I feel like I am missing something here, a mile of road in a rural area costs $1,500,000 to reconstruct? How do small towns afford to maintain their roads?? Perhaps there are many costs that don't inflate as the number of miles increases, like the equipment needed to break down and repave the roads?
Same here. And from that, are there likely to be improvements in the future by automating processes and cutting labour, or finding cheaper materials, or saving on planning or re-routing traffic.
Most states transportation departments publish spreadsheets with itemized costs for recent bid lettings, as well as quarterly summaries with stats by item number. You need to be familiar with the items specs to know exactly what's included (ie installed cost vs material provided cost, etc), but it's a start.
Part of the "ponzi scheme" that Strong Towns likes to talk about is that a lot of the funding comes from state and federal levels. Because the locality no longer is completely tied to the cost of actually building the road, the incentive to cut costs is removed and roads funding is something that local politicians "win" to bring back to their area and show that they've done a good job.
My small town resurfaced (grinding and re-paving) 5/12ths of a mile for about $100,000. That's about $240,000 per mile. Or actually $120,000 per "lane-mile".
However, we could only afford it because we got a grant from the state. Our annual town budget could not afford the road maintenance.
Those numbers are inline with my development where we maintain .9 miles of private road with HOA dues; the quotes we've received all orbit around $250-300k for the last several years. Yes we have hard winters.
What we don't have is frequent heavy vehicles at speed. The state actually bans certain types of commercial vehicles on specific roads in the spring when road beds are soft.
The figures cited in this story seem high. Or maybe they're normal in Illinois or some other state where costs are extraordinary. Their not in line with what I see.
That’s not that expensive, as long as it’s a planned expense.
An acre of land which is large for a town is 43,560 square feet or 208’ x 208’ though you can get significantly narrower along a road. A mile is 5280’ so ballpark that’s 25 per side or 50 properties = 4,800$ per property every say 20 years or 240$ per year.
That stretch of road serves 40 houses. So paving every 20 years works out to $125/year/house. Median home value is $105,000 so that costs 0.12% of home value per year.
Not unreasonable if planned for and if other expenses are not chewing up all property tax revenue.
If it winters, you are going to want to pave more often than that. My parents suburban street has similar traffic (read: 40 people driving their car out then back in every day and that's it), and just from the warming and contraction over the course of the year the asphalt starts buckling and falling apart in less than 5 years.
You're not missing something: they can't afford it, which is why roads are increasingly in poor condition.
The trick is, communities can usually get outside subsidy (state and federal) for _expansion_ projects. So when the road breaks down and they don't have local money to fix it, one of the strategies is to go to the higher level government for an "economic development" project to get outside money to pay for the road to be widened / expanded. This is true even when the added capacity isn't needed.
Cleveland is a model for this, but it fits probably all but 4 cities in the U.S.. The city population has been in decline for 50 years while the metro population has been stagnant for 50 years. People just move around to the latest sub division cleared out of the raw forest when the last one starts to get rough around the edges or the school district numbers waiver, then wonder why the city is so anemic and degenerate.
Thereby doubling the cost next time repaving is needed. Oh well, just double the lanes each time the road wears out. In a few generations the problem will go away.
I can see it playing out as one or two subsidized rounds of widening, and then a subsidy to "modernize" to fewer lanes, but with on-street parking or bike lanes or something like that.
Many places in the US spent and borrowed to build infrastructure without budgeting for long-term maintenance; they also encouraged development patterns (e.g. suburban sprawl) that are cheap to build, but quite expensive when you take into account the long-term maintenance requirements.
This is a problem even in more urban areas, which is why lots of urbanists (including Strong Towns) advocate cutting back on new road construction, and taking into account the local tax base before building out infrastructure.
So, first it depends if the area ever experiences freezing temperatures.
Living in a small town, our roads are in poor shape.
Additionally, we have a US highway that cuts through the center of town.
The state administers the maintenance of that particular road, so we have had incidents where the state will hire contractors to modify the sidewalks along the highway, to make them ADA compliant, but not coordinate w the city.
So, the city winds up ripping up the sidewalks, because of an infrastructure upgrade for the water system.
So, short answer, we don’t maintain our roads.
Unless you have a really good tax base, the money just is not there.
Since rural roads get significantly less traffic, they require less maintenance (Though get similar amounts of frost heave damage). Maintenance is often just filling in potholes and cracks, with occasional resurfacing.
Of course, there are a ton of non-local funding that gets drawn from:
- federal and state gas taxes
- state vehicle registration fees (varying by type and weight of vehicle)
- state, county and municipal specific property, income and / or sales taxes
As for highways, there is the federal highway trust, and grants and loans can be taken out to pay for them, but that typically does not fall on the town's shoulders alone (if at all).
Having lived in the midwest and the south, frost heave has a _major_ impact! Seems like the cycle is 12 years or so on road repavement, but that's anecdotal.
Also note there are a _lot_ of grading options available, some as simple as gravel and tar.
Around where I live they call it stone and oil, and if it is the same thing as gravel and tar, that is the absolute worst way to regrade a road for the consumer. The sound of oil and stones smacking against your car when you unwittingly turned down a road that was recently stone and oiled is awful.
The relevant number here is the cost to repave, not reconstruct, which is about $330,000-$350,000 per mile for a minor arterial road in a rural or urban area.
As to how small towns afford it--you don't repave that often, and you focus efforts on what to repave. For example, Cedar Rapids, Iowa calculated it would cost $500 million over 10 years to repave everything that needs to be repaved: https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Annual-road-repaving-to-st....
Cedar Rapids has about 53,000 households, so that's about $943 per household per year. To put that into perspective, we can do a calculation. 18% of DC metro area commuters use Metrorail. If you take 18% of the 2.2 million DC metro households, that's about 400,000 households (roughly) using Metrorail. The rail capital budget is about $1 billion annually, so about $2,500 per household per year. Excluding the cost of new rail cars, its about $1,500 per household.
(Obviously this is a very back-of-the-napkin calculation, but it puts things into perspective.)
That's a very apples-oranges comparison. DC commuters benefit from Metrorail even if they don't use it. And the Metrorail capital budget is for much more than just trackway (i.e. railcars, buses, parking garages, etc).
Remember in this comparison that a metro line has significantly higher capacity than an average road, and the metro cost includes the vehicles, fuel and drivers. Also, the uncosted externalities (CO₂, air pollution, accidents, noise) are significantly lower for the metro.
I know of a 4.5 mile stretch of small rural road in the California foothills was recently repaved for about $400k. It would be great if the variance on these numbers were also given.
Yeah. If my experience in towns and small cities of highly varied affluence is any indication I would guess that road maintenance costs swell to fit the available budget.
My parents retired somewhere nice (read: wealthy) and there was recently a big stink at the town meeting because they wanted to repave a road that doesn't need it to the tune of a mil or so and it was an obvious handout to a well connected paving/construction company.Meanwhile my city (who's name is synonymous with urban blight if you ask my parents neighbors) bought a pavement milling attachment for a skid steer (an item that costs less than a pickup truck) and it made the regional news because they're known for being so tight with money. I could go on but I won't since you get the picture.
Obviously this is a very back-of-the-napkin calculation, but it puts things into perspective.
You're comparing an all-inclusive capital budget versus simply repaving roads. How much does DC Metro spend on track maintenance annually? How much does Cedar Rapids spend on lighting and signage?
How much do Cedar Rapids residents spend on their cars? The average used car payment runs in excess of $4,800 annually. New cars run around a hundred or so bucks a month more.
The DC metro is a bit of an odd duck since a large chunk of its users don't actually live in DC. The Census Dept. puts metro ridership at about 21% of all commuters commuting into DC, and overall about 34% of all DC residents use public transit (of all modes) as their primary means of transportation.
So even though you're including the cost of things like stations and vehicles, I think the overall cost is much closer (if not slanted in favor of transit) than you're letting on. That said, rail is typically one of the most expensive modes of public transit.
Good point--I forgot WMATA is in the middle of major rail car purchases. The 6-year plan for rail systems, track rehabilitation, and stations is $600 million annually. I've updated my numbers above accordingly.
Again you're making an apples to oranges comparison. The metro budget also includes expenditures for bus and paratransit service, station improvements, fare collection modernization, fire alarm upgrades, information technology projects, police services, and so-called "business support investments".
Per the budget the plan is to spend at most $249 million annually (less for most years) on track and structures rehabilitation. That's the closest you'll get to a repaving budget and includes things beyond track maintenance and replacement.
With that in mind the six year plan would call for per-capita spending of between $335 and $620 annually, cheaper than repaving the roads.
I excluded those items from the Metro budget. I included signaling and stations, because those are a necessary part of subway maintenance that don’t have much of an analog with roads. (Traffic lights must be maintained, but train signaling systems are very complex and very expensive to maintain in comparison. There are millions of feet of wiring throughout the Metro system and each track segment is wired up for the traffic control system to work.)
In any event, the point isn’t to say that road paving is cheaper, but to address GP’s question, which is how cities can afford it. It’s an order of magnitude comparison to put the number into context. (For one thing, the road maintenance budget for Cedar Rapids is overstated by a factor of two, because I used the projection of what the city thinks it ideally needs to spend rather than what it does spend.)
I included signaling and stations, because those are a necessary part of subway maintenance that don’t have much of an analog with roads.
Sure, because municipalities typically externalize those costs (e.g. police doing traffic duty or parking control). Road signaling itself is simpler than rail signaling but still needs periodic maintenance. You've got stuff like generators (a necessity out here now that PG&E is introducing recreational blackouts. Presumably sensor lights increase the cost of repaving.
Likewise Cedar Rapids almost certainly has to plow the roads for a good chunk of the year where a subway and even a surface rail system typically wouldn't. Of course with plowing comes the cost of more frequent repaving.
In any event, the point isn’t to say that road paving is cheaper, but to address GP’s question, which is how cities can afford it. It’s an order of magnitude comparison to put the number into context.
Sure, because governments typically externalize the cost of roads but not public transit. In San Francisco, SFPD will bill the MTA for any sort of police presence on Muni. They sure as shit don't bill Caltrans for the cost of traffic enforcement.
> The relevant number here is the cost to repave, not reconstruct, which is about $330,000-$350,000 per mile for a minor arterial road in a rural or urban area.
Sounds a tad more expensive than it needs to be. Skimming search results for my country (.fi), I get numbers ranging from 30 000 to 50 000 eur per kilometer. I know murican roads are wider, but I don't think they're that much wider. And I don't think we're particularly effective or cheap at doing it..
I don't understand why that would make a fixed length of road be so much more expensive, unless commute time for blue collar workers is compensated better than lawyers. Shipping a truckload of asphalt plus the required machinery can't be that expensive.
With property lines being about 100 feet apart, that comes to 100 houses. It's just $15,000 per house. The road should last 50 years without heavy truck traffic, making it $3000 per year per house.
You’re not discounting properly. It’s more like $500-600 per year because of the time value of money and inflation. Replacement costs are $300 this year, but initial construction is $500 this year because it’s on a bond. Maintenance isn’t included. The surface isn’t really going to last 50 years without looking like Fallout 2. So tack on another hundred.
All of this becomes expensive for single family homes to support. The revenue per area is just so low.
If there are winters, a road with zero traffic won't last 10 years. The weather does more damage than traffic for roads in the suburbs of the midwest and northeast.
A properly built road should last much longer than that. My street in a small town in MA hasn't been paved in over 10 years and is still fine. (The town does periodically seal cracks but that's a pretty cheap maintenance item.)
There's always the humble dirt road, perhaps with a little crushed gravel. Regrading it periodically is not free but with low traffic levels dirt can be cheaper.
In the US road costs are split among the three levels of government. Unfortunately road/fuel taxes at the federal and state level have not increased this century, resulting in a huge maintenance backlog.
This does not address a larger question: how much does a mile of road cost to keep? This is the installed base question.
Consider the amount of road that has been built out in the US relative to the populations that road is serving. Maintenance and expansion is paid out mainly from state and local taxes. That's an enormous civilizational overhead the US contends with, not to mention the economic cost of a large portion of household capital being tied up in rapidly depreciating assets: cars.
Even if this $1.5m figure is wildly inflated, calculate how few people live on a given mile in the suburbs, a conservative estimate on how much it costs to maintain a road, and the numbers just don't add up.
The suburbs were a ponzi scheme and the bottom is about to fall out.
The third world has a lot more miles of dirt roads than paved roads. The slightly more expencive gravel roads are fine for suburban cul-de-sac‘a / side streets that don’t get that much traffic.
They kick up a shitload of dust so everything is dirty all of the time. They also become unusable/get destroyed in the rain. It makes sense for rural roads since the expense is massive and the dust not so much of an issue.
The dust is much less when speeds are kept lower, such as suburban cul-de-sacs as GP states. Dust can be further mitigated with an annual oil coat.
A well built gravel road will have a decent amount of rock which drains in the rain without turning to mud, culverts are needed on the steeper slopes to limit erosion.
While the total cost is much less than asphalt, dirt roads do need more regular maintenance which municipalities frequently try to skimp on.
The suburbs will maintain their own roads before the bottom falls out. low income suburbs probably will not survive, but there's no law that says they cant have shitty roads that require a jeep to drive on
when the roads require a jeep to drive on, it's no longer a suburb - it's the country. the promise of the suburbs is that it's all the luxuries of city living, with all the space of rural living. Losing the amenities of the city is exactly how i would interpret "the bottom falling out"
Middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs will still exist, they'll just be a municipality a few miles over, where all the houses and roads are 25 years newer, and the long tail of opex costs hasn't quite hit as bad yet. It will, eventually.
If a suburb can attract some retail or office space or manufacturing, they can be like Irvine or Tysons or Bloomington -- the suburbs that have made it. Those that cannot will accumulate the same problems with fiscal sustainability that inner cities once did.
High income suburbs will struggle, too. Gotta pay for the roads somehow if federal subsidies stop trickling in. People on HN talk about moving to texas on taxes alone all the time.
To be fair, suburbia was supported as a potential recovery effort following a nuclear war.[0] Its difficult to immediately urbanize people's lives. We agree there are accelerating maintenance costs, but suspect we don't see the same opportunity cost.
I also think people underestimate the desire of men to have their wives and childern living in the suburbs that would survive if a nuclear bomb hit the downtown. By the mid 60's there were so many bombs that this did not make much sense any more, but the roads were already built and there are some nice things about having a large house and a yard.
Isn't that under "Resurface existing lane" and "Improve shoulder"? Yes there are other costs associated with road upkeep, from vegetation trimming to pothole repairs. But I would think the first two are rather major parts of upkeep. To make things easy, assume a 10 year interval between these maintenance items so divide those line items by 10 for the annual cost.
Definitely not a small number considering the installed road base…
Lots of shade thrown towards people living in suburbia on here. Maybe not everyone wants to live in a (rented) closet sized apartment in a major city, complete with all the noise pollution, actual pollution, crime rates, and a lingering piss-smell 24/7, and all for the low price of _more than owning a house_?
>> and all for the low price of _more than owning a house_?
I didnt read much judgement in th parent post, but it does imply suburbia is subsidized because it has higher infrastructure cost per dollar of tax revenue. The was a study on that very thing a couple years ago IIRC and they found the most solvent towns and cities are actually the higher density ones even if they are lower income areas.
