City with the worst road infrastructure
What cities have the worst road infrastructure ? (city can be anywhere in the world .)
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Depends. If you are talking about surface conditions, Montreal is pretty bad as far as bumps and potholes go.
Insanely bad in fact, in spite of the ton of roadwork happening all over. You will always hit a stretch of country road bumpiness on your daily ride. It's fucked up. |
Has to be somewhere like Kinshasa. Or you mean first world cities only?
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In the U.S., Atlanta and Nashville have a glaring lack of proper high capacity urban boulevards. Parts of the St. Louis region (the city proper IS is doing so much better) and Chicago are as bad as i've seen in the U.S. from a maint. standpoint of streets. Chicago may be doing better now, its been a few seasons since i've been. California road infrastructure may be the smoothest I've seen in the U.S. and is making a massive push to rebuild infrastructure, so good for them.
Vancouver traffic and (lack) of infrastructure is absolutely absurd (based on my limited experience) and way outstrips any level of "good" traffic. I don't understand how emergency, etc vehicles operate properly. |
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First world city with third world roads. https://assets.vice.com/content-imag...8a8fbd3728.jpg https://postmediamontrealgazette2.fi...inkhole-t.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/MJLpwcc.jpg https://i.cbc.ca/1.1722556.138146973...le-plessis.jpg |
re: montreal, the same thing became a bit of a meme in st. louis for it's problem with swallowing vehicles the same way...
https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.town...ize=1200%2C800 stltoday.com |
https://www.10tv.com/sites/default/f...0on%20roof.JPG 10tv.com
same with bad st. louis drivers ending up on a roof(?) after flying off the freeway i think. |
For under developed infrastructure both Vancouver and Austin come to mind...
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Pittsburgh streets are pretty terrible. The topography (hills and valleys), climate (frequent freeze/thaw throughout winter), materials (many streets are still cobblestone or brick on the surface, and still very often still underneath paved concrete or asphalt streets), and decades-long deferred maintenance/neglect.
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any city with savage amounts of freeze/thaw cycle in the winter (like chicago) will have worse street surface conditions than any city that doesn't (like phoenix).
that shit utterly destroys paving of all types. and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it other than spending trillions to literally repave every linear mile of road surface every other year. |
Detroit
If limited to the developed world. |
Chicago was bad when I lived there. But it made sense cause of weather.
Not sure where it ranks though. |
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many southern cities, or at least urban cores also tend to struggle with this but don't have the same brutality with regards to weather as an excuse and are just horrible with regards to infrastructure. |
Besides the weather destroy the road conditions in Chicago, i think it has the appropriate amount of road and highway infrastructure. Compared to silicon valley where walking a mile in any direction you would come across two or three freeways
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I don't think I've been to a place that has consistently worse roads than Metro Detroit. And it's not just weather, as you said, because northern Ohio's roads are relatively immaculate. |
New Orleans streets were pretty bad last time I experienced them. Lots of buckling of the pavements laid over marshy, subsiding land
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The peninsula in the bay area. You’d think with all that money and crowdedness, they’d fill the potholes, coordinate intersections, add car sensors, and stop killing people at caltrain-transversing intersections.
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Asphalt in particular needs routine maintenance and sealing or the freeze/thaw wrecks it, even with a good road base. But if you maintain it (which many suburbs do) you can still have a long service life in our climate if the road's foundation is solid and drains reasonably well. Where it doesn't - i.e. most of the city proper and the older suburbs - you're basically just boned. Well constructed concrete roadways last plenty long when built right, even in Chicagoland - there are parts of the Eisenhower where you're still riding on 1950s pavement, and the Kennedy south of the junction is already 25 years old but still in fine shape. |
Yup, the freeze thaw doesn't gurantee terrible road conditions. Much of it has to do with what is underneath and, beyond what viva said about quality of construction, how it has been disturbed over the years.
The issue Chicago has on many streets is that you have a century of layers of road surfaces on top of roads that were already raised up out of the swamp by 7-10 feet often using sand from dredging the lake. Then you have 100 years of cuts for utilities to properties being patched properly or not. Then you have heavy industrial traffic throughout the city hammering those repairs that are already sitting on who knows what kind of roadbed which is sitting on what is literally embankments made of sand. Given those challenges I would say Chicago's road infrastructure stays in remarkable shape. You can definately see the effects of freeze thaw (i.e. the roads are peppered with craters from Feb-Mar), but the majority of even that damage seems to occur predictably where the roads have been disturbed or damaged from utility cuts. Despite the challenges, most apocolyptic streetscapes are quickly addressed by the city. Unfortunately resurfacing only does so much when you have an asphalt patch next to cobblestone next to a concrete patch all overlaid by 2" of asphalt. That will only take a pounding from so many 18 wheelers before you will see the patchwork patter reemerge. |
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