[Russian_Cowboy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Wildwell', 'B')e nice when it get's icy!

You can get a lot more down a rail system than a highway system in similar space, so not that many 'lanes'. Personally I think whole areas will have to be abandoned and we might see 'new garden towns' spring up nearer to food and water resources in the future. Supermarkets will be long gone.

A rail system is not a magic bullet in many places, especially the US because of population density and the way everything is organized around trucks. As for personal vehicles, small, short range I should think. It’s going to be interesting. Rail is just one solution to a great many serious issues based around urban development, to water supply, from food to economics and from industry to commerce.

[NeoPeasant]

Roads without traffic seem to hold up pretty well, as THIS LADY discovered in her ride thru the Chernobyl area.

I imagine the roads would wear quite slowly with mostly bicycle traffic.

[Half-Mad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'I')n many parts of the country the best soil is under pavement...

[Half-Mad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('NeoPeasant', 'R')oads without traffic seem to hold up pretty well, as THIS LADY discovered in her ride thru the Chernobyl area.

I imagine the roads would wear quite slowly with mostly bicycle traffic.

[bentstrider]

I could do just fine without roads in my ride.
Whether it be my shoes, my bicycle, or longer than average jaunt in the Bronco II, hard-packed dirt paths are good for me.
As for ruts and hard-holes, throw some excess dirt into it, pack it down, and you're set.
Some people say it's bad for the suspension, I just tell 'em "I'll keep driving my vehicle on these paths until it breaks apart.
Or I don't get it converted to ethanol burning status soon.

[OldSprocket]

One poor part of Ohio is Perry County, known as Perilous County to the cyclists who ride there. The name comes from the quality of the roads. Perry County improved many roads in the '80s by simply grinding the cracked and potholed pavement into gravel. That may not sound like an improvement, but it was.

The grinding machine probably used more gas than your typical Toyota Prius, but I suspect that in the long term the roads used less oil for maintenance than before the grinding. That is only my guess.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he soil is cleared away before the road is made.

[RidgeRunner]

Half-Mad wrote
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')team trains, burning wood, coal, or whatever, need a water tower every 9 miles. I suppose a coal burning train could have a car dedicated to water for the engine, but then all that much more power is needed to move the water.

[formandfile]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Half-Mad', '
') For a rail system to be a practical replacement, there would have to be rail lines going down every 2nd or 3rd street in all retail and industrial areas, in every city. Down about one in ten or twenty streets in residential areas.

[nocar]

I wonder if not the biggest (or only?) advantage a post-oil world will have over the pre-industrial world is that we will have many good roads. Even when the surface crumbles, the roadbed will remain, and this is the most important part of a road. Aside from sailing, the most energy efficient travel modes are railroads and bicycles, and really, these can be combined. Bicycles on railroads have been used for ages in Europe (but perhaps not so much since the 1950s) for railroad maintenance crews. In some places now in Sweden you can go on railroad bicycles on abandoned railroads, for recreational purposes. You easily get high speeds with little effort.

Certainly it is possible to build railroad bicycles for like 20 persons, that can be pedalled by the passengers, and of course you also can use it for transporting goods. There will be plenty of iron available from useless cars and trucks. My time perspective here is like 40-60 years post peak.

A four-lane highway can have two lanes for horses and bikes and two lanes for railroads, powered by humans or electricity.

I agree, we have paved over and destroyed far too much good farmland, which "we" will certainly regret. (I.e. Our descendents will curse our stupidity) And lots of roads will be useless - but in quite a few places the roadbeds will come in handy.
nocar

[Half-Mad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he soil is cleared away before the road is made.

[Half-Mad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('RidgeRunner', 'H')ave you ever heard of a TENDER???

[gary_malcolm]

I have a Mad-Max employment fantasy about a hard crash... I become the mailman between Eugene and Portland Oregon (~100 mi) on the best bike path ever invented, I-5. All of that road bike training will really pay off.

[bentstrider]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gary_malcolm', 'I') have a Mad-Max employment fantasy about a hard crash... I become the mailman between Eugene and Portland Oregon (~100 mi) on the best bike path ever invented, I-5. All of that road bike training will really pay off.

[pea-jay]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') suppose under parking lots, they might not remove the soil first. I'm not sure about that. But, after having a parking lot sitting on top of the soil, I doubt anybody would want to use that soil for a long time.

[pea-jay]

Of course if everything goes really bad and we all end up extinct, a future civilization may evolve out of the one of the surviving lifeforms. And if they do, their archeological counterparts will puzzle about our peculiar artifacts, while their energy companies will scheme how to remove the oil from the abundance of oil-gravel deposits scattered around the planet.

[gg3]

For a road of a given material and quality of construction, longevity of the surface depends on a) traffic weight & speed, and b) freeze/thaw cycles.

