If they're properly laid down, graded and maintained, unpaved/gravel roads can be way more pleasant to drive on than badly-maintained pavement, at far less cost. But a lot of knowledge about how to do that has been lost, and when states and counties are going broke, gravel is really just another term for "unmaintained".

Funny, I live in rural northern Virginia where we have lots of gravel roads, and the right (so-called property rights/pro development types) had always called for paving the roads and attacked the elitist liberals who want to keep the gravel. Even something as simple as road surfaces was made into a political issue with these people. Wonder what they think of this issue now that there is zero new development going on?

No, no...more bailouts! Just joking. Projects like these, but on a grander scale, is where that money should have went. Money in pockets, into banks, and actual, you know, CREATE something, and not just finance schemes.

Notice that these are Repubican't led states. Except perhaps PA.

In any case, I've heard the GOP answer to fight climate change amounts to "Bring back the horse and buggy." Let's return to our American roots. The founding fathers rode horses and so should we!

"Let's return to our American roots. The founding fathers..."

I'm not sure you can convince the NRA or the MI-complex to return to muzzle-loading guns...

This is perhaps my favorite quote from the story:

"I'd rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill," said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman's Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood.

Wow, how noble of you, Bob.

Got news for you, though. Your kids won't be driving on those gravel roads. They're going to catch the first stagecoach out of Dodge just as soon as they're able. Why? Because there won't be any jobs for them in that primitive backwater you call Stutsman County, N.D.

Infrastructure is one of the main criteria for economic development. You anti-tax fanatics are deliberately depriving your state of the ability to compete for decent jobs.

Gravel roads are better than taxes, huh, Bob? Do you think a company looking for a place to locate its next production plant thinks the same way? Do you think dirt-freakin'-roads will help your state's economic development people attract new business to North Dakota?

Good luck trying to compete for the next Hyundai factory with dirt roads, Bob. Good luck trying to attract Wal-Mart's next regional distribution warehouse.

I think this proves that the average American voter has all the sense of an eight-year-old. Once again, The Simpsons got there first:

Man: How many of you kids would like Itchy & Scratchy to deal with real-life problems, like the ones you face every day?

Kids: [clamoring] Oh, yeah! I would! Great idea! Yeah, that's it!

Man: And who would like to see them do just the opposite -- getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers?

Kids: [clamoring] Me! Yeah! Oh, cool! Yeah, that's what I want!

Man: So, you want a realistic, down-to-earth show... that's completely off-the-wall and swarming with magic robots?

Kids: [all agreeing, quieter this time] That's right. Oh yeah, good.

Milhouse: And also, you should win things by watching.

It's funny how people don't put together the concept that cutting the revenue of the state below what's needed to maintain a certain standard of living results in lower standard of living...

The good news, maybe this will drive people back into cities and we can reverse the environment killing persersity of urban sprawl. Don't pave these roads. Invest in urban infrastructure, make the city a more attractive place to live.

Dirt roads can actually be more effective and easier to maintain in the northern parts of the country, where freezing and thawing leads to the constant breakdown of paved roads. I agree with Paul above.

I second UncommonSense. The reason why my country, Germany, rose from the ashes of WW2 into Wirtschaftswunder in less than a decade was: the infrastructure still existed. And it was maintained, even in times where Germany was basically bankrupt.

Streets pay for themselves - as long as the people living besides the streets are intelligent enough to produce anything they can sell.

Maybe that's the problem in some of these areas...

Also, I would like to see a return to good old American leeching. That's what should replace health care reform.

I liked this piece by Slacktivist:

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2010/07/1-water.html

Short version:

1. For a long time American cities have been deferring maintenance on their water infrastructure.
2. Deferring maintenance leads to a need to pay for emergency fixes later when the unmaintained thing breaks, and this is more expensive than the original maintenance would have been.
3. So deferring maintenance is a lot like borrowing-- it's a way to get some money now, but at the cost of more money later. But for some reason "deficit hawks" don't care about *this* kind of borrowing against the future, because it's not on the balance sheets.
4. The Recovery Act put aside $6 billion for water infrastructure, and it both created jobs and paid off some of our invisible deferred-maintenance debt
5. We still have $257 billion in deferred maintenance on water infrastructure out there
6. Unemployment is still over 9%.

Due to the "all taxes any time bad" message - and lack of concerted, coordinated pushback messaging from Democrats, unfortunately all too many people don't make the connection that taxes pay for roads, utilities, police, firefighters, etc.

This is probably due to a host of factors, not the least of which is dilution or complete lack of basic civics and social studies (oh! that word is now bad too!) courses in elementary and high school. People are now trained to assume that any and all taxes are bad, yet the other side of their mouths complain about bad roads, cops being let go, general infrastructure crumbling, etc.

