California I-5
We just drove from Lodi to Kettleman City, Southbound. The right lane is horrible! We're going to try Hwy 99 back North to save the RV. Sadly, the state has let a major highway fall into disrepair.
Forum Discussion
profdant139 wrote:
How is it that other states with heavy truck traffic are able to design roads that stand up to abuse? I assume that some truckers are over-weight, despite the scales. That is foreseeable. And I assume that it is possible to pave a road to withstand that extra pounding. But in all my travels throughout the West, there is nothing like the Calif highway system, where the right lane is just trashed.
This is not a political issue -- it has to be an engineering issue, at least in part.
The cost of this mess is not only in terms of ruined tires and suspensions. It has to result in more accidents per mile. A blowout on a big rig or an RV is dangerous to everyone.
For the most part, I agree with profundant139, however, politics do play a huge part and so does design and the change in trucking over the last 50 years.
I believe that the Interstate Highway System standards for construction were very loose, this was in part due to what the COE learned in AK. Try applying common construction standards to a road being built in permafrost. They don't apply and for the most part the geology throughout the country precluded setting absolute standards for the entire system.
California standards were based on lighter trucks carrying lighter loads and fewer truck miles per lane. Allowable weights have risen but to keep cost down, the studies conducted by several think tanks never saw the light of CalTrans engineering offices and CA highways have more truck miles per lane than any other state..
Originally I felt that the feds created the construction standards as they were going to pay for the system but in fact, the states paid over 90 percent of the construction costs. In CA the standards have not really been reassessed and upgraded and for a LONG time there was no maintenance budget and so much damage occurred during those years that it will take decades before we catch up with the maintenance needed.
Yes there is a lot more money being spent on maintenance and reconstruction right now, could that reflect that this is an election year?
