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How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

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Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#101

Post by bbradley406 »

justinator wrote: post #73
mumblemumble wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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 ro…

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: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#102

Post by mumblemumble »

justinator wrote: post #73
mumblemumble wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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 ro…

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.

Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#103

Post by SubuSS »

phkahler wrote: post #80
geddy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#104

Post by magicnubs »

kazinator wrote: post #23
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a blog post about the unsustainability of suburbs — https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2017/03/20/the-fiscal-unsust... 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.

Or maybe how much road costs in the USA is a bit of a strawman version of how much road costs. Come on, some remote villages in the third world have paved roads to them.

You'd be surprised how many unpaved roads there are. Even in Europe

https://i.redd.it/4xau5auzqg741.png

Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#105

Post by njarboe »

tomrod wrote: post #26
dougweltman wrote: post #7

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 port…

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. [0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=Disaster+and+d...

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.

Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#106

Post by pedantsamaritan »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #91
dougweltman wrote: post #7

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 port…

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 mo…

For the curious, "Road damage ... is estimated to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight". [0] A chart shows it nicely: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating#Imp...

Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#107

Post by Dylan16807 »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #96
AcerbicZero wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

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.

You'll also see trucks use more axles with wider, softer tires. It's easy to get more than an order of magnitude in damage reduction.

Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#108

Post by njarboe »

ip26 wrote: post #53
burfog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$3000 per year per house In other words completely out of reach of the kind of town we're talking about?

$300 per year per house, I believe.

Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#109

Post by davidw »

SubuSS wrote: post #103
phkahler wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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).

It really doesn't, on a per acre basis.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/1/the-surprising-...

Re: How Much Does a Mile of Road Cost?

#110

Post by joe_the_user »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #91
dougweltman wrote: post #7

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 port…

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 mo…

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.

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