Roads are socialistic...

The county roads in my part of Iowa are gravel and taxes are low. It's a terrible waste of good motorcycle riding roads and your car is always filthy. Pitted paint job. It does cut down on the speeding.

"Folks want more public services while opposing efforts to pay for them. Imagine that."

This truth highlights why America is so screwed up. People need to stop blaming the politicians and start blaming the selfish and deliberately ignorant voters who put them there.

Barbarians at the broken gate...

Any Toynbees or Durants out there?
Haven't decaying roads been an indicator of decaying empires?

Seems I remember that was so about Rome...
Once their roads went...
So did they.

Dirt roads can actually be more effective and easier to maintain in the northern parts of the country, where freezing and thawing leads to the constant breakdown of paved roads.

Paved roads seem to hold up ok if they're built right in the first place, and not compromised by utility cuts. There's also lots to be said for gravel (less runoff, an issue in my town), but I haven't figured out how they're supposed to be better during mud season.

(My cousin once got a bulldozer stuck, during mud season in VT.)

The water runoff issue is what has environmentalists finding a silver lining.

There's a happy medium. Cul-de-sacs and parking lots should be gravel. Arterials and highways can be paved. The little dead end streets are a huge portion of pavement that really shouldn't be driven at high speed anyway.

Asphalt is the junk left after extracting useful products out of petroleum. Long term, it's a questionable practice to pave all roads anyway.

Rome and its roads.

In California ground up old tires are being receycled into road surfacing; durable, quiet and environmentally friendly. Time to move on to better initial product.

All this talk about taxes, what happened, we used to be able to pay for roads, schools, etc. without raising taxes every year.

re: Barbarians at the broken gate

One difference is the Romans still knew how to build a road up until the Vandals and Visigoths poured in. Most states, especially Red ones, lost that knowledge when asphalt and quick patches came into use, due to oil company bribes.

I lived on a road with a two lane WPA base. When a Republican Oklahoma county commissioner* widened it to 4 lanes, the outer two were rebuilt three times until they put in a base half as good as the WPA.

* See Doonesbury archives for the reference.

Seven years on a condo board made me very skeptical that democracy can survive human stupidity. There was absolutely no way to convince people that we couldn't improve services and cut fees at the same time. As for preventative maintenance, you would run into a psychological wall more solid than any in the actual buildings. "We need to reshingle the roofs this year, it can't wait." "Why? My attic isn't leaking." "Well, it's a lot less expensive to reshingle the roofs before they leak than to do it afterwards and also to repair the water damage." "Do you see any water damage?" You could bat that one back and forth all night and they'd never get it.

To wax nostalgic, in the late 1980s, I would drive from the Bay Area to Salt Lake City on I-80. I remember there were billboards advertising Winnemucca, Nevada, as "The City of Paved Streets". Being an urban dweller, I found that hilarious -- apparently, it is now prophetic !

Remember some areas of the country reached their peak of population a century ago, and have been declining ever since. That says to me there may be cases where there's no longer the need for good roads, because there's no one living on them.

Many of The roads, including, parts of the freeway, in Soutthern Arizona are rapidly declining. There are certain parts of I-10 where you must drive in the left lane because the right is like a pitted washboard and hitting them at 80 mph is not good for your car.

The current Gov of Az seems only to care about the mythical hordes of drug dealing, job stealing, trash dropping undocumented workers ruining our state... When in fact it is she who fixes the roads.

Note also Caesar's men could build ten miles of good Roman road in one day, which when you are stripping the soil to bedrock, putting many layers of concrete on that, then topping it with hexagonal pavers and sand required supervisory and logistical skills difficult to find today,

Amazing, isn't it, how so-called conservatives see the strength of our nation only in wasting trillions on a monstrous military machine and putting our heavy bootprint on the rest of the world. A great economy supported by a solid infrastructure and contented, prosperous workers never seems to be part of their picture of a strong America. Why? Because the latter wouldn't make them obscenely wealthy fast enough.

Amazing, isn't it, how so-called conservatives see the strength of our nation only in wasting trillions on a monstrous military machine and putting our heavy bootprint on the rest of the world. A great economy supported by a solid infrastructure and contented, prosperous workers never seems to be part of their picture of a strong America. Why? Because the latter wouldn't make them obscenely wealthy fast enough.

I lived in rural OK for a summer with a gravel road in front of my place. I asked my landlord if they were planning to pave it, but he said, "You'll learn to like it," and he was right. If they had paved it, there would have been a ton of traffic that instead went by another route. It was beautiful just having maybe three cars a day, all local people, go by.

And when I lived in WI, the way they paved a road was to lay the gravel and then leave it there for a year so that traffic packed it down and it got firm. Then they came by and poured asphalt.