Are you thinking of dollar revenue as an average OR considering suburbian dollar revenue separate? You'd think the suburbia also brings in more cash to the government (I got no sources).
well, people in suburbia get their infrastructure subsidized by everyone and in addition are destroying the planet, people in cities are paying artificially super-high rent to the landowning class. it seems like we could solve both these problems at the same time and change the value proposition here.
Ideally, this discussion would not be emotional, but simply one of saying "hey, we should all be free to live like we want, as long as we're willing to pay the associated costs".
I live in a city, and I love cars. The issue isn't density, its road damage caused by long and short haul trucking. The shade being thrown towards the suburbs is because some people haven't learned the real enemy is (as almost always) crony capitalism that subsidizes trucking by distributing the costs of roads and road repair onto the local people, while the trucks do the real damage.
It would be preferable that rail be used for transportation and it's unfortunate that trucking in particular gets subsidized.
However, I don't think your argument justifies that American policy prejudice towards cars and suburbs. Suburbs involve more roads - trucks may the force that mainly consumes roads but of course the higher the road-to-people ratio is, the more those roads are going to be consumed by those trucks. Which is to say, of course cars and trucks both go to the far suburbs and the nowhere's villes around the country and of course these trips are part of maintaining these places.
Moreover, if we moved to more rail transit, the little towns would be more in trouble because rail tends to require larger loads and so would raise the price of goods in far suburban malls and such.
I don't think anyone cares if you prefer to live rural, the problem is suburbanites having their yard, big house and pool, then every workday commuting into the city where they expect urban dwellers to subsidize the parking spot and eat all the death, destruction and pollution their hunks of metal bring along.
It's like I'm happy to have the walkable grocery store and 24/7 piss smell, but when feeling adventurous driving out to the suburbs to set up camp in your garden.
they expect urban dwellers to subsidize the parking spot
I think most urban commuter parking is paid, whether public or private, and the expectation is that a city charges appropriate property taxes on commercial buildings to cover any costs imposed by commuters.
Look all you want, but road maintenance costs are primarily a subsidy for the trucking industry, and by extension the businesses that rely on them. Businesses that are primarily located in.....cities. If Middletown USA didn't have to worry about 80,000 lbs trucks hauling kombucha to your local bodega tearing up their roads, perhaps road costs would be a bit more in-line with reality.
More importantly if we focused more on making transport costs in-line with the damage they do to the road surfaces (not to mention the environmental impact of long and short haul trucking, plus the traffic) instead of city/suburbia none issue, perhaps we'd all be a bit better off.
The proper solution would be to tax trucks exactly the amount of damage they cause. This would cause the cost of imported goods to go up and the cost of local goods to go down. In the short term you would see the extra cost and lower taxes cancel each other out and in the long term, local goods become more common than imported.
Thats certainly one solution, and a perfectly reasonable one at that. It seems to be an excellent way by which we can also encourage more rail development, and reduce the overall amount of waste in the transport chain.
This is the right idea, but let's not stop there. Why not also tax privately registered vehicles to some degree by their mass?
I also like the idea of making fines for moving violations somewhat proportional to vehicle mass. The danger posed to others by a 150 lb moped pales in comparison to that of a 4500 lb pickup truck. At least in the U.S., a ticket for speeding 50% over the limit through a residential neighborhood is the same for both, for example. Neither is OK, but considering the disparity in the potential for damage and injury to others, imposing equal fines is insane.
Because "privately registered" vehicles don't matter for purposes of road damage.
A fully loaded semi is 18,000 lbs per axle. A really huge personal vehicle, an F-350, is 4000 lbs per axle. That's 4.5x the weight, 4.5^4=410, so the semi is doing 410x as much damage. There's really no point in trying to tax personal vehicles for road damage when over 99% of the damage is being done by trucks.
You need to approach or exceed a roads per-axel weight limit to do any damage or serious wear.
Trucks and permit loads are pretty much the only things that get close.
Beyond the elastic limit, damage is an exponential function of the pavement loading, but only once that certain minimum psf is hit.
For the majority of a highway's loading curve, the damage-per-force is essentially nil. Plastic deformation and serious fatigue only start as you approach the design limits.
It's 99%+ because cars don't do any real wear or damage to pavement from typical use.
A semi is doing 400x as much damage as essentially the heaviest personal vehicle driving. For a more typical car at 4000 lbs (2000 lbs per axle), the semi does 6000x as much damage. If semis are 2% of all traffic (true in my observation), they're doing over 99% of the damage to roads. It makes no sense to care about road damage at all from any vehicle other than a heavy truck.
Yes that's the gross weight, i.e. carrying its maximum rated load. Personal vehicles are very rarely loaded up to their maximum weight, and mostly are driven relatively empty.
Even driven at gross weight, it's doing 5% of the damage per axle of loaded semi. The semi also has 4-5 axles, so it's more like 2% of the damage of the semi.
Mind you, we're talking here about the most damaging personal vehicle loaded to its maximum weight, and the semi is still doing 50x the damage of the personal vehicle. It's reasonable to say that essentially all road damage is done by semis.
For the most part I agree. The other issue is psi load produced by different tread patterns. Going from some minimal water channels to a mud terrain cleated style will reduce surface area a good bit. If you have experience with rural areas you don't need a calculator to observe the highest direct damage is usually from agricultural tractors. Deformation from a single pass can be observed (and often felt) with the naked eye in many cases.
Well, after all, the whole point of these tires is to dig into the "road" to get better traction than is possible with normal friction, so it's not too surprising that they dig in to a lesser extent on hard surfaced roads.
That said, this type of tire is a very tiny fraction of the total miles driven on public highways, and so if you're looking for someone to tax based on the costs they create, it's all heavy trucks.
In my state, we're implementing a cost per mile for vehicle registration purposes. I think the idea is tied to air quality concerns, but a similar model would work for road maintenance.
I just wonder what would happen if we charged trucks based on weight.
Which is always easier said than done and a bit simplistic. The primary factor derived to date has been to tie the wear factor to axle weight. Meaning an empty vehicle made for transporting goods would be in the range of passenger vehicles. In addition to simple overloading, improperly balanced loading represents more damage for the same total vehicle weight. So each axle must be weighed in a loaded state on each individual trip to determine the presumptive proportional tax burden.
All of which creates overhead in the form of people to be paid, equipment to build/own/maintain, time lost at all stages, the usual political influence problems, jusrisdiction of different areas of road, implementing policy, and corruption. Most of it will end end up as pass through cost to individuals either way as both consumer goods and roadways are deemed essential. It's ultimately a fairness exercise of tax distribution so like most things in the public interest the arena any idea must be fought in is politics.
Don't we already weigh trucks as they enter and leave the state, as well as sometimes in the middle of the state? I don't know what goes on there already, but we could certainly charge trucks based on loaded miles in the state, which should be pretty easy to calculate since they have very predictable driving patterns and take fairly detailed logs. For local deliveries, we could just charge based on the max load and allow drivers to prove anything otherwise.
And yes, consumers will pay regardless, but at least the difference is reflected in the cost of goods. It could very well be that certain local goods are cheaper than imported goods after road costs are properly factored in, which could change how much is imported.
However, this feels a bit regressive since poorer people will pay more of the cost since roads are largely funded by income tax, but that can be accounted for by shifting other taxes. The idea isn't too punish poor people or shipping customers, but to allow the market to work more efficiently.
Shouldn't roads that are heavily trafficked by trucks by made out of concrete instead of asphalt? Surely it's known that it lasts much longer, I guess the question is if it's economically viable considering long term costs.
Also, it's an elasticity problem. There is essentially no damage and minimal wear until the forces exceed the elastic limit on the stress-strain curve.
A road is a spring, and will behave elastically, with almost no deformation, unless you exceed a certain point on the stress-strain curve.
This is why the main concern of highway departments is not exceeding maximum axel loads.
Worrying about the amount of wear commuters are responsible for is just a distraction.
It's like a toddler jumping on your mattress vs a 350 lb offensive-lineman doing it. They both technically cause some amount of wear, but it's not worth figuring out the proportions.
Look all you want, but road maintenance costs are primarily a subsidy for the trucking industry, and by extension the businesses that rely on them.
I can't see a plausible argument that cities consume a disproportionate amount of the country's truck traffic. It seems like Suburban malls and supermarkets require pretty much exactly proportionate truck traffic to their city counter-parts. Moreover, manufacture is not particular concentrated in cities so that too gets equal coverage in suburbs. And all of this stuff requires proportionately more miles driven in the suburbs due to the lower density.
I don't know if cities consume more Kambucha than suburbs but if they do, I assume that suburbs consume some other equivalently.
The 80,000lb trucks aren't supplying the inner-city bodegas, they're supplying the out-of-town malls the suburb model relies on. I agree with getting road use charged in line with what it costs, but the result is going to be that the cities stop subsidizing the suburbs so much.
no they’re not. the suburbs are not buying your kombucha. get a grip on the numbers. all the fucking food is going to feed the millions of people packed up like rats.
Traffic on roads could stop tomorrow and you'd still need to resurface the entirety of the road network anywhere with a winter season every 5-10 years. Thermal expansion and contraction are serious forces for infrastructure, outweighing traffic in most places I imagine (if most places aren't large cities). Didn't matter much back when we used brick or dirt.
Sure, but they do contribute to the cost of maintaining roads. We need to figure out roughly what percentage of road maintenance costs come from vehicles and charge individual vehicles based on their rough contribution to maintenance costs. It's not a terribly hard calculation, especially since you can directly compare with roads that are infrequently used by trucks.
>This does not address a larger question: how much does a mile of road cost to keep?
Half of that design chart is for reconstruction and repaving. What else are you looking for?
>an enormous civilizational overhead
You could eliminate suburbia overnight, and demand for those suburban and rural highways will still be there, since cities generally need things delivered from outside (like food) in order to continue being cities.
I think this is the real issue. I've witnessed that the problem is lack of maintenance on roads. Instead of taking care of issues as they arise, like patching cracks and small holes, they're left to just grow and spread and before you know it the entire road is garbage and needs to be repaved. If we took care of the roads they would last longer and over time would alleviate funds for other expenses. Not to mention that it seems work on pipes under the roads are never worked on until a few months after it's been repaved, which completely destroys a new road and throws all that money down the gutter.
That would be an interesting question. My experience is that there's a lot more chip seal on smaller roads as a refurbishment (tar + a thin layer of gravel) rather than hot asphalt paving. It's a lot cheaper, but doesn't last as long.
Motorways in France and Germany seem to be repaved more often, and billiard table smooth in a lot of cases.
France has private-ish roads that are quite expensive. So does italy, there you have to often literally pay a human everytime you get of the highway. This leads to many people driving on small roads, polluting and wearing down those roads.
Not sure about Germany, but they just have a super strong car lobby in general, and its one of their national pride things, so they tend to find money for that.
Here in Switzerland we have a very high gas price, but that leads to many people going for gas outside of Switzerland and we have no idea what to do when EVy really take off. The true cost of those roads is hidden in the 'normality' of the high gas prices.
Roads are a tricky problem, not just for libertarians.
The rule of thumb in Western EU (mind you it is only an order of magnitude and may vary) for a 10 meter wide road (think one way highway two lanes+emergency lane 2x3.75+2.50=10 or an extraurban road 2x3.50+2x1.50=10) is usually considered:
plain road (on terrain) € 10,000,000 x km
viaduct/bridges € 20,000,000 x km
tunnel € 30,000,000 x km
with a variation of up to -15% or -20% in countries where workmanship and materials are cheaper and + 15% or + 20% in the more expensive ones.
The price of rail is pretty good when you consider the capacity. That single rail line is replacing at least 6 lanes of highway and would get people to their destination safer and faster with less air pollution which is a major issue they are trying to tackle.
>Probably doesn't work in some urban sprawl American suburb
yep, hi. It's also the same kind of area where road maintenance is the highest problem. Lot's of road wear and tear, and not enough funding to maintain properly
Depends on the average traffic speed. Subways go over 60mph and are generally the fastest vehicles in a large city besides helicopters and airplanes, and lane splitting motorcycles.
Light rail has a lot more destinations, and most rail systems are designed to complement bus systems.
I live in Utah, and our "urban" area (SLC) is similar to many "suburban" areas in terms of population density. We have a commuter line that intersects with light rail, which intersects with the bus system. Rail hits most of the important business areas, and buses hit most of the residential areas, and each runs every 15-20 minutes. If you know the system, you can get around fairly well without a car. It was expensive to build, but it is used quite a bit so it is absolutely worth it.
China doesn't build things to last, and often builds things very very quickly without longevity in mind. So, I would actually argue the opposite. That Chinese expenditures will likely go up a lot, while US expenditures will be flat. This is for various reasons, but mostly because the US is transitioning toward a remote work model, where in China (at least currently and for the foreseeable future) can't do that because their economy is so reliant on physical human labor. US cargo routes are actually near the most efficient in the entire world, and in the end...that is what a lot of the "wear and tear" comes from.
Despite the US leftist whining about the disappearing middle class, the US middle class is still a beacon to the world in actual prosperity. The Us can afford 80% to own vehicles to drive on its still decent roads, while its only 60% in Europe and 25% in much-touted China.
False equivalency with Europe where a lot of people skip cars in the metro regions because public transport actually works. For example in Stockholm 37.5%[0] of the people own cars while being the by far richest region in Sweden.
European here. I could buy a luxury car right now with cash, but I wouldn't know what to do with it. My bicycle and public transport are much more convenient.
I'm planning to live a car free life soon. I'll be moving in to the city so almost everything is within walking distance and just about everything is accessable via public transport. The only thing I haven't been able work out is how I will continue to go mtn biking since bikes aren't allowed on the bus. But I just can't justify the massive expense of owning a car and a car park for one activity.
Living car-free for about 5 years I _dreaded_ whenever I'd need to rent a car. Cars that were good enough for rural driving were $$$ and often not available, so I was stuck with super compact cars for $$. Plus the whole experience of renting cars is awful.
And that was with renting a car ~3 times per year. If I wanted even monthly trips it would have been cheaper to buy a car and park it the rest of the time.
I use Zipcar for random errands and rent one for overnight trips. Last year I think I spent around $1500 on cars, all in.
Zipcars are parked nearby, probably closer than I'd find a parking spot on average and basically always available. The rental place I use is 1/4 mile away. They know me by name. I never move a car for street cleaning, deal with a busted window, or pay tickets.
If you don't need one for work, or have mobility issues or kids, they're entirely optional and (at least to me) life is better without them.
Mountain biking is one of the things I gave up when I moved to the city.
I thought that maybe I'd occasionally rent a car and drive out to a state park, but what I quickly discovered was that, once driving stopped being a part of my daily life, the idea of regularly driving out to a forest preserve lost its palatability. Largely because I am no longer inured to driving, so any plan for how to spend my leisure time that involves devoting a significant percentage of it to being stuck behind the wheel on a freeway is kind of a non-starter. So instead I road bike 4 seasons and take a few camping trips per year. So far it's working for me. Less time stuck in a car and more time out walking in my neighborhood means I have a greatly reduced need for things like mountain biking to help me unwind in the first place.
That said, I think that when I originally calculated it out, I figured out that renting a car 4-5 days a month was still cheaper than owning an inexpensive car. And not too much of a hassle in most cities - out of 4 urban addresses I've lived at, only one wasn't close to a car rental office, and even then it was only about 15 minutes by bus.
I think I'll likely end up the same as you. I also enjoy road cycling so I think I will probably just sell the mtb and go full time road. A bit sad but the other benefits I expect to see will make it worth it.
