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-   -   City with the worst road infrastructure (https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=240651)

Danie Oct 16, 2019 10:55 AM

City with the worst road infrastructure
 
What cities have the worst road infrastructure ? (city can be anywhere in the world .)

montréaliste Oct 16, 2019 11:59 AM

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.

Crawford Oct 16, 2019 12:33 PM

Has to be somewhere like Kinshasa. Or you mean first world cities only?

Centropolis Oct 16, 2019 12:48 PM

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.

Darkoshvilli Oct 16, 2019 1:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by montréaliste (Post 8718475)
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.

This.

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

Centropolis Oct 16, 2019 1:25 PM

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

Centropolis Oct 16, 2019 1:27 PM

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.

ATXboom Oct 16, 2019 1:41 PM

For under developed infrastructure both Vancouver and Austin come to mind...

pj3000 Oct 16, 2019 1:48 PM

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.

Steely Dan Oct 16, 2019 1:53 PM

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.

iheartthed Oct 16, 2019 2:12 PM

Detroit

If limited to the developed world.

LA21st Oct 16, 2019 2:25 PM

Chicago was bad when I lived there. But it made sense cause of weather.
Not sure where it ranks though.

Centropolis Oct 16, 2019 2:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LA21st (Post 8718567)
Chicago was bad when I lived there. But it made sense cause of weather.
Not sure where it ranks though.

as steely said with relation to the freeze-thaw cycle, any place that crosses the freeze-thaw barrier a lot will struggle with maintenance. that being said, i think midwestern cities have a unique problem in both dealing with that and the relative lack of resources compared to the northeast.

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.

Chisouthside Oct 16, 2019 2:56 PM

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

iheartthed Oct 16, 2019 3:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Centropolis (Post 8718587)
as steely said with relation to the freeze-thaw cycle, any place that crosses the freeze-thaw barrier a lot will struggle with maintenance. that being said, i think midwestern cities have a unique problem in both dealing with that and the relative lack of resources compared to the northeast.

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.

I don't recall Chicago's roads being exceptionally bad, but I don't usually spend much time in cars when I'm in Chicago.

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.

pj3000 Oct 16, 2019 3:23 PM

New Orleans streets were pretty bad last time I experienced them. Lots of buckling of the pavements laid over marshy, subsiding land

ocman Oct 16, 2019 3:28 PM

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.

pacarlson Oct 16, 2019 4:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pj3000 (Post 8718628)
New Orleans streets were pretty bad last time I experienced them. Lots of buckling of the pavements laid over marshy, subsiding land

My daughter lives in New Orleans, and I am always amazed at the number of pot holes and moguls on the residential streets that I have to avoid whenever I go visit her.

VivaLFuego Oct 16, 2019 4:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steely Dan (Post 8718542)
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.

Older cities that simply laid down some asphalt over old brick and cobblestone streets (this includes Chicago) have particularly short service lives, especially when those old brick streets were built cheaply and without proper paver base preparation, and on top of very old collapsing water/sewer lines.

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.

LouisVanDerWright Oct 16, 2019 5:09 PM

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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