City with the worst road infrastructure
 

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

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?

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Moguls... that's a good description for them. Really love driving down a smooth stretch of street and then all of a sudden... whoa!... one side of the car goes up 3 feet higher as you run over a mogul caused by some massive live oak root.

^^^^^^^^ LouisVanDerWright,

Yes, the roadbed quality is the prime culprit, the freeze and thaw will then do its job, hand in hand with the traffic conditions. The heavier the traffic, the more damage occurs.

I made a little trip to Vermont a coupla weeks ago, and the roads are topnotch. We hit the highway between South Burlington and Montpelier and noticed a sign on the merging lane that said; Bump! Needless to say, there was no bump to be felt. We had a good laugh about that. I often wonder what Vermonters think when they drive on our highways and streets.

I though Houston was bad but New York is terrible. You need a Humvee just to get around and not bottom out on potholes and heaved up streets

People in Portland like to complain about the quality of the roads, which is laughable coming from Michigan - easily the worst state in the nation for road conditions. But Michigan is super overbuilt in roadway capacity and Portland is way, way under built. Saginaw/Tri-Cities, Michigan have more highway capacity than Portland.

Toronto’s roads are generally terrible, but the suburban and especially provincial roads are pristine. The 400 series highways are as smooth as a baby’s bottom.. just don’t take an exit, especially in the old city.

I find it’s generally getting better over time though. I think as reconstruction projects slowly occur for the full roadbed, roads are brought up to standard and last a lot longer. Older parts of the city often still have the original cobblestone and streetcar tracks under it though, which causes all kinds of problems.

Then you have streets like Adelaide with Abandoned streetcar tracks that haven’t been used in 60 years yet for some reason haven’t even been covered up.. you result with entire stretches of track heaving up and creating “mega bumps” when they end.. very hazardous, especially for cyclists.. they are large enough to throw you off your bike if you aren’t careful.

Montreal comparatively is in another world though. There it’s the roads, sidewalks, freeways, suburban roads, everything. Gravel parking lots even in commercial lots are common, the roads are *always* torn up, under construction, or falling apart, the signal system setups make little sense and aren’t particularly clear (and often don’t even have pedestrian walk signals), the freeways are bumpy, substandard, and over congested, etc. I don’t know if it’s a climate or cultural thing, but Ottawa has a similar climate and seems to do at least a bit better..

Vancouver is horrid due to having very few freeways, the roads are very poorly connected, and grotesquly over capacity. BC only has one freeway with more than the standard 4 lanes and itès only 30 km long.

Nope.

https://www.teletracnavman.com/telet...tes-1178px.jpg

https://www.teletracnavman.com/infog...-united-states

I was surprised to see Austin and Houston not faring as bad as I thought for road conditions. I guess it's all relative. I see road maintenance in Austin as poor, and maintenance in Houston as a losing battle due to intense rainfall and flooding that the city is well known for.

The best I've experienced is Phoenix, where rainfall is sparse, and freeze-thaw cycles not an issue.

Phoenix has the opposite problem of Chicago, but the asphalt tends to be rubberized, which helps when it expands during periods of extreme heat.

Problem is, road maintenance is shit compared to what it used to be, or, now that some of the roads and freeways have aged and maintenance hasn't kept up, I'd argue the driving experience isn't as pleasant as it was 10 to 15 years ago.

I'm gonna go with Mogadishu

Isn't it kind of the point that everyone views their road conditions as shitty? It's kind of comforting in a weird way...

So, close to the most terrible roads then. The Bay Area does have terrible roads, but I don't think they're worse than Detroit's. The Bay Area also has alternative modes of transit, which Detroit does not.

That's so weird, I always thought the roads in the Bay were in generally good condition, at least compared to Chicago. I could see if these ranking were based off polls as people in the Bay tend to overreact to the most minimal adverse conditions.

The worst road conditions I've experienced in North America have been in New Orleans. That goes for sidewalks as well!

Why would you re-quote the entire graphic? lol

Thinking is nice I guess but you glossed over LA also being worse and Detroit being on par with Milwaukee. I'm not gonna play some transit goal post game, just pointing out you were obviously wrong, you can admit it. :)

Florida in general has good roads. My biggest gripe is lighting outside of Miami & the major urban areas.

I don't know if you realize it or not, but your own graphic just validated the point I was making. But if you think you scored a pointed, that's okay. Congrats.

As has been stated in this thread, northern roads tend to be generally poorer condition due to inclement winter weather... but... what's Oklahoma's excuse, I wonder?

Totally anecdotal, but the worst roads I've ever driven on were in Canton, OH. Seemingly every other block had massive potholes that could seriously damage your car.

The worst roads I've ever observed (but didn't drive on) were in New Orleans. In fact, the road quality was so bad there, it made using their bike share system extremely unpleasant. Sidewalks there were also pretty terrible. I'd hate to be a disabled person in NOLA!

Oklahoma has bad roads? Maybe it's their anti Government spending stance = Socialism?

You literally claimed it was THE worst in the developed world. An absolute statement that holds significant weight...

data clearly shows massive population centers with significantly worse roads just in the united states alone

....

You are ridiculous. Detroit's roads suck, that is a statement of fact not opinion, and you verified it. The governor's literal campaign slogan was "fix the damn roads."

https://willsrandomweirdness.files.w...4/05/sntad.png

credit: https://willsrandomweirdness.wordpre...omment-page-1/

northern roads also are maintained more often. As soon as the snow and ice thaws, work crews are all over (or supposed to be) fixing potholes

I've never spent extensive time there... I'm just basing that statement off the chart that was posted.

Dude you are probably the only person on Earth who is defending their city streets when according to your own graphic they suck.


New Orleans streets are horrible.

No.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/stat...ditures-capita

Are you okay? I never said they didn't suck. For the record; they suck! :P This whole country has crappy roads big surprise. I provided hard data and you changed goal posts, threw a toddler-esque tantrum and now put words into my mouth to deflect. :haha: You could have just not responded... way easier than your tap dancing.

Speaking of bad STL drivers, what the hell are STL motorists smoking down there??? I was in an accident two weekends ago on Forest Park and Kingshighway and for what's supposed to be considered a major American city, nowadays you'd think that there would at least be a red light camera installed by now at that intersection!!!

I'm not even sure if that intersection is the most dangerous in the city or what, but Jesus, STL sure have some method-out drivers from my experience!!!

And here is the answer folks. Hopefully they raise gas taxes....makes you wonder how they ranked each location. Hopefully...

California did raise gas taxes and fees and has the highest taxes, unfortunately that money goes into peoples' pockets and not towards road infrastructure.

They suck more than just about every other place in the country.