Consider doing multi-day trips from your front door during the weekends (bikepacking).
I used to live in Denver and never understood why people would find the need to drive 10 miles to the nearest trails when you could just ride to them. Then I realized, once you're done with those initial 10 miles, you could link up routes that covered practically the entire rest of the state.
Now I'm writing a guidebook on those routes.
Bummer about buses not accepting bikes - that sounds crazy to me. They just don't have room underneath or a bike rack up front? I can hardly understand how that could be true!
>10 miles to the nearest trails when you could just ride to them.
Because they are usually up in the hills so its a fairly large effort to get there and by the time you are there you have no energy left to do the trails unless there is a ski lift to get you to the top.
But if you are riding bike seriously 10 miles is nothing. It's literally 30-40 minutes ride. I am runner not biker and on many occasions 10 miles for me is just a morning run before work.
The mtb park is 30km away from the city and its uphill the whole way. Sure its not impossible to do 60km road and then 10km mtb riding but it excludes all but the fittest cyclists.
In my city the buses do have bike racks, and people use them pretty frequently for road / town bikes.
A cross country or downhill bike doesn't fit on the rack though. Longer wheelbases, wider tires and wider handlebars make it very difficult or impossible to rack or bring inside (if the driver even allows it, usually not the case unless the bus is very empty).
The trains here have front wheel hooks, dedicated spots and more space, which is better. The size of XC and DH bikes still makes it a hassle though, and obviously you're limited to spots near the train stops.
re: bike racks on buses, I don't know that it's worthwhile. Chicago has them, and they rarely get used. Personally I don't use them because my bike moves faster than the bus, so it hardly seems worthwhile. I've also seen a bike get stolen off of a bus I was on - the bus was stopped at a red light, and someone who was crossing the street just grabbed a bike off the front as he was walking past and rode away before anyone could do anything about it.
Bike racks make a lot of sense here in CO - we have regional bus routes that can be 25 or 250 miles in distance. They, "why ride the bus when riding the bike is faster" isn't always true.
I do kind of live in cycling Mecca here in CO, where Chicago just ain't.
Friend's bike got stolen off Muni while he was on it. I'm not going to do that. I was car free in SD for almost a decade. It was good, but this is also good.
> I figured out that renting a car 4-5 days a month was still cheaper than owning an inexpensive car.
This is what I tell people now when they ask how I get around without a car. Renting 1-2x/month for a road trip is still cheaper than parking, insurance and maintenance even on a fully owned car
Its just the one I currently work at in Australia. I have a semi plan to move to Melbourne for the higher availability of jobs but I think I want to test the waters somewhere more local first.
You should see if the bus has racks for bikes on the front. Most do in the U.S. at least. Keep the wheel locked to the frame so if someone ambushes the bus for your bike they won't get very far.
I live in the state of Colorado where there are a thousand interesting and fun places to drive to. Ditto when I lived in California. Life is too short to be sanctimonious. P.S. I have a vehicle that gets almost 50 mpg, nearly triple the popular hulking SUVs here.
YMMV, but as someone who lives in the city in SF and hasn’t ever owned a car before, I just got a car a month ago and so far it’s been a great decision, I’m loving it.
Before this I did zipcar or other services for the occasional trip, and sure, it’s convenient enough to physically get to the cars (unless they get fully booked in my neighborhood which does happen) but it’s still quite a bit of overhead. It’s a pain always having to know exactly how long you’ll be gone to book the right number of hours, since someone might book right after you so you can’t rely on being able to extend it at the last minute. And every time you book one for a day, you have to do the calculation - is it really worth spending $100 to go to a friend’s bbq in the suburbs? You also don’t have specific gear you may need like snow chains or mountain bike racks. I just ended up not using it all that often, only for specific big planned trips, and even then it adds additional stress.
Owning a car will certainly be more expensive for me overall, but I‘ll also use it a lot more. And I consider myself an urbanist, I’ve always been proud not to own one. Now I feel like I’ve been tilting at windmills all this time and it’s nice to give it up. SF is an insanely car-centric place for being so-called progressive, which sucks for density, and walkability, and street life, and pedestrian and biker safety. Public transit, especially on the weekends, is pretty bad. For instance getting from the east side of the city out to ocean beach or land’s end, would take over an hour on muni, but it’s a 20-30 minute drive. Public transit to get to even very popular destinations close to the city, like Napa or Muir Woods, is often non existent. Instead of being annoyed by it, now I can take better advantage of the perks of living here and do more with my free time, which is absolutely worth it to me right now.
My goal this year is to get out more, do more day hikes and other short trips, and so far it’s going great. I feel kind of dumb now for holding out this long, actually.
I feel you, I'd really love to get rid of the car but it would be impossible to go climbing/hiking (begging for carpools gets old fast).
Even in a car-centric place like the US (Seattle) it's possible to live in a house and still accomplish things cheaper and more conveniently via walking/bus/bike/Uber/Zipcar/rentals, except for the mountain trips, because it's so hard to get a car for 2-3 days at a convenient time and/or on a short notice.
It's a chicken and egg problem... if most people didn't own cars there would be much more reasonable and convenient ways to rent a car. But given that most people do anyway because even groceries without a car are a chore in a poorly design city, the market for the good rentals is not there.
This is interesting information, but from the perspective of a high-value urban area, even these fairly eye-watering numbers are a understatement. The capital represented both as infrastructure and forgone real estate usage (i.e. yes, we need roads, but building more roads than we need diverts incredibly valuable real estate from other purposes) is huge.
I'm always amused here in Australia when governments like to make the spending on roads and the amount raised through petrol taxes and registration fees "balance out". Uhhh, ok, you're sitting on billions of dollars worth of capital and you're patting yourselves on the back that it's "breaking even".
The point is that the value created and not captured by the government (at a cost of billions of dollars of what could otherwise be working capital, so effectively being paid for by taxpayers) is effectively a subsidy, and this particular subsidy may not be fairly distributed.
When they built the harbor freeway alone (a half a block wide and 20 miles long), LA razed nearly 100,000 of some of the most affordable homes in the city in the process.
I'm not sure what you're gunning for here. Spending road money on other projects? Or that real estate used for roads is somehow removed from the overall real estate market (in the active commerce sense, not active listing sense)?
If it's a new project, even if land is behind expropriated, the market value is being paid. (I assume, bring Australia) So it does balance out, even in land value. For appreciated value, it doesn't occur in a vacuum. The local transportation is factored in to the market rates for property.
So I'm not sure in what sense you don't see it as balanced out. Or what you'd like to see as the alternative.
The way I see it is that the existing road network is an enormous public capital investment that is permitted to woefully underperform due to political pressure to make roads cheap or essentially free. The idea that roads are "breaking even" when you roughly balance road spending and money raised from roads is artificial.
Given the huge historical capital investment states have made in their roads they should be making money; or if they are not, we should be acknowledging that we are choosing to not make money at market rates when we compare the costs involved with roads with other forms of transport (especially rail).
I don't think we should necessarily do anything different with roads, but we should acknowledge that, well, pretty much everything at this scale needs to be subsidized out the wazoo - roads as well as public transport. I'm not arguing for some sort of dystopia where the government does some crazy user-pays thing on even public asset; just an end to the endless rhetoric about how roads "break even" while public transport "needs to be subsidized".
Are expensive roads really needed? What if we see a gradual decline in roadway expenditures in the USA, transitioning our economy to involve less driving and more work from home, deliveries via drone/efficient vehicle, promote self-sufficiency, not to mention biking, walking, trains, etc...my point is maybe we won't need/use roads as much as we do now.
One would hope so, but it seems our VMT is going up over time whilst people are locking in very expensive, long-term car purchases.
There are roads in our county in New Jersey that have been transitioned from paved back to gravel, presumably based on usage and the anticipated savings from maintaining gravel over asphalt. I'm not a civil engineer and I don't know what all the tradeoffs are, but it seems to me that we're either going to have to admit we can't afford so much paving, or we're going to have to agree to pay higher taxes.
The primary downside of gravel is reduced speed, additional downsides are probably some additional vehicle wear, and lower suitability for heavy vehicle. Also, it's louder, and flung gravel can be a hazard, and it's not great for bikes.
The upsides are reduced cost of building, maintenance, and equipment, and better water permiability. Reduced speeds can be a benefit depending on the application.
What’s interesting about this is NJ is the most densely populated state and has a high income level generally speaking. And some of the highest taxes in the country, especially property tax.
I suspect NJ loses a lot of tax dollars from commuters that work in NYC or Philadelphia and pay income tax in those states.
Regardless the state brings in a lot of revenue. I suspect the pension obligations are the real killer here.
Quite the opposite. Not only are urban populations increasing, but the so-called economies of ride-sharing and same-day delivery increase the number of vehicles on the road significantly. NYC has done studies.
Concrete is pretty much the only alternative that can handle 40+ tonnes trucks and be cost effective. It will last longer, but it's more expensive to build - could be cheaper on the long run. You get a bit more tire noise and less traction than on the asphalt.
Many freeways around Toronto use concrete and according to the MTO it is cheaper. But the deciding factor appears to be the number of trucks passing the stretch of road. Concretes durability under weight more than offsets the decay from weather.
That's where I notice them as well. I haven't seen it recently, but I recall a few years ago there was a highway around here (Denver) that was asphalt for the two leftmost lanes with a concrete slow lane that semi trucks were supposed to drive on.
Maybe Denver is particularly bad for concrete roads because our freeze/thaw cycles get really bad. We have so many warm days in the winter interspersed with cold days and freezing nights.
Although most modern roads do tend to use petroleum products, the asphalt is actually remarkably sustainable as almost all of it is recycled: http://www.asphaltpavement.org/recycling.
It seems like it would be tough to move to another type of material that would actually be more environmentally friendly after considering all the extra maintenance required for a less durable but more environmentally friendly construction.
As others have mentioned, it seems like the long term solution is to move to a less car-dependent society.
I think of this as I drive 30ish miles each way to work. 5 miles of surface roads, 19 miles of interstate (2 lanes each way), and 6 miles of surface (2 lanes each way). One cause for increased construction is the need for more capacity. My frequent lament is poor driving habits. We have regular instances of sub-optimal speeds in both lanes. A 65 mph limit and vehicles driving 55mph in both lanes, frequently with 1/4 of open lane ahead. Vehicles behind begin to crowd and we experience the slinky effect. After 3 years we add another lane. And the cycle continues. Driver education used to emphasize keeping right except to pass. I think this isn't taught anymore.
I was surprised to read this in the California DMV driver handbook:
"If you can choose among
three lanes, pick the middle lane for the smoothest driving."
When I learned to drive (in the UK), the official guidance was to stay in the left-most lane except when overtaking. And then, after overtaking, to immediately return to the left lane.
That's still mostly true in the US for the more rural areas. Interstate highways often have two lanes in each direction.
For denser areas with multilane highways that are entirely in use, the best you can say is that the people in the passing lane probably want to go faster. :-)
That feels pretty legit to me. I don't remember reading that, but when I drive a car and I've got more than 2 lanes to choose from, I usually end up in the middle. The right lane always has people merging, either to enter or exit, or trucks lumbering along at 45. The left lane always has someone wanting to do 90 in a 55. Middle is the smoothest, from a traffic flow perspective.
On a motorcycle it's all about riding between the left-most and its neighbor. More cars expect you there because most motorcycles ride there, so they make more room. The next lane-line is a death trap, from cars in the second lane moving over for a motorcyclist over there.
"The right lane always has people merging, either to enter or exit, or trucks lumbering along at 45."
Interesting perspective. I feel a little differently:
- cars meeting to enter shouldn't affect you, because it's their responsibility to get to the right speed and time their entry to a gap; an entering car should never cause you to need to change speed or direction
- an exiting car shouldn't affect you, because there's usually no reason for them to slow down before exit
- you can overtake the slow trucks when you encounter them: just change lanes to overtake, and then pull back into the right lane afterwards
Driving in the middle lane is optimal from each driver's own perspective but, globally, it reduces road capacity and increases journey times.
People merging onto the highway are supposed to reach highway speed before attempting to merge, but they very often do not do that.
And they're supposed to to find a gap, but there may not be one or other drivers may deliberately try to deny them one.
The merging lane may be very short.
The merging car may start to change lanes even if it's not safe to do so.
Congestion may require more deliberately courteous behavior.
The right lane often has many trucks clustered together and rote exercise of the keep-right rule will require an excessive amount of lane changing.
And on a limited access highway, lane changing is the most dangerous routine maneuver so one should be thoughtful of balancing lane changing with expediency.
And the idea that a driver has no responsibility to accommodate another merging driver, if applied strictly, also means that one cannot always leave the right lane at will, because driver in the left lane are not permitting. So you change speed a lot, which is rough on fuel efficiency and precludes cruise control if it's adaptive.
Being religious about keep-right is kind of miserable on a congested highway, especially one with a differential of speed speed limits depending on vehicle type. The people most steadfast about traffic laws get punished at the pleasure of people who flout them, which doesn't seem correct.
"The people most steadfast about traffic laws get punished at the pleasure of people who flout them, which doesn't seem correct."
Exactly. Each person acting in their own self-interest causes a reduction in road capacity and longer journey times. Those who try to stay in the right-most lane that's going their speed don't gain anything for themselves, as they only increase road capacity for people behind them.
That's a bit of a cherry pick. I don't disagree with upholding the principle of the social good.
But two things.
Tragedy of the commons. You're arguing that some drivers should elect to have poor travel times to, frankly, accommodate those who are breaking the law. Maybe the law should be changed (different speed limits are bad) and more zealously enforced.
Second, your greatest responsibility on the road is safety and accident avoidance, not expediency. It is not defensible to change lanes or refuse to accommodate another driver when it may cause an accident that could have been avoided. Changing lanes or refusing to accommodate is least safe when there is a lot of congestion.
I don't know the best way to drive. I don't always obey the law and neither do I only do those things that give me individually an immediate. Mostly, I try to be safe and not instigate road rage.
But I don't think it's as simple as you're suggesting, either. You absolutely have to drive in a way that anticipates that others are acting selfishly. It's part of avoiding accidents.
- I'm not saying that minimising your own journey time should be your only or main objective
- I'm not saying that minimising other people's journey time should be your only or main objective
My observation (no judgment) is that we'd each like less traffic in front of us, but it's most convenient for us to drive in a way that slightly increases traffic for those behind us.
Whether this is good or bad, I don't know. On the 280 and 101, it's common to see cars driving 80+, when the posted speed limit is 65. Perhaps better lane discipline would increase those speeds and make the roads less safe...
You need a gap between cars to stop them colliding due to speed variation. I've heard that all cars on LA roads go at the same 0mph, so I guess you don't need a gap.
But they do, because when they don't it's potentially your life on the line.
> an exiting car shouldn't affect you
But they do, because there's always a reason.
> just change lanes to overtake, and then pull back into the right lane afterwards
I look at the act of driving on the freeway as gambling with my life. Every single action I take (or don't) has the potential to kill me. This is anecdotal, so I'm happy to take actual facts and change my opinion, but I see a much higher order of accidents (or near misses) caused by changing lanes than I see from people staying in their lane. My conclusion is that staying in a lane is inherently safer than drifting from lane to lane based on its occupancy level.