The effect of traffic is equivalent to pounding on the surface, which aggravates any imperfections that occur. The effect of freeze/thaw cycles is to cause a) uneven expansion and settlement of the subgrade, which in turn cracks any pavement surface (asphalt loses its flexural strength at low temps, i.e. becomes brittle), and b) expansion and contraction of the surface material (normally the flex in asphalt takes this up; in concrete pavements, expansion strips are placed at regular intervals in the slab).

Both of these problems can be solved, and a sustainable & maintainable pavement surface produced, with "paving blocks." These are standardized units typically made of concrete. They are typically set in a base course of sand, with tar spread between them to provide room for expansion/contraction, and to provide adhesion to keep them from rising or settling precipitously.

Why sustainable & maintainable: When damage occurs to the pavement, it is localized to a few damaged pavers. These are easily replaced by breaking them out and setting new ones into place. They can be broken out with hand tools i.e. heavy sledge hitting a cold chisel which in turn is held by a small tripod that is set over the paver that is to be broken out. They can be replaced with hand tools, i.e. simply prodded into place with crowbars and tapped down with a mallet.

New pavers can be manufactured using gravel derived from crushing old ones. Yes, portland cement is needed, but the overall quantity of concrete is less than for conventional pavement repairs (in which larger sections of concrete are often chopped out and re-poured).

A road repair crew can operate using a small truck (choose your renewable power source) with a load of pavers and a few tools.

Any municipality can manufacture pavers with low-tech equipment, i.e. a small concrete mixer (human-powered if need be), a few sets of reusable steel forms in standard sizes, and a few common hand tools.

Roads made of pavers are viable for traffic up to about 30 miles per hour, which is adequate for most local applications. It may be that improved designs can support higher traffic speeds. Also the weight of vehicles would have to be limited to what is normally encountered in local traffic, but again, improvements may be possible. Both of these limitations will reduce damage due to vehicular pounding.

In the case of freeze/thaw cycles, the pavers will tend to rise and fall with the subgrade, restrained by the tar in between them (think of a brick walkway with the bricks set in mortar). If individual pavers get cracked or broken up, replacement is simple (as per above). The expansion and contraction of the pavers themselves will be taken up by the tar, which will form a proportionally greater area than the expansion strips in conventional slabs.

Another aspect of road maintenance that is possible with pavers but not with conventional materials: An entire road can be dug up easily enough by breaking out one row and then prying up the succeeding rows with the pavers intact. By this method, one could take a worn or "rutted" road surface and "re-arrange" the blocks so as to even out the wear. Unlike conventional asphalt or concrete, the pavers don't need time to harden after they're put into place.

For snow removal, use plows with rubber edges at the bottoms of the blades, that won't catch on the slight irregularities or cause damage to edges of pavers sticking up. Alternately, use rotary brooms mounted on the front of agricultural tractors, as is/was the practice in Copenhagen (useful application for tractors outside of growing season, and no need for separate dedicated vehicles for plowing). These snow sweepers can handle accumulations up to a foot deep, and operate in eschelon to move all the snow to the edge of the road in one pass.

For street cleaning, older-type broom sweepers are preferable to modern vacuum sweepers, as the high suction of the latter could loosen the pavers under the intake nozzle.

So yes, we can have roads. Nice ones. Not necessarily high-speed freeways, but at least good local roads that are friendly to all types of lower-weight, slower-speed mixed traffic of the type that will probably predominate in the foreseeable future.

[RonMN]

As if we didn't know this already...here's a bit of a news report out today:

QUOTE:
About 71 percent of major roads and highways in the Kansas City area are considered substandard, ranking the city No. 1 on the list of large urban areas with poor quality roads.

The St. Louis area ranked No. 3, with 66 percent of major routes having unacceptable quality pavement, according to the study released Thursday by TRIP, a Washington-based transportation research group.

And my personal favorite quote:

"We get a lot of cross-country traffic and we get more than our fair share of heavy truck traffic as well," Briggs said. "A lot of these major highways are 30 to 40 years old, taking a tremendous beating from all this traffic, and they are simply wearing out faster than we can repair them."

Can you say "overshoot"???

[Jack]

It's a nationwide phenomenon. We built the roads - and now we cannot even maintain them.

Gee, I wonder what will happen post-peak?

[ubercrap]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('RonMN', 'A')s if we didn't know this already...here's a bit of a news report out today:

QUOTE:
About 71 percent of major roads and highways in the Kansas City area are considered substandard, ranking the city No. 1 on the list of large urban areas with poor quality roads.

The St. Louis area ranked No. 3, with 66 percent of major routes having unacceptable quality pavement, according to the study released Thursday by TRIP, a Washington-based transportation research group.

And my personal favorite quote:

"We get a lot of cross-country traffic and we get more than our fair share of heavy truck traffic as well," Briggs said. "A lot of these major highways are 30 to 40 years old, taking a tremendous beating from all this traffic, and they are simply wearing out faster than we can repair them."

Can you say "overshoot"???