.org/unpave/Do you like that terminology? "Distressed paved roads" Makes them sound like a victim doesn't it. Poor things, we'll go in there and De-pave them and make them better
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')reface. The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.
Many of these roads should have never been paved to begin with, but the costs of construction, asphalt, and energy were so cheap it was done anyway. Now many rural roads are past their design life and rapidly deteriorating, especially in the Midwest from enormously heavy trucks taking corn and soybeans to biorefineries. It is both difficult and expensive to maintain them, and dangerous to let these roads fall apart and degrade into gravel on their own.
https://energyskeptic.com/2023/unpave-l ... ve-energy/"Many of these roads should have never been paved to begin with"Isn't that the truth. Why were they? Cheap oil, let's just do it, with no though for the future because when the future arrives we'll be out of office ant it'll be someone else's problem. That is if they even thought that far? Like all the idiot early adopters that qued up to pay triple the price for a rechargeable battery car. They were't thinking ahead either, they were just sucked into the vortex of "The Future will be better than the Past." Well for many the future is here and they are driving their Battcars down "Distressed" roads and getting massive repair bills for the damage. In some cases the Battcar is simply written-off because it's impractical to repair it with the massive battery integrated into the subframe. Battcars on rough gravel roads? In your dreams. The Rivian Adventure idiots go down them but only the better ones I'll wager. They'll not take their 100k baby down anything too rough. No chargers out that far anyway

Toyota still makes a decent offroad vehicle, the landcruiser. It's got what it takes but it costs $100,000. Why so expensive when a Doge or a Ford... Well those trucks are just shopping trolleys compared to the Landcruiser, it costs so much because the Japanese still build them tough, it's basic inflation. You either accept the true inflation price and buy the quality or you cheap-out and buy the shrink-flation Ford etc. I've seen some of those, crap engines, crap brakes. Toy trucks compared to the Japanese offering. Australia stopped manufacturing cars and trucks because we realized we weren't competitive with Asia given our small population. Oh it worked when Oil was $5 a barrel, but it doesn't work now.
While our resident troll bleats on about how PeakOil never arrived and the world is all peaches and cream the roads around him are crumbling away with the rest of the infrastructure that made life so pleasant. He must never leave the house? It's the only way you could be in denial at this stage.
We're 17 years past the peak now and the 3rd World is going hungry and dark. We'll be next, we're well on the way in fact.