> Driving in the middle lane is optimal from each driver's own perspective
I generally stay in the middle lane when the load on the freeway is low to moderate. When the load is high it doesn't matter which lane you're in; they're all sub-optimal. But if there are so many people driving in the middle lane that journey times are increased, then people will start to pass more often and the lanes will even out. If they don't, then you're in high load.
> it reduces road capacity
It doesn't reduce road capacity. It could reduce road capacity utilization, but if you're hitting that point then the utilization has already taken a hit, and driver patterns change to utilize the road more fully (for better or worse).
Ultimately the lane choice of each driver doesn't matter, because drivers won't sit in bumper to bumper traffic with a wide open lane next to them.
In fact, changing lanes reduces road capacity utilization. For the duration of the lane change and for a short period before and after the car is effectively taking up two cars places (their place in the old lane and the new).
I've noticed while driving in the US that American highway exits seem to be designed differently than those in the UK. The rightmost lane of three-lane highways will often become the exit lane, so if you stick to the rightmost lane you'll frequently need to switch lanes to your left to stay on the road. In the UK, in contrast, the exit lane is usually the new lane, and you have to switch lanes to get into it.
So instead of constant lane switching, use the middle lane for going straight ahead, and the leftmost lane for passing.
That depends on the region and age of the road. In more rural areas where the freeways are newer things are much more consistent and usually just as you'd expect. In older areas like New York or California where many of the freeways predate the Federal Interstate system, and where lane expansions, lane extensions, and exits have grown far more organically, there are inconsistent designs (although often consistent within the time period) and even bizarre, one-off stuff.
California didn't even adhere to Federal Interstate guidelines for exit numbering until relatively recently (sometime in the early to mid 2000s, IIRC), decades after most other states. California's scheme predated the Federal Interstate system and they weren't keen on changing it.
Only tangentially related, but New Jersey has a special case of this. It used to be all in on "jug-handles" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughandle), where you would need to be in the rightmost lane in order to make a "left" turn. But they have also built intersections that have the standard left turn lane, on the left. You only know which one it is as you approach the intersection, then either need to get all the way to the left or right. Always a fun surprise!
>California's scheme predated the Federal Interstate system and they weren't keen on changing it.
Massachusetts is about to embark on a project to renumber all of their exits per federal mandate. The consensus is that the only way they can take "exit 17"[1] from us is by lasering it out of our brains. I know people who are planning a guerilla renumbering campaign for this sign after it is harmonized.
Back when Connecticut re-numbered the highways they struck a deal where they'd re-number the highways as the signs were replaced to save money. Massachusetts being Massachusetts they'll inevitably find a way to replace all the signs three or four times to maximize the number of favors they can do for the well connected people in the relevant industries.
Wait a sec, you drive on the opposite side of the road in the UK, so the advice to stay in the left lane except for overtaking is the equivalent of the advice here to stay to the right, or out of the left lane except when passing.
"is the equivalent of the advice here to stay to the right"
Yeah, but the advice in the California DMV handbook is to stay in the middle, not the right.
The difference is that, in the UK, the middle lane is explicitly only for overtaking. If you're going the same speed as the cars in the left lane, you're not overtaking, so you shouldn't be in the middle lane. California's guidance is directly contrary to this.
In the US there is no priority with 3+ lanes. You can legally plod along in the left lane without passing anyone. The middle is a safe option to avoid conflicts on either side. For two lanes you are supposed to leave the left/high-speed lane for passing only.
That really depends on the state. In Utah, for example, the law requires left lane drivers to move over if they are being passed on the right. Some other states explicitly designate the left lane for passing only.
So wait, in a 3+ lane setup in the UK, both the middle lane and the rightmost are only for passing? That seems weird to me.
Reason for the CA rules is that, in the US, the rightmost lane is where all the entrance and exit ramps are, so you often have people speeding up or slowing down as they enter and exit. Rather than have to do a ton of lane changes to pass people as they merge on, the advice to stay in the middle lane if you just want to stay a constant speed is so you don't have to deal as much with people entering and exiting your lane.
"You should always drive in the left-hand lane when the road ahead is clear. If you are overtaking a number of slower-moving vehicles, you should return to the left-hand lane as soon as you are safely past."
When I learned to drive (many years ago), the guidance was more specific: the middle lane for overtaking a vehicle, and the right-most lane for overtaking multiple vehicles.
UK motorway junctions are all equipped with long sliproads. Generally you're supposed to do all your accelerating or braking on the sliproad when you join or leave the motorway, although traffic conditions can obviously prevent this.
With that said, in free-flowing traffic, it can be incredibly dangerous when people fail to follow this protocol, and I often wish there was more enforcement.
I stay in the middle lanes most of the time on the 101 because they are constantly adding/removing lanes or onramps with quickly disappearing lanes. Easier to stay in the middle than constantly deal with California drivers merging into your lane. I have had a lot of close calls where people behaved very irrationally merging onto the highway. Best to avoid it
Oregon has a law that if you have 5 or more vehicles behind you, you must let them pass. It's more for the highways, not the freeway, but I haven't seen it enforced in many, many years
> Vehicles proceeding at a speed less than the flow of traffic and moving on a two-lane highway where passing is unsafe, must turn off the roadway at the nearest place designated as a turnout or wherever sufficient area for a safe turnout exists, if a line of 5 or more vehicles forms behind them.
That is indeed the rule in European countries I've driven in and (modified for which side of the road is being driven on) some US states (like Oregon) have similar rules.
California, on the other hand, allows people to drive in whatever lane they feel like for however long they feel like as long as they maintain sufficient speed. The slower traffic is supposed to stay to the right and the faster traffic is supposed to stay to the left. The police can intervene if they feel that someone is driving too slow in the wrong lane, but I've never seen that happen.
There are no rules in California to prevent overtaking on the right, so you can choose which lane you want to move into to overtake someone.
In my experience, this really only encourages "king of the road, get out of my way" behavior.
Source: South Floridian driver who does felonious speeds in the left lane (typically in a speeding convoy, with everybody else doing the same speeds, if not higher)
It's never been tested, to my knowledge. To be clear, I'm not suggesting people tailgate and drive aggressively in the left lane. I'm literally suggesting cars
in the left lane have to legally yield to overtaking traffic from behind, just as passing on a two lane highway requires yielding to oncoming traffic.
And I would expect behavior improvement, if nothing else, on the fact that ambiguity is removed and time of conflict is reduced.
>king of the road, get out of my way" behavior.
I get that's not something people might want to "encourage" , but a certain amount of conflict and congestion is resolved by allowing the people who think they're king, be king in the left lane. If you don't want to go faster than the car behind you, you can be king in the right (or any other) lane.
It might not feel right based on principle, but in a practical sense it solves a lot.
If I'm passing at 5 over the limit, I'm still passing. I waited my turn. Not my fault I don't want to go 20+ over.
I'll move back when the passed car is in my rear view. Oh, you really to ride my rear, and pay me on the right? Will Joe we have a problem because I'm happy merged into the right line and you're on my as, and now you're 3 feet from both me and the car were passing.
That's what I got from this comment... Just forget encourages already aggressive driving.
Of course, some people do not pass, and that is frustrating.
Surely it's only polite to allow the faster guys past before you do your thing. It doesn't really matter to me generally because few things on the highway annoy me, but it's sort of habit for me to not be in the way. So even if I'm doing 10 over and there's a chap coming up doing 20 over, I let him go before I go.
You don't have to do that, and I won't judge you for it. It just seems like a harmlessly nice thing to do for your fellow driver.
And it's rare to be in a situation where it's reasonable for you to overtake at 5 mph more than the other car while there are +20s whizzing by so it doesn't seem like it's really something that needs defending.
It's not necessarily about who's turn it is, or what's "just". It's about driving rules that are crystal clear, that will end up maximizing traffic flow, clarifying r-o-w order, and minimizing time of conflict.
>Not my fault I don't want to go 20+ over.
No, but I think that people see it this way is part of the problem. It becomes a sort of moral game of chicken, with one side thinking one rule is more important, and vice versa. It shouldn't be debatable. Both sides should automatically know who has r-o-w without thinking, even if the rule is arbitrary. The entire system operates around this premise.
And because speed is always going to be a personal sliding scale (maybe 5 over is ok but 20 isn't), the simplest, most practical, consistent resolution (whether "fair" or not) is to yield the lane to the passer behind you.
Look at it this way: You wouldn't worry about momentary speed to pass someone on a two lane road, if you needed to. You'd focus on getting past and getting over before the oncoming traffic gets to you. It should be the same way on multi-lane highways, even if the traffic is overtaking instead of oncoming. That's why it's called the passing lane.
There should be a very simple rule - if there's a car behind you in the left lane, no car ahead of you, and this situation persists for a bit, merge right.
Make the /right/ choice - the pedal, or the lane ;)
Why put the conditional if? Avoid conflict entirely by eliminating judgement calls. Like how close a car needs to be in front or behind you for you to react. It just provides justification (in their mind) for a driver to stay left.
Just pass and get over, regardless of if anyone is behind you. Driving rules should be as simple as possible.
The fact that the lane isn't being used by anyone else isn't an excuse for you to use it as you see fit. Anymore than driving on the wrong side of a 2-lane road, just because there's no oncoming traffic.
When I see someone behind me I will switch to the right but sometimes I am too slow (=they are significantly above the speed limit) and the speeding idiots try to pass me on the right side even if it is illegal. When someone is going 200km/h on a 130km/h road you don't want to block their path by suddenly switching at the last moment.
This type of regressive behavior is disgusting. When someone tries to pass I now have to be extra careful about switching lanes because they may pass me on the right. This leads to even slower switching which fuels even more passing on the right.
Not sure where you are, but in the US, the rule is to stay right in the first place. Not get over once someone is coming. This avoids all the problems you mention.
It's just that people don't do it, and have little incentive to. Part of what I'm suggesting is that you should have to be ultra cautious anytime you're in the passing lane. Which is an incentive to quickly get out of it.
Driver education doesn't matter when it stops at 16 years old. I've been in cars with these bad drivers doing less than the speed limit in the left lane... I told them they should get over... they said they prefer to drive "in the fast lane"... like they'll get there faster. They stayed in the left lane until the exit, and then exit across 2 lanes. I don't see how you can help these people.
Where I live (Los Angeles), all the lanes are filled all the time. There is no passing lane, so it doesn’t matter which lane you drive in. The skill that is important for drivers to have is the zipper merge, because those are happening all the time as fully utilized lanes merge and split.
I am actually usually pretty impressed with LA drivers. Most respect the zipper merge.
Most. Maybe 1/10 are that prick that believes you merging in front of them is an affront to their pride, and opts to block you from entering or exiting the freeway. I see this most on the 10, but also on the 110 going from pasadena to downtown when you have to merge over 3 lanes to stay on the freeway then merge back 3 lanes to get on the 10 west.
I wouldn't let it bother you too much.. For every prick like that theres another prick like myself who is willing to smash up their front bumper with the rear of my vehicle to make a point. Interestingly, they always cede your right of way when you don't hesitate.
Ah, I recall as a young man when the guy in the shiny SUV would try to cut you off because they had a bigger vehicle.
I felt like I could tell the moment when they realized that the repairs on their car would be more expensive than my entire car, and slink back into their lane.
Everyone talks tough on the internet but when it comes down to it basically everyone will avoid an accident because regardless of who's fault it would be it's still a massive pain in the ass and the proliferation of dash-cams has much reduced the opportunities to be a dick and make the other guy pay.
if you hit the back of someone's car, you're almost certainly paying regardless. you would have to prove they were intentionally brake checking you or something like that.
In some states you basically have a legal obligation to drive defensively and there's shared fault, even for what could sensibly be considered entirely the fault of one party.
Oh man particularly from the 110 to the 5 south - that one lane change - there is _always_ one person go tries to skip the line and merge at the very end, only to get stuck, and cause a massive hangup. That line of cars is ~30 long, so 1 in 10 is perfectly high enough for it to be broken all the time.
The benefits of zipper merge don't materialize fully unless merging lanes match speed approaching the merge point.
The parent is likely talking about situations like those presented where a relatively less dense (and ending) lane is merging into a fully-loaded thru-lane, and the traffic in the relatively less dense lane, rather than matching speed and finding the tooth-gap correspondence that's implied in the name zipper merge, zooms as quickly as possible to the last merge point, and then either cuts in without having negotiated a corresponding gap (causing the traffic column in the thru-lane to brake dramatically) or ends up having to slow/stop until an opportunity presents itself (causing a build-up in the ending lane). Or maybe even the latter and then the former.
So, yes, there is "no line" in the zipper merge. There are two lines. And yes, you are supposed to merge at the very end.
But if that's where the thinking/behavior stops, then the parent is right to complain. Drivers who are not matching speed before the merge point are not doing a zipper merge.
In times of congestion, the conditions rarely exists for very long which would allow both lanes to match speed before the merge point. The simplest rule is to use as much road as possible. It’s less than ideal 10% of the time, but 90% of the time it’s the inevitable result of too many cars.
Yes, stopping is pretty much inevitable after a certain density of cars has been reached. In an ideal situation, where all cars have the same acceleration and deceleration, drivers are aware and allow zipper merging and don't tailgate, it would happen more smoothly.
But that isn't the world we live in, so at the end of the day, the simplest rule is to use as much lane as possible and take turns merging.
> In times of congestion, the conditions rarely exists for very long which would allow both lanes to match speed before the merge point.
I see these conditions frequently in LA. Either two merging lanes are highly congested in which case they are moving at roughly the same speed anyway, or there's one congested lane and one less dense lane.
The latter case shows up at almost every onramp when traffic gets thick, so it's pretty common. It doesn't take any special skills to negotiate well: accelerate to the speed of thru traffic and proceed to the end of the lane looking for a gap to match with. If you feel like it or just don't want the people behind you who don't understand this to feel impatient, accelerate to maybe an additional 30% above matched speed, then slow down to matched speed and look for a gap as the end of the lane gets close.
Every once in a while you see the reverse situation, where for some reason the merging lane is thick and the thru lane is moving at speed. That is indeed a really difficult situation. Thankfully it's rarer.
> The simplest rule is to use as much road as possible.
At the risk of sounding cold hearted: I get that it doesn't seem fair, but logically, it's the right call to drive to the end of the lane.
1) It keeps the rules simple. If we should merge at some arbitrary point before the lane is up, it will always be arbitrary, and different drivers will have different opinions.
2) By getting to the end and slowing down, the driver now has matched the speed of traffic. It's a self correcting problem.
3) Not going to the end of the lane is wasting capacity. If it's 4 lanes reducing to 3, how far back is it fair to expect that ending lane to go unused?
4) For on ramps, it gives more cars the chance to merge at once, which will either help the flow of traffic, or quickly reach equilibrium with the through lane.
5) And finally, if everyone always used the full lane, it wouldn't give "cheaters" the opportunity to pass everyone else and cheat.
>causing the traffic column in the thru-lane to brake dramatically
Theoretically, where the car merges doesn't have any bearing on this occurring or not. It shouldn't be any different at the beginning of the lane or the end. If traffic isn't moving, there's no breaking to be had. If it is, it should only give better opportunity to match speed and merge without disruption. Practically, the problem has as much to do with the aggression of the through lane drivers as it does the merging one.
They certainly have the right of way. I'm just saying that where the merging driver comes over doesn't really change any of that, unless the through traffic is behaving differently in response.
>Theoretically, where the car merges doesn't have any bearing on this occurring or not. It shouldn't be any different at the beginning of the lane or the end.
