<story><title>Why Galesburg has no money</title><url>https://inlandnobody.substack.com/p/why-galesburg-has-no-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rexreed</author><text>Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.</text></item><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>The problem boils down to this: we&amp;#x27;ve vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We&amp;#x27;ve paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt&amp;#x2F;gravel, but they got paved because it&amp;#x27;s a sign your neighborhood has &amp;quot;made it.&amp;quot; It&amp;#x27;s a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50&amp;#x27;s, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes?&lt;p&gt;If we hadn&amp;#x27;t allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we&amp;#x27;d have neighborhoods with dirt&amp;#x2F;gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc.&lt;p&gt;Instead we have a country where we&amp;#x27;re slaves to cars.</text></item><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure for super low density development is extremely costly relative to how much &amp;#x27;stuff&amp;#x27; you&amp;#x27;re building the infrastructure for.&lt;p&gt;Initially it&amp;#x27;s not so bad, because it takes decades before you need to do replacement-level repairs&amp;#x2F;maintenance, but eventually it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic economy, but the ones that don&amp;#x27;t...it&amp;#x27;s not pretty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>occz</author><text>The roman roads didn&amp;#x27;t have to bear the load that modern roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation are trucks.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Galesburg has no money</title><url>https://inlandnobody.substack.com/p/why-galesburg-has-no-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rexreed</author><text>Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.</text></item><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>The problem boils down to this: we&amp;#x27;ve vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We&amp;#x27;ve paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt&amp;#x2F;gravel, but they got paved because it&amp;#x27;s a sign your neighborhood has &amp;quot;made it.&amp;quot; It&amp;#x27;s a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50&amp;#x27;s, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes?&lt;p&gt;If we hadn&amp;#x27;t allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we&amp;#x27;d have neighborhoods with dirt&amp;#x2F;gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc.&lt;p&gt;Instead we have a country where we&amp;#x27;re slaves to cars.</text></item><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure for super low density development is extremely costly relative to how much &amp;#x27;stuff&amp;#x27; you&amp;#x27;re building the infrastructure for.&lt;p&gt;Initially it&amp;#x27;s not so bad, because it takes decades before you need to do replacement-level repairs&amp;#x2F;maintenance, but eventually it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic economy, but the ones that don&amp;#x27;t...it&amp;#x27;s not pretty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Naga</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m assuming you&amp;#x27;re speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought about why we have problems that the Romans didn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know about ease of maintenance and access to utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that survived, not 90% of the roads that haven&amp;#x27;t) and they were not affected as much by freeze&amp;#x2F;thaw cycles as North American roads are.&lt;p&gt;My intutition says that they also probably were not generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures I&amp;#x27;ve seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less road width means less maintenance since there&amp;#x27;s physically less roads.</text></comment>