[rwwff]

Don't forget bridges and flooding related washouts. Undermine the roadbed, and the thing will fall apart.

The big bridges are the most problematic. A washout, you can handle by conscripting a few hundred warm bodies from a soup line, giving them shovels, and marching them off to the site of the damage. Road won't be wonderful afterwards, but it'll still be basically functional for low speed travel, bicycles, horse powered wagons, etc.

A bridge across a serious river would be nigh impossible to replace. Perhaps the military would expend the resources to keep a few important ones open, but otherwise, if there is no replacement for oil, those bridges are eventually going to be history.

For impacts, just look around where you live, and imagine if every bridge longer than 100 ft was gone.

[Ludi]

I think roads will get a lot of use even after there is no budget for maintenance. In my county, our county roads are one step up from gravel roads (smooth out a bit, pour on a little tar, spread gravel, and compact a bit - presto! a "road") and require constant maintenance because of destruction due to flooding. We don't even get snow and ice and our roads are a mess. County roads at least will quickly deteriorate when times get tough.

[morph]

we are reasonably lucky where i live, most roads are fairly new or have been resurfaced recently so should stand up for a while. Aswell there are several bridges that cross the river in the town so if one goes down access is still fairly easy.


A lot of the town centre is paved with bricks aswell so this should stand up longer(i think)? any one know an answer?

[JPL]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rwwff', 'D')on't forget bridges and flooding related washouts. Undermine the roadbed, and the thing will fall apart.

The big bridges are the most problematic. A washout, you can handle by conscripting a few hundred warm bodies from a soup line, giving them shovels, and marching them off to the site of the damage. Road won't be wonderful afterwards, but it'll still be basically functional for low speed travel, bicycles, horse powered wagons, etc.

A bridge across a serious river would be nigh impossible to replace. Perhaps the military would expend the resources to keep a few important ones open, but otherwise, if there is no replacement for oil, those bridges are eventually going to be history.

For impacts, just look around where you live, and imagine if every bridge longer than 100 ft was gone.

[frood]

Ive seen some Roman roads, the paved ones, with huge ruts where hundreds of years of cart travel has made its impression so I guess everyone travelled on the smoothed down bits and took it in their stride. Also in the dark ages, villagers would take bits of the road for their houses (precut stone why not?). The authorities even made a law against it at the time but no one listened.

When I went to Iceland in the early 80s the exterior road circumnavigating the island was just flattened down sections of volcanic gravel. The constant pinging of the gravel on the underside of the car would send a lesser person screaming off a cliff with their foot down. However it was a simple servicable route but only vehicles with a decent ground clearence could really drive on it. Trucks had no problem.

As roads nowadays are just a patchwork of decades of shoddy roadworks filled in with marzipan mixed with some dirt(certainly here in the UK) I would expect deterioation of modern roads would come very quickly when the governments feel thats its not worth their while (read money) to upkeep them.

Only highways would be kept in some sort of order to keep people getting to work and the freight running. This is due to rail infrastructure being downgraded to such a degree nowadays that to open up new rail links for frieght and travelling would cost even more. Not that they dont realise railways are easier to fix and locomotives run on coal...no sir

[JPL]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('frood', 'A')s roads nowadays are just a patchwork of decades of shoddy roadworks filled in with marzipan mixed with some dirt(certainly here in the UK) I would expect deterioation of modern roads would come very quickly when the governments feel thats its not worth their while (read money) to upkeep them.

[lateralus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JPL', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('frood', 'A')s roads nowadays are just a patchwork of decades of shoddy roadworks filled in with marzipan mixed with some dirt(certainly here in the UK) I would expect deterioation of modern roads would come very quickly when the governments feel thats its not worth their while (read money) to upkeep them.

[savethehumans]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')re roads in Britain really that bad?

[TWilliam]

I don't know if this is typical or not, but on my recent move across the US, I couldn't help but notice that most of I-70 across Missouri and I-80 across Nebraska and Wyoming were absolutely terrible. Miles-long stretches where I swear I thought I was going to rupture internal organs, much worse than they were when I was making multiple trips across the same routes 7 - 10 years ago. And no indications of impending repair anytime soon...

[frood]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lateralus', '
')I was watching the news(on the British heat wave) last night and they showed a vehicle that usually spreads salt on the roads in winter, except that it was spraying water on the road to keep it from melting in the heat. Are roads in Britain really that bad?

[lateralus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('frood', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lateralus', '
')I was watching the news(on the British heat wave) last night and they showed a vehicle that usually spreads salt on the roads in winter, except that it was spraying water on the road to keep it from melting in the heat. Are roads in Britain really that bad?

[zed]

I happen to know that Washington state is facing these issues.

I-5 through Seattle was built in the 1960s and is now a rough ride in many places and is constantly congested. However there is no money to fix or expand it. The Seattle area also has a couple of structures considered extremely vulnerable to earthquakes - the Alaskan Way viaduct and the Highway 520 floating bridge. During a "big" earthquake, it is widely considered possible that both structures could be completely destroyed. Also, the I-5 bridge that crosses the Columbia River into Oregon is also in need of replacement. It consists of a pair of bridges built in 1917 and 1958 and is over capacity and also vulnerable to earthquakes.

The transportation situation in Washington has already reached a point of diminishing returns IMO. Times are good economically yet politicians are struggling to fund the massive investments needed to maintain existing infrastructure, much less expand it.

Of course we are talking about a state that has already had a major suspension bridge fall into the water (Tacoma Narrows) and a floating bridge sink (Murrow bridge on I-90). You can probably extrapolate what will happen when the resources aren't there anymore to recover from these sorts of things...

[gg3]

The Romans were blessed with naturally occurring deposts of volcanic ash that just happened to have the right proportion of minerals to make a high-quality cement. And the Romans figured out how to use that to make concrete (use it as a binder for sand and gravel and rock), hence structures that last 2,000 years.