It’s a scheduling problem where people that join the lane early are starved by the people joining late.
In cases where there is roughly an equal exchange of vehicles between two lanes it doesn’t matter much, and maybe that’s the norm where you are.
Where I am, congestion is more localized to chokepoints where too many people need to use an exit or on ramp. In this case if time matters it’s usually better to be aggressive and merge at the last minute rather than be passive and get in line early.
People may think you are a jerk. For people where it’s important not to be thought of badly, they get in line first. For people who don’t care (or occasionally for other reasons) they skip the line and merge late.
On paper, maybe the zipper is excellent. In practice, with prideful LA drivers, its a shit show. I know the maneuver the previous commenter described, it only leads to pain.
- everyone effectively stopped in the exit lane has to stop for even longer
- everyone in the thru traffic lanes has to deal with this person merging all the way from the left to the right with no blinker, then coming to a stop in the right most thru lane desperately trying to force themselves into the exit lane, usually driving over the gut in the process
- the end result is the entire freeway becomes even more backed up because this one person couldn't think more than 1 exit ahead, or worse, they convinced themselves that risking a brutal death like this is worth the 20 seconds it saved them
Sorry, to be clear, if you don't know that road, the person is breaking the law and driving over a very very large shoulder. They cross into a slashed white zone. You're absolutely right otherwise, but in this case, it's one very wide lane for some reason, and so people try to shoot around each other, causing chaos. If it was two lanes it would be fine, but it's a weird overpass / junction madness. I didn't mean "that one weird lane change", I meant "that weird one-lane change", heh.
That's actually mandated by law in Germany (Reißverschlussverfahren). Took me a few years of driving in other countries to realize that wasn't universal.
Where was it I read the zipper merge is not recommended in the U.S. because Americans are too adversarial to understand it, and so it usually makes things worse.
I recently drove around Spain for 2 weeks. My first significant international driving experience. I was shocked at how seriously they took the rule of only passing on the left. Every single car in the right line was driving slower than every single car in the left.
It made driving so much better. The behavior of every car was basically predictable. I've never seen anyone pay much attention to their lane here.
In the UK it's actually not illegal: it's just advised against, and considered bad form in most situations by most drivers. And, of course, if you cause an accident by undertaking the police will (rightly) throw the book at you.
Examples where it's considered acceptable to undertake:
- In heavier or queuing traffic inside lanes might move faster than outside lanes: this is OK, and it's considered better and safer to stay in lane than keep changing lanes to overtake.
- Motorcycles filtering through traffic, which generally occurs between the middle and outside lane on motorways. Where gaps are bigger motorcyclists will often move from the outside to middle lanes to get around slow moving vehicles in the outside lane. Again, this tends to apply when traffic is heavier.
If you do it on a reasonably clear road to get around someone hogging an overtaking lane, and the police see you, they're going to pull you over and give you a fixed penalty notice for careless driving though. I know this from experience.
there is a certain cynicism regarding traffic laws in the US. many drivers feel that some of the laws are in place for the sole purpose of revenue collection or to give the police an excuse to pull you over, absent any real safety concern. in my state, for example, it is against the law to have anything dangling from the rearview mirror. if I so much as forget to take down my parking permit in the morning, I can be pulled over at any time.
fwiw, I take traffic flow very seriously. I will always move over if I notice someone driving close behind me.
> in the US. many drivers feel that some of the laws are in place for the sole purpose of revenue collection
That's not a US only phenomenon. For example, in the UK there is a - somewhat justified - suspicion that some speed[1] cameras have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with revenue raising.
[1] Ahem, sorry, I mean "safety" not "speed", obviously.
just wanted to add some context for the EU readers who I (perhaps mistakenly) assume have a bit more respect for government and for traffic laws in particular.
the US has a somewhat fraught history with traffic laws. by default, police are not really allowed to stop you for no reason and possibly search your vehicle/person. of course, this is very inconvenient for police, so over the years many traffic offenses have been created to remedy this. if a cop wants to (legally) pull over the most upstanding citizen in the country, all they have to do is follow them on the road for a mile and they'll have a reason.
Interesting. On the A1M heading to and from Peterborough I've also seen them flash and pull people over for lane hogging so at least they're enforcing it both ways.
Super annoying when you're cruising along in the inside lane and then have to cross the entire width of the carriageway to overtake some clown hogging the middle lane: always feels a bit risky, especially if there are vehicles coming up from behind in the outside lane.
Same when you get someone who's pulled out to overtake a lorry but can't be bothered to pull in again even though the next vehicle they'd overtake is hundreds of metres ahead of them.
Like many other things in the Highway Code there may be no specific offence for failing to follow it but the police have enough freedom with fixed penalty notices making disregarding the rules an ill advised activity.
The problem with undertaking for me is that it reduces options when you need them the most.
If I'm in the middle lane doing 70mph and thinking "I can't pull into the inside because that car is only 30 foot off my bumper", that driver deciding to keep up with me at 70mph or undertaking reduces my outs in the event of a tyre blowout or other incident (e.g. a broken down car or debris in the middle lane ahead).
Where there is a dynamic hard shoulder or all-lane running, options become fewer still and the chance of a problem even higher.
And then there are the lorries on the inside of a 50mph average speed check contraflow undertaking in narrow lanes at 0.25mph more than the outside lane - that's just an accident waiting to happen.
I've also been on the outside lane overtaking somebody who was doing 65mph in the middle lane with an empty inside lane who as I moved to overtake sped up. Not undertaking: just blocking me from moving past and back into the middle lane.
I then had a boy racer come in behind me at 90mph and have to throw the anchor out whilst flashing his lights at me, and my options are basically "hope for the best". We were on a relatively tight corner for a motorway (it's that horrid section of the M60 that runs through Stockport), so deciding to accelerate to get out of this would have meant potentially losing control of the car, and the guy in the middle lane was likely going to pin me there anyway...
For me then - especially in the narrow lanes of UK motorways - it is not just about using middle and outside lanes for passing only, there is a responsibility of the drivers on the inside to allow that to happen and give those around them enough options if they need them, and not doing so should be considered just as much a case of careless driving as undertaking in most other scenarios.
So many aspects about driving in the US are so terrible.
The road conditions are pretty bad, and what i would like to understand are the gas taxes and other taxes which ostensibly go into road infra.
We have high gas taxes and drive more miles than most countries on the planet - where is that money going?
Some countries have high vehicle costs and their roads to me seem pristine and perfect by comparison. Specifically in fresh memory is both Singapore and Hong Kong.
The condition of their roads just seem to be flawless.
In the US we even have potholes jokingly having birthdays thrown for them, gas prices include large per gallon taxes and road conditions never appear to improve - and yearly reports of “crumbling infrastructure” and “deteriorating dangerous bridges” keep coming out.
California comes in second on the list of states with the highest gas tax at 72.76 cents per gallon. Rising fuel prices and increased taxation are the primary reasons for this.
A law that was passed in 2017 allowed the state of California to increase the gas tax by a steep 12 cents, because it seemed like the most viable way to obtain the funds needed to replace several bridges and fund other important road projects.
You can expect the state’s gas tax to increase further by 7.5 cents per gallon in a few months.
We consume 10% of the US’ gas consumption i. California.
We consume more than 40 million gallons per day. There are opaque additonal taxes on each gallon sold at the nearly 9,000 gas stations and billions in taxes are also missing.
That is a very low gas tax. In Germany it's €2.47 per gallon/ €0.65 per liter.
Edit: Your numbers for california amount to about $10.6B per year - and the transportation budget for california for the current fiscal year is $23.5 billion [0]. So the tax pays for less than half of the costs.
Given that Singapore and Hong Kong are cities I would imagine that both of them have a much higher population density per road mile. Indeed, a quick search brings up unconfirmed numbers which indicate road per capita for the total US exceeds that of Singapore by an order of magnitude.
Singapore and Hong Kong are both in areas which never experience freezing. The act of freezing and thawing of water in temperate climates is super harsh on roads - as water will seep into cracks and then expand when it freezes. It's the main reason why many roads are bad in many US cities like Chicago.
Another reason might be due to regulations. I faintly recall hearing that European highways are built on an 18" base, whereas the US only a 12" base, but I'm sure it varies...
Perhaps worse in terms of consistency. Private drivers education, public school drivers education, or uncle Bob can just teachya!
The testing is remarkably pathetic. It's impressive this system works as well as it does. Red light runners, meh, just fine them! Pot smokers, fine and imprison them even if they weren't near a vehicle!
My experiences of driving in Italy point to a slight disregard for the law in that case - I've never seen more egregious undertaking than I have on the motorways there... .
I used to hold that position too, but then I realized a couple things that could fill several books. It boils down to the fact that the USA was essentially first to build a road network based on assumptions of low population density, high abundance and first to access requisite resources; and assuming a civilized society with a baseline of standards, culture, and customs that were essentially tacit and implicit to the system without having to be regulated or explicitly managed.
If you are European, although the significantly increased government control of its population will mitigate things somewhat, reality is that as Europe has now imbued itself with third world people and the customs and proclivities they carry, the road behaviors will also change even more than they clearly have, as anyone who has driven in Europe for more than 20 or so years, can attest to.
And before anyone gets triggered on some conditioned and well trained pavlovian assumptions, what I described above was equally observable when East Germans started meshing with West Germany, where after 55 years of having been exposed to relentless psychological engineering to break East Germans of their German-ness and proclivities and identity, they lacked what are commonly understood to be certain German traits and preferences for methodical order, systematic structure, and social courtesy; all of which the East Germans had far less of a connection to. That led to a lot of poor driving on roads and that has really not changed all that much either since as anyone who spends any distinct time on West German Roads and East German roads can attest to, even though the impact is being muddled by things like Polish drivers in East Germany and increasingly foreign drivers from all over the place.
Essentially it also comes down to the fact that now people with drivers licenses from various other European countries with lower driving standards, are also just allowed to drive in Germany without having to meet the far higher German driving class standards. It's yet another way in which democracy itself is being utterly disassembled, as foreign minorities are advantaged over native majorities … a total in version of democracy and even basic morality and ethics.
As for the USA, things have gotten so bad in many states that just ignoring the overcapacity of most of the road system due to unfettered and uncontrolled invasion by foreigners driving on US roads, you now have a whole ethnic driving license racket going on where an ethnic communities pass their own in spite of essentially not passing or being safe drivers.
I know that is not what people here want to hear, but reality simply is that this whole system is failing and it is failing due to deliberate bugs intentionally injected, and instead of fixing those bugs, people are just covering them up and making excuses and using ever mounting number of hacks to obscure and hide the ever more brittle system. It's quite telling that even in this kind of forum no one seems to understand that they are looking at a totally broken system and one that is failing at every increasing speed; all while willfully ignoring the inevitable cascading and total failure.
I'm not sure what it's like in Spain but, in France, if you hog the outside lane you will get flashed and beeped at. French drivers do not tolerate lane hogs at all and generally manifest excellent lane discipline: I wish the UK were more like that.
It's not simply against social norms: in (some/most?) European countries you can get a ticket for hogging the left (fast) lane. You are supposed to move over, if traffic allows.
I've started driving again after a couple of years off, and it still astounds me that people lane hog the middle lane.
I don't know if it's laziness, ego, or fear of motorways but it should be taught as a rule. I usually make it a point to overtake and then, if possible, go straight back across to the left lane. Highly doubt the hogger is paying any attention, but I feel more content feeling like I've taught something...
Still amazing still motorway driving isn't taught or tested at all (I think? Been quite a while since I got my license).
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there's a lot less hogging in 2 lane scenarios, which I why I try and find A roads now rather than motorways.
I drive when and where I feel comfortable. Usually at or slightly below the speed limit. I'm mostly optimizing for making the minimum number of lane changes once I get on the motorway. Preferably that means as soon as I get on the motorway switching to whatever lane will take me directly to the exit. A lot of people do what you do. Doesn't bother me a bit. My logic is no one is really actually getting anywhere any faster anyway. They're just increasing risk for barely any benefit. Changing lanes seems to me like the most likely time to have an accident, so the people who insist that driving at the speed limit isn't fast enough and that they must change a lane to go around me and then change back again taking a small risk twice for the privilege are just impatient.
As the old saying goes "everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, everyone who drives faster than you is crazy".
Fun fact: I also take routes that minimize the number of times I have to turn into oncoming traffic and/or judge gaps where the landscape gives poor visibility of the traffic, so long as the detour is no more than a few minutes.
I drive at the speed limit as well - the number of people you see doing 60mph in the middle lane though is worrying. I see that as the dangerous thing (and would argue that it inherently makes changing lanes more dangerous as you have 3 trafficked lanes, rather than 2 with a usually empty middle).
If you stick to the middle when the slow lane is even going faster than you, that's definitely the time to move over.
My aim is to be a good road citizen and obey by rules and convention to ensure everyone's journey is smooth, not only my own.
If you think of the lanes as one driving lane and the others as overtaking lanes like they do in the UK or some other countries then there is no conception of slow or fast lane and there are no people going slower in the overtaking lanes, or someone with a faster car just hogging the outside lane. They have to move over always.
It’s a trade off. You can’t neatly organize ox, a guy pulling a heavily loaded cart, an ox driven cart, a bicycle, a scooter, a motorcycle, a rickshaw, a car, and a heavily loaded truck which is probably overcapacity.
You can certainly neatly organize those. First of all, ox and horsecarts don't even really need tarmac, and so in many countries where these means of transportation persist, they are only allowed to use the earth surface parallel to the road. Scooters should be expected to do the same, as even the cheap Chinese motorbikes found throughout the developing world have tires thick enough for earth or even sand.
If you’ve been to India, you will see that there is no earth surface parallel to the road in many places. It’s a path that is two lanes wide, maybe a little longer, and everything is negotiable. It may be possible to reign it in with China style authoritarian rule, but Indian culture is not like that in my experience. Although perhaps it would result in a safer environment.
I've also noticed (around Costa Blanca) how seriously they take tailgating (I mean it as a positive thing). As soon as there was a slow car in the left lane there was another literally 2 meters behind it... I tend to tailgate left lane hogs but I wouldn't ever go so close for safety reasons. In 0-2 minutes, the slow car is merging right.
I wonder if those two are related.
It depends on the state. In Ohio you will actually get pulled over all the time for hanging out in the left lane. Not so in California in my experience so far.
I have a similar commute and experience the same thing. People dragging along in left and middle lanes. This winds up aggravating selfish and entitled road rage types who then proceed to tailgate and forcibly cut across to get around these people.
One thing about driving, it's the closest we get to bellum omnium contra omnes. You don't see the other vehicles as an extension of the driver, a person, but rather a singular inhuman being you want to fight. People lose their humanity on the road.
> I think this isn't taught anymore.
Driver instruction is a joke here in the USA. I got my license around 2001 in NYC. The test was 20 brain dead questions such as "what sign is this: [school crossing]" and you look up and on the wall is a huge PSA poster of the school crossing sign with the slogan "Schools open. Drive carefully." So they practically gave the answers away. Driving school is optional and all they do is show you an hour long video that nobody watched which the proctor turned off after 15 min. Then you drive around the neighborhood for a half an hour with two others and an instructor a few days. No rules of the road, no etiquette, no nothing. The tests should be much harder, rules and etiquette drilled. The bar must be raised.
I'll give the CDL (commercial Drivers License) more credit. It's the equivalent to what I think is an HGV license in Europe. Though I never got the license I took the test for class A with as many endorsements as I could(tank, hazmat, and doubles/triples). Quite challenging and you have to know how some of the systems on the truck work such as air brakes. I failed it the first go as I thought I knew better but some old terminology tripped me up.
Is there a Primer / tldr for Strong Towns? I kind of get the basic idea (maintaining town infrastructure sometimes exceeds revenue) but I was looking for "start here" but don't seem to be able to find it
If you're genuinely interested, the recently published book "Strong Towns" is the best possible primer. It's not long, and covers the core ideas behind the movement in enough detail to understand how it all hangs together.
I was always puzzled by how do English-speaking folk communicate such matter clearly? I mean the word "cost". It has two meanings: basically all expenditure that is associated with something or it might mean agreed upon price of product.
That was interesting data set, and here by "cost" I guess "price" is meant.
That's where it starts getting dubious. Technically, all roads and transit are built at a great loss on paper. However, connecting locations connects people and enables economic activity, so there is definitely a 'profit' per se but it would be difficult to quantify precisely.
USA is definitely a high labor cost market. The throughput per unit time from each worker is probably much lower compared to developing countries. I am actually more interested in seeing highway cost/mi. stats for each developed and developing country. If anyone got links, I appreciate.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadHowever, we could only afford it because we got a grant from the state. Our annual town budget could not afford the road maintenance.
Do you experience freezing temperatures?
What we don't have is frequent heavy vehicles at speed. The state actually bans certain types of commercial vehicles on specific roads in the spring when road beds are soft.
The figures cited in this story seem high. Or maybe they're normal in Illinois or some other state where costs are extraordinary. Their not in line with what I see.
An acre of land which is large for a town is 43,560 square feet or 208’ x 208’ though you can get significantly narrower along a road. A mile is 5280’ so ballpark that’s 25 per side or 50 properties = 4,800$ per property every say 20 years or 240$ per year.
Not unreasonable if planned for and if other expenses are not chewing up all property tax revenue.
The trick is, communities can usually get outside subsidy (state and federal) for _expansion_ projects. So when the road breaks down and they don't have local money to fix it, one of the strategies is to go to the higher level government for an "economic development" project to get outside money to pay for the road to be widened / expanded. This is true even when the added capacity isn't needed.
Often, they don't. Examples:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/1/11/the-cost-of-de...
https://www.sdnewswatch.org/stories/small-s-d-towns-struggle...
https://www.wpr.org/small-wisconsin-towns-paved-roads-return...
Many places in the US spent and borrowed to build infrastructure without budgeting for long-term maintenance; they also encouraged development patterns (e.g. suburban sprawl) that are cheap to build, but quite expensive when you take into account the long-term maintenance requirements.
This is a problem even in more urban areas, which is why lots of urbanists (including Strong Towns) advocate cutting back on new road construction, and taking into account the local tax base before building out infrastructure.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/1/22/paved-with-goo...
https://www.strongtowns.org/nonewroads
Living in a small town, our roads are in poor shape.
Additionally, we have a US highway that cuts through the center of town.
The state administers the maintenance of that particular road, so we have had incidents where the state will hire contractors to modify the sidewalks along the highway, to make them ADA compliant, but not coordinate w the city.
So, the city winds up ripping up the sidewalks, because of an infrastructure upgrade for the water system.
So, short answer, we don’t maintain our roads.
Unless you have a really good tax base, the money just is not there.
Of course, there are a ton of non-local funding that gets drawn from:
- federal and state gas taxes
- state vehicle registration fees (varying by type and weight of vehicle)
- state, county and municipal specific property, income and / or sales taxes
As for highways, there is the federal highway trust, and grants and loans can be taken out to pay for them, but that typically does not fall on the town's shoulders alone (if at all).
Also note there are a _lot_ of grading options available, some as simple as gravel and tar.
As to how small towns afford it--you don't repave that often, and you focus efforts on what to repave. For example, Cedar Rapids, Iowa calculated it would cost $500 million over 10 years to repave everything that needs to be repaved: https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Annual-road-repaving-to-st....
Cedar Rapids has about 53,000 households, so that's about $943 per household per year. To put that into perspective, we can do a calculation. 18% of DC metro area commuters use Metrorail. If you take 18% of the 2.2 million DC metro households, that's about 400,000 households (roughly) using Metrorail. The rail capital budget is about $1 billion annually, so about $2,500 per household per year. Excluding the cost of new rail cars, its about $1,500 per household.
(Obviously this is a very back-of-the-napkin calculation, but it puts things into perspective.)
[1] https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/budget/upload/FY19-Propose... (p. 76)
for more perspective, cedar rapids average income is $54,465 per household, compared to $99,669 for the DC metro area.
My parents retired somewhere nice (read: wealthy) and there was recently a big stink at the town meeting because they wanted to repave a road that doesn't need it to the tune of a mil or so and it was an obvious handout to a well connected paving/construction company.Meanwhile my city (who's name is synonymous with urban blight if you ask my parents neighbors) bought a pavement milling attachment for a skid steer (an item that costs less than a pickup truck) and it made the regional news because they're known for being so tight with money. I could go on but I won't since you get the picture.
You're comparing an all-inclusive capital budget versus simply repaving roads. How much does DC Metro spend on track maintenance annually? How much does Cedar Rapids spend on lighting and signage?
How much do Cedar Rapids residents spend on their cars? The average used car payment runs in excess of $4,800 annually. New cars run around a hundred or so bucks a month more.
The DC metro is a bit of an odd duck since a large chunk of its users don't actually live in DC. The Census Dept. puts metro ridership at about 21% of all commuters commuting into DC, and overall about 34% of all DC residents use public transit (of all modes) as their primary means of transportation.
So even though you're including the cost of things like stations and vehicles, I think the overall cost is much closer (if not slanted in favor of transit) than you're letting on. That said, rail is typically one of the most expensive modes of public transit.
Per the budget the plan is to spend at most $249 million annually (less for most years) on track and structures rehabilitation. That's the closest you'll get to a repaving budget and includes things beyond track maintenance and replacement.
With that in mind the six year plan would call for per-capita spending of between $335 and $620 annually, cheaper than repaving the roads.
In any event, the point isn’t to say that road paving is cheaper, but to address GP’s question, which is how cities can afford it. It’s an order of magnitude comparison to put the number into context. (For one thing, the road maintenance budget for Cedar Rapids is overstated by a factor of two, because I used the projection of what the city thinks it ideally needs to spend rather than what it does spend.)
Sure, because municipalities typically externalize those costs (e.g. police doing traffic duty or parking control). Road signaling itself is simpler than rail signaling but still needs periodic maintenance. You've got stuff like generators (a necessity out here now that PG&E is introducing recreational blackouts. Presumably sensor lights increase the cost of repaving.
Likewise Cedar Rapids almost certainly has to plow the roads for a good chunk of the year where a subway and even a surface rail system typically wouldn't. Of course with plowing comes the cost of more frequent repaving.
In any event, the point isn’t to say that road paving is cheaper, but to address GP’s question, which is how cities can afford it. It’s an order of magnitude comparison to put the number into context.
Sure, because governments typically externalize the cost of roads but not public transit. In San Francisco, SFPD will bill the MTA for any sort of police presence on Muni. They sure as shit don't bill Caltrans for the cost of traffic enforcement.
Sounds a tad more expensive than it needs to be. Skimming search results for my country (.fi), I get numbers ranging from 30 000 to 50 000 eur per kilometer. I know murican roads are wider, but I don't think they're that much wider. And I don't think we're particularly effective or cheap at doing it..
In other words completely out of reach of the kind of town we're talking about?
All of this becomes expensive for single family homes to support. The revenue per area is just so low.
They make developers build them on the developer's dime, and then the roads don't need maintenance for a decade.
As long as your suburb keeps growing, the pain of maintaining decade-old roads can be offset by the increase in your tax base.
Once your suburb stops growing, you find yourself a mile down crap creek with no shovel.
(... sorry, I couldn't pass up on that one.)
Consider the amount of road that has been built out in the US relative to the populations that road is serving. Maintenance and expansion is paid out mainly from state and local taxes. That's an enormous civilizational overhead the US contends with, not to mention the economic cost of a large portion of household capital being tied up in rapidly depreciating assets: cars.
I'm looking at you, suburbia.
Even if this $1.5m figure is wildly inflated, calculate how few people live on a given mile in the suburbs, a conservative estimate on how much it costs to maintain a road, and the numbers just don't add up.
The suburbs were a ponzi scheme and the bottom is about to fall out.
Come on, some remote villages in the third world have paved roads to them.
A well built gravel road will have a decent amount of rock which drains in the rain without turning to mud, culverts are needed on the steeper slopes to limit erosion.
While the total cost is much less than asphalt, dirt roads do need more regular maintenance which municipalities frequently try to skimp on.
A good read of the pro's and con's: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents...
https://www.nap.edu/read/21935/chapter/1
very limited discussion a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272140
https://i.redd.it/4xau5auzqg741.png
If a suburb can attract some retail or office space or manufacturing, they can be like Irvine or Tysons or Bloomington -- the suburbs that have made it. Those that cannot will accumulate the same problems with fiscal sustainability that inner cities once did.
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=Disaster+and+d...
Definitely not a small number considering the installed road base…
I didnt read much judgement in th parent post, but it does imply suburbia is subsidized because it has higher infrastructure cost per dollar of tax revenue. The was a study on that very thing a couple years ago IIRC and they found the most solvent towns and cities are actually the higher density ones even if they are lower income areas.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/1/the-surprising-...
It turns out that having more of them per acre is more cost effective.
However, I don't think your argument justifies that American policy prejudice towards cars and suburbs. Suburbs involve more roads - trucks may the force that mainly consumes roads but of course the higher the road-to-people ratio is, the more those roads are going to be consumed by those trucks. Which is to say, of course cars and trucks both go to the far suburbs and the nowhere's villes around the country and of course these trips are part of maintaining these places.
Moreover, if we moved to more rail transit, the little towns would be more in trouble because rail tends to require larger loads and so would raise the price of goods in far suburban malls and such.
It's like I'm happy to have the walkable grocery store and 24/7 piss smell, but when feeling adventurous driving out to the suburbs to set up camp in your garden.
I think most urban commuter parking is paid, whether public or private, and the expectation is that a city charges appropriate property taxes on commercial buildings to cover any costs imposed by commuters.
More importantly if we focused more on making transport costs in-line with the damage they do to the road surfaces (not to mention the environmental impact of long and short haul trucking, plus the traffic) instead of city/suburbia none issue, perhaps we'd all be a bit better off.
I also like the idea of making fines for moving violations somewhat proportional to vehicle mass. The danger posed to others by a 150 lb moped pales in comparison to that of a 4500 lb pickup truck. At least in the U.S., a ticket for speeding 50% over the limit through a residential neighborhood is the same for both, for example. Neither is OK, but considering the disparity in the potential for damage and injury to others, imposing equal fines is insane.
A fully loaded semi is 18,000 lbs per axle. A really huge personal vehicle, an F-350, is 4000 lbs per axle. That's 4.5x the weight, 4.5^4=410, so the semi is doing 410x as much damage. There's really no point in trying to tax personal vehicles for road damage when over 99% of the damage is being done by trucks.
Trucks and permit loads are pretty much the only things that get close.
Beyond the elastic limit, damage is an exponential function of the pavement loading, but only once that certain minimum psf is hit.
For the majority of a highway's loading curve, the damage-per-force is essentially nil. Plastic deformation and serious fatigue only start as you approach the design limits.
It's 99%+ because cars don't do any real wear or damage to pavement from typical use.
Even driven at gross weight, it's doing 5% of the damage per axle of loaded semi. The semi also has 4-5 axles, so it's more like 2% of the damage of the semi.
Mind you, we're talking here about the most damaging personal vehicle loaded to its maximum weight, and the semi is still doing 50x the damage of the personal vehicle. It's reasonable to say that essentially all road damage is done by semis.
That said, this type of tire is a very tiny fraction of the total miles driven on public highways, and so if you're looking for someone to tax based on the costs they create, it's all heavy trucks.
I just wonder what would happen if we charged trucks based on weight.
All of which creates overhead in the form of people to be paid, equipment to build/own/maintain, time lost at all stages, the usual political influence problems, jusrisdiction of different areas of road, implementing policy, and corruption. Most of it will end end up as pass through cost to individuals either way as both consumer goods and roadways are deemed essential. It's ultimately a fairness exercise of tax distribution so like most things in the public interest the arena any idea must be fought in is politics.
And yes, consumers will pay regardless, but at least the difference is reflected in the cost of goods. It could very well be that certain local goods are cheaper than imported goods after road costs are properly factored in, which could change how much is imported.
However, this feels a bit regressive since poorer people will pay more of the cost since roads are largely funded by income tax, but that can be accounted for by shifting other taxes. The idea isn't too punish poor people or shipping customers, but to allow the market to work more efficiently.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating#Imp...
A road is a spring, and will behave elastically, with almost no deformation, unless you exceed a certain point on the stress-strain curve.
This is why the main concern of highway departments is not exceeding maximum axel loads.
Worrying about the amount of wear commuters are responsible for is just a distraction.
It's like a toddler jumping on your mattress vs a 350 lb offensive-lineman doing it. They both technically cause some amount of wear, but it's not worth figuring out the proportions.
I can't see a plausible argument that cities consume a disproportionate amount of the country's truck traffic. It seems like Suburban malls and supermarkets require pretty much exactly proportionate truck traffic to their city counter-parts. Moreover, manufacture is not particular concentrated in cities so that too gets equal coverage in suburbs. And all of this stuff requires proportionately more miles driven in the suburbs due to the lower density.
I don't know if cities consume more Kambucha than suburbs but if they do, I assume that suburbs consume some other equivalently.
Half of that design chart is for reconstruction and repaving. What else are you looking for?
>an enormous civilizational overhead
You could eliminate suburbia overnight, and demand for those suburban and rural highways will still be there, since cities generally need things delivered from outside (like food) in order to continue being cities.
Motorways in France and Germany seem to be repaved more often, and billiard table smooth in a lot of cases.
Not sure about Germany, but they just have a super strong car lobby in general, and its one of their national pride things, so they tend to find money for that.
Here in Switzerland we have a very high gas price, but that leads to many people going for gas outside of Switzerland and we have no idea what to do when EVy really take off. The true cost of those roads is hidden in the 'normality' of the high gas prices.
Roads are a tricky problem, not just for libertarians.
An Autobahn built in/towards a city tend to get way more expensive.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/bundesregierung-p...
plain road (on terrain) € 10,000,000 x km
viaduct/bridges € 20,000,000 x km
tunnel € 30,000,000 x km
with a variation of up to -15% or -20% in countries where workmanship and materials are cheaper and + 15% or + 20% in the more expensive ones.
I read somewhere that China spends $30 million per mile of high-speed rail. 22,000 miles and counting.
The US is going to bankrupt itself trying to modernize its aging infrastructure.
Probably doesn't work in some urban sprawl American suburb but for more sensible layouts its the best option. Also the best for the environment.
yep, hi. It's also the same kind of area where road maintenance is the highest problem. Lot's of road wear and tear, and not enough funding to maintain properly
I live in Utah, and our "urban" area (SLC) is similar to many "suburban" areas in terms of population density. We have a commuter line that intersects with light rail, which intersects with the bus system. Rail hits most of the important business areas, and buses hit most of the residential areas, and each runs every 15-20 minutes. If you know the system, you can get around fairly well without a car. It was expensive to build, but it is used quite a bit so it is absolutely worth it.