We could of course do likewise today, plus or minus the economic constraints on the price of construction.

---

Dirt and gravel roads can be built and maintained via horse methods. Go look up "road maintainer" and "drag scraper" for examples. The resulting roads would be more than adequate for horse-drawn or motor-driven transport. Snow removal via horse methods is also viable up to a point, after which, wheels come off the wagons and are replaced with ski-like skids for riding over the snow during winter months.

"Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh..."

---

Smooth hard pavement decreases the energy expenditure for moving a load. Rotating a wheel on a soft pavement is much like trying to constantly climb a slight hill.

Thus we have a bit of a tradeoff. Best combination it would seem, is to maintain the pavement but keep down the load on it.

Any human-powered vehicle, i.e. bicycles, velomobiles, pedal/electric hybrids, will do much better on a good hard smooth pavement, rather than on gravel or dirt road.

Freeze-thaw cycles cause damage to pavement regardless of traffic. This is a constant maintenance issue.

What I would like to do in our community plan if we have the re$ource$ to do it: gravel road with a wide sidewalk adjacent. Pedal powered and small electric vehicles could use the paved surface, everything else uses the gravel surface.

Efficient technique for paving: "Paving blocks," made of cast concrete, that are prepared at a central plant and then "installed" in the road surface by largely hand-labor methods. One advantage is, when you have damaged blocks, you can break them up with hand tools, pull out the pieces with hand tools, and drop new paving blocks into the open space using hand tools also.

The subgrade for these blocks can be "controlled-density fill" aka deliberately weak concrete that provides the needed compressive strength but can be excavated out with hand tools (this is done via minimizing the portland cement content, thereby minimizing embodied energy content of the material as a whole). Between the blocks, brushed sand or, in freezing climates, a rubber-like filler compound that is applied with a squeegee.

Broken paving blocks can be put through a crusher (this too can be powered by horse methods) and turned back into chunks of < 2" size, which in turn can be used as a coarse aggregate for making more paving blocks. (That is, the crushed-up broken pavers are placed into a mold and new concrete is poured over them and vibrated into place; this significantly reduces the amount of new concrete needed to produce replacement pavers.)

---

Bridges: I'm far from an expert on bridge design, but the key constraint would seem to be the span of an arch that can be achieved with pre-petroleum methods. Don't forget that some impressive bridges were built using steam-powered equipment for all major job functions (grading approach roads, cutting timber, mixing concrete, hoisting materials, laying pavement, etc.).

Though, for the longer spans, once they're gone, they are probably gone. We will see a resurgence of ferry boats (probably powered by steam), but these will not be able to carry private vehicles in any large number, and will therefore have to interface with public transport at each end. Think of Oakland and San Francisco before the Bay Bridge was built in the 1930s.

[cube]

I think the roadway system will be one of the last institutions to die in a PO world. It's all a matter of financial priorities you see. Let me ask.....As a tax payer if you had to choose what would you rather have?

1) a roadway system?
2) a welfare system?

I don't know how it works in Europe but in America people for the most part have given up on the "welfare" system....at least welfare for the poor.

Even "liberal" democrats barely mention it today. I remember back in the "Ronald Reagan days".....the concept of government funded social welfare was the central theme of liberalism. I'm not sure what the central theme of liberalism is today or if it even exists???

The 2 party system in America seems to be merging into 1.

[emersonbiggins]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cube', 'I') think the roadway system will be one of the last institutions to die in a PO world. It's all a matter of financial priorities you see. Let me ask.....As a tax payer if you had to choose what would you rather have?

1) a roadway system?
2) a welfare system?

[Leanan]

I don't think the U.S. highway system will survive the peak.

European and Canadian roads will probably last longer. They are built to last, because they are more willing to spend money on roads there. They are also more willing to put up with inconvenience to get the job done right. In the U.S., people get angry if you shut the road down to re-pave it, so we do a lot of quickie "paint the road black" resurfacing, that hardens fast so you can get the traffic back on the road in a few hours. But of course, it doesn't last as long.

The comparison to Roman roads is not accurate. The Romans massively overbuilt everything. We don't. Instead, we use our technology to build as cheaply as possible. Most of our roads are bridges were built with a 30-40 year lifespan, because we figured we'd want bigger and better ones by then.

The bridges will be the biggest problem. Who will be willing to cross a bridge, when this might happen:



But the main reason I don't think roads will last is our method of funding them. They are paid for with gas taxes. As gas prices rise and people drive less, there will be less and less money going toward the highway funding.

Eventually, only the rich will be able to afford to drive. But they can't pay for the highways on their own, and the poor and middle class will resent being taxed so the rich can drive. The roads will deteriorate, until no one wants to drive on them any more.

[emersonbiggins]

Of course, you know Amory Lovins has the answer for all of this...

"no roads needed for my car!"

[dub_scratch]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Leanan', 'I') don't think the U.S. highway system will survive the peak.

European and Canadian roads will probably last longer. They are built to last, because they are more willing to spend money on roads there. They are also more willing to put up with inconvenience to get the job done right. In the U.S., people get angry if you shut the road down to re-pave it, so we do a lot of quickie "paint the road black" resurfacing, that hardens fast so you can get the traffic back on the road in a few hours. But of course, it doesn't last as long.

[lateralus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Leanan', 'I') don't think the U.S. highway system will survive the peak.

European and Canadian roads will probably last longer. They are built to last, because they are more willing to spend money on roads there. They are also more willing to put up with inconvenience to get the job done right.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Leanan', '
')But the main reason I don't think roads will last is our method of funding them. They are paid for with gas taxes. As gas prices rise and people drive less, there will be less and less money going toward the highway funding.