[0]: http://miljobarometern.stockholm.se/trafik/motorfordon/bilin...
And that was with renting a car ~3 times per year. If I wanted even monthly trips it would have been cheaper to buy a car and park it the rest of the time.
I use Zipcar for random errands and rent one for overnight trips. Last year I think I spent around $1500 on cars, all in.
Zipcars are parked nearby, probably closer than I'd find a parking spot on average and basically always available. The rental place I use is 1/4 mile away. They know me by name. I never move a car for street cleaning, deal with a busted window, or pay tickets.
If you don't need one for work, or have mobility issues or kids, they're entirely optional and (at least to me) life is better without them.
I thought that maybe I'd occasionally rent a car and drive out to a state park, but what I quickly discovered was that, once driving stopped being a part of my daily life, the idea of regularly driving out to a forest preserve lost its palatability. Largely because I am no longer inured to driving, so any plan for how to spend my leisure time that involves devoting a significant percentage of it to being stuck behind the wheel on a freeway is kind of a non-starter. So instead I road bike 4 seasons and take a few camping trips per year. So far it's working for me. Less time stuck in a car and more time out walking in my neighborhood means I have a greatly reduced need for things like mountain biking to help me unwind in the first place.
That said, I think that when I originally calculated it out, I figured out that renting a car 4-5 days a month was still cheaper than owning an inexpensive car. And not too much of a hassle in most cities - out of 4 urban addresses I've lived at, only one wasn't close to a car rental office, and even then it was only about 15 minutes by bus.
I used to live in Denver and never understood why people would find the need to drive 10 miles to the nearest trails when you could just ride to them. Then I realized, once you're done with those initial 10 miles, you could link up routes that covered practically the entire rest of the state.
Now I'm writing a guidebook on those routes.
Bummer about buses not accepting bikes - that sounds crazy to me. They just don't have room underneath or a bike rack up front? I can hardly understand how that could be true!
Because they are usually up in the hills so its a fairly large effort to get there and by the time you are there you have no energy left to do the trails unless there is a ski lift to get you to the top.
As they say, "Any Distance Is Cycling Distance!"
A cross country or downhill bike doesn't fit on the rack though. Longer wheelbases, wider tires and wider handlebars make it very difficult or impossible to rack or bring inside (if the driver even allows it, usually not the case unless the bus is very empty).
The trains here have front wheel hooks, dedicated spots and more space, which is better. The size of XC and DH bikes still makes it a hassle though, and obviously you're limited to spots near the train stops.
Bike racks make a lot of sense here in CO - we have regional bus routes that can be 25 or 250 miles in distance. They, "why ride the bus when riding the bike is faster" isn't always true.
I do kind of live in cycling Mecca here in CO, where Chicago just ain't.
This is what I tell people now when they ask how I get around without a car. Renting 1-2x/month for a road trip is still cheaper than parking, insurance and maintenance even on a fully owned car
Before this I did zipcar or other services for the occasional trip, and sure, it’s convenient enough to physically get to the cars (unless they get fully booked in my neighborhood which does happen) but it’s still quite a bit of overhead. It’s a pain always having to know exactly how long you’ll be gone to book the right number of hours, since someone might book right after you so you can’t rely on being able to extend it at the last minute. And every time you book one for a day, you have to do the calculation - is it really worth spending $100 to go to a friend’s bbq in the suburbs? You also don’t have specific gear you may need like snow chains or mountain bike racks. I just ended up not using it all that often, only for specific big planned trips, and even then it adds additional stress.
Owning a car will certainly be more expensive for me overall, but I‘ll also use it a lot more. And I consider myself an urbanist, I’ve always been proud not to own one. Now I feel like I’ve been tilting at windmills all this time and it’s nice to give it up. SF is an insanely car-centric place for being so-called progressive, which sucks for density, and walkability, and street life, and pedestrian and biker safety. Public transit, especially on the weekends, is pretty bad. For instance getting from the east side of the city out to ocean beach or land’s end, would take over an hour on muni, but it’s a 20-30 minute drive. Public transit to get to even very popular destinations close to the city, like Napa or Muir Woods, is often non existent. Instead of being annoyed by it, now I can take better advantage of the perks of living here and do more with my free time, which is absolutely worth it to me right now.
My goal this year is to get out more, do more day hikes and other short trips, and so far it’s going great. I feel kind of dumb now for holding out this long, actually.
It's a chicken and egg problem... if most people didn't own cars there would be much more reasonable and convenient ways to rent a car. But given that most people do anyway because even groceries without a car are a chore in a poorly design city, the market for the good rentals is not there.
I'm always amused here in Australia when governments like to make the spending on roads and the amount raised through petrol taxes and registration fees "balance out". Uhhh, ok, you're sitting on billions of dollars worth of capital and you're patting yourselves on the back that it's "breaking even".
If it's a new project, even if land is behind expropriated, the market value is being paid. (I assume, bring Australia) So it does balance out, even in land value. For appreciated value, it doesn't occur in a vacuum. The local transportation is factored in to the market rates for property.
So I'm not sure in what sense you don't see it as balanced out. Or what you'd like to see as the alternative.
Given the huge historical capital investment states have made in their roads they should be making money; or if they are not, we should be acknowledging that we are choosing to not make money at market rates when we compare the costs involved with roads with other forms of transport (especially rail).
I don't think we should necessarily do anything different with roads, but we should acknowledge that, well, pretty much everything at this scale needs to be subsidized out the wazoo - roads as well as public transport. I'm not arguing for some sort of dystopia where the government does some crazy user-pays thing on even public asset; just an end to the endless rhetoric about how roads "break even" while public transport "needs to be subsidized".
One would hope so, but it seems our VMT is going up over time whilst people are locking in very expensive, long-term car purchases.
The upsides are reduced cost of building, maintenance, and equipment, and better water permiability. Reduced speeds can be a benefit depending on the application.
I suspect NJ loses a lot of tax dollars from commuters that work in NYC or Philadelphia and pay income tax in those states.
Regardless the state brings in a lot of revenue. I suspect the pension obligations are the real killer here.
Maybe Denver is particularly bad for concrete roads because our freeze/thaw cycles get really bad. We have so many warm days in the winter interspersed with cold days and freezing nights.
It seems like it would be tough to move to another type of material that would actually be more environmentally friendly after considering all the extra maintenance required for a less durable but more environmentally friendly construction.
As others have mentioned, it seems like the long term solution is to move to a less car-dependent society.
"If you can choose among three lanes, pick the middle lane for the smoothest driving."
When I learned to drive (in the UK), the official guidance was to stay in the left-most lane except when overtaking. And then, after overtaking, to immediately return to the left lane.
For denser areas with multilane highways that are entirely in use, the best you can say is that the people in the passing lane probably want to go faster. :-)
On a motorcycle it's all about riding between the left-most and its neighbor. More cars expect you there because most motorcycles ride there, so they make more room. The next lane-line is a death trap, from cars in the second lane moving over for a motorcyclist over there.
Interesting perspective. I feel a little differently:
- cars meeting to enter shouldn't affect you, because it's their responsibility to get to the right speed and time their entry to a gap; an entering car should never cause you to need to change speed or direction
- an exiting car shouldn't affect you, because there's usually no reason for them to slow down before exit
- you can overtake the slow trucks when you encounter them: just change lanes to overtake, and then pull back into the right lane afterwards
Driving in the middle lane is optimal from each driver's own perspective but, globally, it reduces road capacity and increases journey times.
People merging onto the highway are supposed to reach highway speed before attempting to merge, but they very often do not do that.
And they're supposed to to find a gap, but there may not be one or other drivers may deliberately try to deny them one.
The merging lane may be very short.
The merging car may start to change lanes even if it's not safe to do so.
Congestion may require more deliberately courteous behavior.
The right lane often has many trucks clustered together and rote exercise of the keep-right rule will require an excessive amount of lane changing.
And on a limited access highway, lane changing is the most dangerous routine maneuver so one should be thoughtful of balancing lane changing with expediency.
And the idea that a driver has no responsibility to accommodate another merging driver, if applied strictly, also means that one cannot always leave the right lane at will, because driver in the left lane are not permitting. So you change speed a lot, which is rough on fuel efficiency and precludes cruise control if it's adaptive.
Being religious about keep-right is kind of miserable on a congested highway, especially one with a differential of speed speed limits depending on vehicle type. The people most steadfast about traffic laws get punished at the pleasure of people who flout them, which doesn't seem correct.
Exactly. Each person acting in their own self-interest causes a reduction in road capacity and longer journey times. Those who try to stay in the right-most lane that's going their speed don't gain anything for themselves, as they only increase road capacity for people behind them.
But two things.
Tragedy of the commons. You're arguing that some drivers should elect to have poor travel times to, frankly, accommodate those who are breaking the law. Maybe the law should be changed (different speed limits are bad) and more zealously enforced.
Second, your greatest responsibility on the road is safety and accident avoidance, not expediency. It is not defensible to change lanes or refuse to accommodate another driver when it may cause an accident that could have been avoided. Changing lanes or refusing to accommodate is least safe when there is a lot of congestion.
I don't know the best way to drive. I don't always obey the law and neither do I only do those things that give me individually an immediate. Mostly, I try to be safe and not instigate road rage.
But I don't think it's as simple as you're suggesting, either. You absolutely have to drive in a way that anticipates that others are acting selfishly. It's part of avoiding accidents.
- I'm not saying that minimising your own journey time should be your only or main objective
- I'm not saying that minimising other people's journey time should be your only or main objective
My observation (no judgment) is that we'd each like less traffic in front of us, but it's most convenient for us to drive in a way that slightly increases traffic for those behind us.
Whether this is good or bad, I don't know. On the 280 and 101, it's common to see cars driving 80+, when the posted speed limit is 65. Perhaps better lane discipline would increase those speeds and make the roads less safe...
But they do, because when they don't it's potentially your life on the line.
> an exiting car shouldn't affect you
But they do, because there's always a reason.
> just change lanes to overtake, and then pull back into the right lane afterwards
I look at the act of driving on the freeway as gambling with my life. Every single action I take (or don't) has the potential to kill me. This is anecdotal, so I'm happy to take actual facts and change my opinion, but I see a much higher order of accidents (or near misses) caused by changing lanes than I see from people staying in their lane. My conclusion is that staying in a lane is inherently safer than drifting from lane to lane based on its occupancy level.
> Driving in the middle lane is optimal from each driver's own perspective
I generally stay in the middle lane when the load on the freeway is low to moderate. When the load is high it doesn't matter which lane you're in; they're all sub-optimal. But if there are so many people driving in the middle lane that journey times are increased, then people will start to pass more often and the lanes will even out. If they don't, then you're in high load.
> it reduces road capacity
It doesn't reduce road capacity. It could reduce road capacity utilization, but if you're hitting that point then the utilization has already taken a hit, and driver patterns change to utilize the road more fully (for better or worse).
Ultimately the lane choice of each driver doesn't matter, because drivers won't sit in bumper to bumper traffic with a wide open lane next to them.
In fact, changing lanes reduces road capacity utilization. For the duration of the lane change and for a short period before and after the car is effectively taking up two cars places (their place in the old lane and the new).
So instead of constant lane switching, use the middle lane for going straight ahead, and the leftmost lane for passing.
California didn't even adhere to Federal Interstate guidelines for exit numbering until relatively recently (sometime in the early to mid 2000s, IIRC), decades after most other states. California's scheme predated the Federal Interstate system and they weren't keen on changing it.
Massachusetts is about to embark on a project to renumber all of their exits per federal mandate. The consensus is that the only way they can take "exit 17"[1] from us is by lasering it out of our brains. I know people who are planning a guerilla renumbering campaign for this sign after it is harmonized.
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/3X8gIOf.jpg
This means that they generally stay in the rightmost lane, as slower traffic is supposed to keep right.
Yeah, but the advice in the California DMV handbook is to stay in the middle, not the right.
The difference is that, in the UK, the middle lane is explicitly only for overtaking. If you're going the same speed as the cars in the left lane, you're not overtaking, so you shouldn't be in the middle lane. California's guidance is directly contrary to this.
Reason for the CA rules is that, in the US, the rightmost lane is where all the entrance and exit ramps are, so you often have people speeding up or slowing down as they enter and exit. Rather than have to do a ton of lane changes to pass people as they merge on, the advice to stay in the middle lane if you just want to stay a constant speed is so you don't have to deal as much with people entering and exiting your lane.
"You should always drive in the left-hand lane when the road ahead is clear. If you are overtaking a number of slower-moving vehicles, you should return to the left-hand lane as soon as you are safely past."
When I learned to drive (many years ago), the guidance was more specific: the middle lane for overtaking a vehicle, and the right-most lane for overtaking multiple vehicles.
With that said, in free-flowing traffic, it can be incredibly dangerous when people fail to follow this protocol, and I often wish there was more enforcement.
https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/811.425
Not doubting you, just wanna know.
> Vehicles proceeding at a speed less than the flow of traffic and moving on a two-lane highway where passing is unsafe, must turn off the roadway at the nearest place designated as a turnout or wherever sufficient area for a safe turnout exists, if a line of 5 or more vehicles forms behind them.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/driver_ha...
California, on the other hand, allows people to drive in whatever lane they feel like for however long they feel like as long as they maintain sufficient speed. The slower traffic is supposed to stay to the right and the faster traffic is supposed to stay to the left. The police can intervene if they feel that someone is driving too slow in the wrong lane, but I've never seen that happen.
There are no rules in California to prevent overtaking on the right, so you can choose which lane you want to move into to overtake someone.
Left-most lane on controlled access highways should be rear car, by default, has the right-of-way.
Source: South Floridian driver who does felonious speeds in the left lane (typically in a speeding convoy, with everybody else doing the same speeds, if not higher)
And I would expect behavior improvement, if nothing else, on the fact that ambiguity is removed and time of conflict is reduced.
>king of the road, get out of my way" behavior.
I get that's not something people might want to "encourage" , but a certain amount of conflict and congestion is resolved by allowing the people who think they're king, be king in the left lane. If you don't want to go faster than the car behind you, you can be king in the right (or any other) lane.
It might not feel right based on principle, but in a practical sense it solves a lot.
I'll move back when the passed car is in my rear view. Oh, you really to ride my rear, and pay me on the right? Will Joe we have a problem because I'm happy merged into the right line and you're on my as, and now you're 3 feet from both me and the car were passing.
That's what I got from this comment... Just forget encourages already aggressive driving.
Of course, some people do not pass, and that is frustrating.
You don't have to do that, and I won't judge you for it. It just seems like a harmlessly nice thing to do for your fellow driver.
And it's rare to be in a situation where it's reasonable for you to overtake at 5 mph more than the other car while there are +20s whizzing by so it doesn't seem like it's really something that needs defending.
>Not my fault I don't want to go 20+ over.
No, but I think that people see it this way is part of the problem. It becomes a sort of moral game of chicken, with one side thinking one rule is more important, and vice versa. It shouldn't be debatable. Both sides should automatically know who has r-o-w without thinking, even if the rule is arbitrary. The entire system operates around this premise.
And because speed is always going to be a personal sliding scale (maybe 5 over is ok but 20 isn't), the simplest, most practical, consistent resolution (whether "fair" or not) is to yield the lane to the passer behind you.
Look at it this way: You wouldn't worry about momentary speed to pass someone on a two lane road, if you needed to. You'd focus on getting past and getting over before the oncoming traffic gets to you. It should be the same way on multi-lane highways, even if the traffic is overtaking instead of oncoming. That's why it's called the passing lane.
Just pass and get over, regardless of if anyone is behind you. Driving rules should be as simple as possible.
The fact that the lane isn't being used by anyone else isn't an excuse for you to use it as you see fit. Anymore than driving on the wrong side of a 2-lane road, just because there's no oncoming traffic.
This type of regressive behavior is disgusting. When someone tries to pass I now have to be extra careful about switching lanes because they may pass me on the right. This leads to even slower switching which fuels even more passing on the right.
Just follow the damn rules.
It's just that people don't do it, and have little incentive to. Part of what I'm suggesting is that you should have to be ultra cautious anytime you're in the passing lane. Which is an incentive to quickly get out of it.
I am actually usually pretty impressed with LA drivers. Most respect the zipper merge.
Most. Maybe 1/10 are that prick that believes you merging in front of them is an affront to their pride, and opts to block you from entering or exiting the freeway. I see this most on the 10, but also on the 110 going from pasadena to downtown when you have to merge over 3 lanes to stay on the freeway then merge back 3 lanes to get on the 10 west.
I felt like I could tell the moment when they realized that the repairs on their car would be more expensive than my entire car, and slink back into their lane.
Ahem... he's the one that actually knows what a zipper merge is, and you are the one who needs to learn a thing today.
There is no line in the zipper merge. You are supposed to merge at the very end to keep the traffic flowing, like a zipper would.
Read up, and don't be that guy: https://auto.howstuffworks.com/traffic-lane-zipper-merge.htm
(Unless you are talking about something else entirely, but the parent comments were talking about this scenario)
The parent is likely talking about situations like those presented where a relatively less dense (and ending) lane is merging into a fully-loaded thru-lane, and the traffic in the relatively less dense lane, rather than matching speed and finding the tooth-gap correspondence that's implied in the name zipper merge, zooms as quickly as possible to the last merge point, and then either cuts in without having negotiated a corresponding gap (causing the traffic column in the thru-lane to brake dramatically) or ends up having to slow/stop until an opportunity presents itself (causing a build-up in the ending lane). Or maybe even the latter and then the former.
So, yes, there is "no line" in the zipper merge. There are two lines. And yes, you are supposed to merge at the very end.
But if that's where the thinking/behavior stops, then the parent is right to complain. Drivers who are not matching speed before the merge point are not doing a zipper merge.
But that isn't the world we live in, so at the end of the day, the simplest rule is to use as much lane as possible and take turns merging.
I see these conditions frequently in LA. Either two merging lanes are highly congested in which case they are moving at roughly the same speed anyway, or there's one congested lane and one less dense lane.
The latter case shows up at almost every onramp when traffic gets thick, so it's pretty common. It doesn't take any special skills to negotiate well: accelerate to the speed of thru traffic and proceed to the end of the lane looking for a gap to match with. If you feel like it or just don't want the people behind you who don't understand this to feel impatient, accelerate to maybe an additional 30% above matched speed, then slow down to matched speed and look for a gap as the end of the lane gets close.
Every once in a while you see the reverse situation, where for some reason the merging lane is thick and the thru lane is moving at speed. That is indeed a really difficult situation. Thankfully it's rarer.
> The simplest rule is to use as much road as possible.
Right. While matching speed.
1) It keeps the rules simple. If we should merge at some arbitrary point before the lane is up, it will always be arbitrary, and different drivers will have different opinions.
2) By getting to the end and slowing down, the driver now has matched the speed of traffic. It's a self correcting problem.
3) Not going to the end of the lane is wasting capacity. If it's 4 lanes reducing to 3, how far back is it fair to expect that ending lane to go unused?
4) For on ramps, it gives more cars the chance to merge at once, which will either help the flow of traffic, or quickly reach equilibrium with the through lane.
5) And finally, if everyone always used the full lane, it wouldn't give "cheaters" the opportunity to pass everyone else and cheat.
>causing the traffic column in the thru-lane to brake dramatically
Theoretically, where the car merges doesn't have any bearing on this occurring or not. It shouldn't be any different at the beginning of the lane or the end. If traffic isn't moving, there's no breaking to be had. If it is, it should only give better opportunity to match speed and merge without disruption. Practically, the problem has as much to do with the aggression of the through lane drivers as it does the merging one.
They certainly have the right of way. I'm just saying that where the merging driver comes over doesn't really change any of that, unless the through traffic is behaving differently in response.
It’s a scheduling problem where people that join the lane early are starved by the people joining late.
In cases where there is roughly an equal exchange of vehicles between two lanes it doesn’t matter much, and maybe that’s the norm where you are.
Where I am, congestion is more localized to chokepoints where too many people need to use an exit or on ramp. In this case if time matters it’s usually better to be aggressive and merge at the last minute rather than be passive and get in line early.
People may think you are a jerk. For people where it’s important not to be thought of badly, they get in line first. For people who don’t care (or occasionally for other reasons) they skip the line and merge late.
There's no dispute on this point. It's the right call to merge at the last workable moment.
One can also make another wrong call in failing to match speed and negotiate tooth-gap arrangement (still in separate lanes) before doing so.
If drivers don't do that, it isn't a zipper merge, even if everyone waits.
- everyone effectively stopped in the exit lane has to stop for even longer
- everyone in the thru traffic lanes has to deal with this person merging all the way from the left to the right with no blinker, then coming to a stop in the right most thru lane desperately trying to force themselves into the exit lane, usually driving over the gut in the process
- the end result is the entire freeway becomes even more backed up because this one person couldn't think more than 1 exit ahead, or worse, they convinced themselves that risking a brutal death like this is worth the 20 seconds it saved them
For merging (on ramps), waiting to the last moment is collectively efficient. For diverging traffic (exits) it isn't, especially if there's a backup.
It made driving so much better. The behavior of every car was basically predictable. I've never seen anyone pay much attention to their lane here.
Examples where it's considered acceptable to undertake:
- In heavier or queuing traffic inside lanes might move faster than outside lanes: this is OK, and it's considered better and safer to stay in lane than keep changing lanes to overtake.
- Motorcycles filtering through traffic, which generally occurs between the middle and outside lane on motorways. Where gaps are bigger motorcyclists will often move from the outside to middle lanes to get around slow moving vehicles in the outside lane. Again, this tends to apply when traffic is heavier.
No mercy shown! Jokes on them though I never paid the ticket and I'm never going to.
To me it shows a lack of responsibility and a huge lack of respect for the local laws. I guess not everyone feels that way though.
fwiw, I take traffic flow very seriously. I will always move over if I notice someone driving close behind me.
That's not a US only phenomenon. For example, in the UK there is a - somewhat justified - suspicion that some speed[1] cameras have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with revenue raising.
[1] Ahem, sorry, I mean "safety" not "speed", obviously.
the US has a somewhat fraught history with traffic laws. by default, police are not really allowed to stop you for no reason and possibly search your vehicle/person. of course, this is very inconvenient for police, so over the years many traffic offenses have been created to remedy this. if a cop wants to (legally) pull over the most upstanding citizen in the country, all they have to do is follow them on the road for a mile and they'll have a reason.
Super annoying when you're cruising along in the inside lane and then have to cross the entire width of the carriageway to overtake some clown hogging the middle lane: always feels a bit risky, especially if there are vehicles coming up from behind in the outside lane.
Same when you get someone who's pulled out to overtake a lorry but can't be bothered to pull in again even though the next vehicle they'd overtake is hundreds of metres ahead of them.
https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q891.htm
The problem with undertaking for me is that it reduces options when you need them the most.
If I'm in the middle lane doing 70mph and thinking "I can't pull into the inside because that car is only 30 foot off my bumper", that driver deciding to keep up with me at 70mph or undertaking reduces my outs in the event of a tyre blowout or other incident (e.g. a broken down car or debris in the middle lane ahead).
Where there is a dynamic hard shoulder or all-lane running, options become fewer still and the chance of a problem even higher.
And then there are the lorries on the inside of a 50mph average speed check contraflow undertaking in narrow lanes at 0.25mph more than the outside lane - that's just an accident waiting to happen.
I've also been on the outside lane overtaking somebody who was doing 65mph in the middle lane with an empty inside lane who as I moved to overtake sped up. Not undertaking: just blocking me from moving past and back into the middle lane.
I then had a boy racer come in behind me at 90mph and have to throw the anchor out whilst flashing his lights at me, and my options are basically "hope for the best". We were on a relatively tight corner for a motorway (it's that horrid section of the M60 that runs through Stockport), so deciding to accelerate to get out of this would have meant potentially losing control of the car, and the guy in the middle lane was likely going to pin me there anyway...
For me then - especially in the narrow lanes of UK motorways - it is not just about using middle and outside lanes for passing only, there is a responsibility of the drivers on the inside to allow that to happen and give those around them enough options if they need them, and not doing so should be considered just as much a case of careless driving as undertaking in most other scenarios.
The road conditions are pretty bad, and what i would like to understand are the gas taxes and other taxes which ostensibly go into road infra.
We have high gas taxes and drive more miles than most countries on the planet - where is that money going?
Some countries have high vehicle costs and their roads to me seem pristine and perfect by comparison. Specifically in fresh memory is both Singapore and Hong Kong.
The condition of their roads just seem to be flawless.
In the US we even have potholes jokingly having birthdays thrown for them, gas prices include large per gallon taxes and road conditions never appear to improve - and yearly reports of “crumbling infrastructure” and “deteriorating dangerous bridges” keep coming out.
A. You don't have high gas taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#/media/File%3AFuel_ta...
B. You build a lot of roads.
California comes in second on the list of states with the highest gas tax at 72.76 cents per gallon. Rising fuel prices and increased taxation are the primary reasons for this.
A law that was passed in 2017 allowed the state of California to increase the gas tax by a steep 12 cents, because it seemed like the most viable way to obtain the funds needed to replace several bridges and fund other important road projects.
You can expect the state’s gas tax to increase further by 7.5 cents per gallon in a few months.
We consume 10% of the US’ gas consumption i. California.
We consume more than 40 million gallons per day. There are opaque additonal taxes on each gallon sold at the nearly 9,000 gas stations and billions in taxes are also missing.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/energy-green/s...
And not all taxes are hitting our roads...
Edit: Your numbers for california amount to about $10.6B per year - and the transportation budget for california for the current fiscal year is $23.5 billion [0]. So the tax pays for less than half of the costs.
[0] = https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3948#Overview_of_Gove...
Another reason might be due to regulations. I faintly recall hearing that European highways are built on an 18" base, whereas the US only a 12" base, but I'm sure it varies...
The testing is remarkably pathetic. It's impressive this system works as well as it does. Red light runners, meh, just fine them! Pot smokers, fine and imprison them even if they weren't near a vehicle!
Honestly it's so backwards.
If you are European, although the significantly increased government control of its population will mitigate things somewhat, reality is that as Europe has now imbued itself with third world people and the customs and proclivities they carry, the road behaviors will also change even more than they clearly have, as anyone who has driven in Europe for more than 20 or so years, can attest to.
And before anyone gets triggered on some conditioned and well trained pavlovian assumptions, what I described above was equally observable when East Germans started meshing with West Germany, where after 55 years of having been exposed to relentless psychological engineering to break East Germans of their German-ness and proclivities and identity, they lacked what are commonly understood to be certain German traits and preferences for methodical order, systematic structure, and social courtesy; all of which the East Germans had far less of a connection to. That led to a lot of poor driving on roads and that has really not changed all that much either since as anyone who spends any distinct time on West German Roads and East German roads can attest to, even though the impact is being muddled by things like Polish drivers in East Germany and increasingly foreign drivers from all over the place.
Essentially it also comes down to the fact that now people with drivers licenses from various other European countries with lower driving standards, are also just allowed to drive in Germany without having to meet the far higher German driving class standards. It's yet another way in which democracy itself is being utterly disassembled, as foreign minorities are advantaged over native majorities … a total in version of democracy and even basic morality and ethics.
As for the USA, things have gotten so bad in many states that just ignoring the overcapacity of most of the road system due to unfettered and uncontrolled invasion by foreigners driving on US roads, you now have a whole ethnic driving license racket going on where an ethnic communities pass their own in spite of essentially not passing or being safe drivers.
I know that is not what people here want to hear, but reality simply is that this whole system is failing and it is failing due to deliberate bugs intentionally injected, and instead of fixing those bugs, people are just covering them up and making excuses and using ever mounting number of hacks to obscure and hide the ever more brittle system. It's quite telling that even in this kind of forum no one seems to understand that they are looking at a totally broken system and one that is failing at every increasing speed; all while willfully ignoring the inevitable cascading and total failure.
So illegal != taken seriously. In Spain it was both.
Until you get to a road with more than 2x2 lanes. You have people half asleep in the middle lane going 10 km/h under the speed limit.
I don't know if it's laziness, ego, or fear of motorways but it should be taught as a rule. I usually make it a point to overtake and then, if possible, go straight back across to the left lane. Highly doubt the hogger is paying any attention, but I feel more content feeling like I've taught something...
Still amazing still motorway driving isn't taught or tested at all (I think? Been quite a while since I got my license).
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there's a lot less hogging in 2 lane scenarios, which I why I try and find A roads now rather than motorways.
As the old saying goes "everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, everyone who drives faster than you is crazy".
Fun fact: I also take routes that minimize the number of times I have to turn into oncoming traffic and/or judge gaps where the landscape gives poor visibility of the traffic, so long as the detour is no more than a few minutes.
If you stick to the middle when the slow lane is even going faster than you, that's definitely the time to move over.
My aim is to be a good road citizen and obey by rules and convention to ensure everyone's journey is smooth, not only my own.
Comparatively, it's pretty chaotic here.
Adding new capacity to shorten journey times is a fools errand. The new capacity soon fills up as longer and more commutes become acceptable.
One thing about driving, it's the closest we get to bellum omnium contra omnes. You don't see the other vehicles as an extension of the driver, a person, but rather a singular inhuman being you want to fight. People lose their humanity on the road.
> I think this isn't taught anymore.
Driver instruction is a joke here in the USA. I got my license around 2001 in NYC. The test was 20 brain dead questions such as "what sign is this: [school crossing]" and you look up and on the wall is a huge PSA poster of the school crossing sign with the slogan "Schools open. Drive carefully." So they practically gave the answers away. Driving school is optional and all they do is show you an hour long video that nobody watched which the proctor turned off after 15 min. Then you drive around the neighborhood for a half an hour with two others and an instructor a few days. No rules of the road, no etiquette, no nothing. The tests should be much harder, rules and etiquette drilled. The bar must be raised.
I'll give the CDL (commercial Drivers License) more credit. It's the equivalent to what I think is an HGV license in Europe. Though I never got the license I took the test for class A with as many endorsements as I could(tank, hazmat, and doubles/triples). Quite challenging and you have to know how some of the systems on the truck work such as air brakes. I failed it the first go as I thought I knew better but some old terminology tripped me up.
This is a pretty good wrap up of what the Strong Towns thing is about.
That was interesting data set, and here by "cost" I guess "price" is meant.
How much margin/profits is included in it?
That's where it starts getting dubious. Technically, all roads and transit are built at a great loss on paper. However, connecting locations connects people and enables economic activity, so there is definitely a 'profit' per se but it would be difficult to quantify precisely.