Interstate highway conditions

Thanks for the discussion everyone.

You all did pretty well to avoid the politics, but there's way to avoid the political stuff in a topic like this.

ajriding wrote:
We build beautiful roads and bridges in other countries, just not our own.
In our 50 States road contracts go out to the lowest bidder who has to use the cheapest asphalt, the quickest methods and the lowest paid workers to get the contract. Roads fall apart as soon as they are built.
In Europe they use high-grade asphalt with rubber bits to keep the pavement from cracking and falling apart, they do not hire the cheapest bidder. Their roads look like Main Street Disneyland.
Ours are terrible. Our pavement ends at the white line, pavement needs to extend wider than the road as water damage occurs because there lacks margins. Many many problems

You're wrong about a number of things.If the work you are doing is federally funded, you must pay prevailing wage and benefits.The asphalt is tested for temperature when it goes in. The feds will sometimes audit your company to make sure those wages and benefits make sure they meet federal standards.Most of the work done on interstate is done by union shops and their work is pretty high quality.And they do not have to use the lowest bidder if that contractor had issues in the past.Europe's roads are better.But remember, a lot of people take the train. Their train system blows our away.And, their cars are mostly smaller and lighter. I fault the people who design our roads. They should look at how the Romans built roads,some of which are still in use.

Well I can report on I20 in Louisiana, starts off on the west, very nicely with asphalt pavement, I'd give it a 8/10. Get to Slidell and if concrete lasts 20 years I'd estimate the Slidell concrete as nearing social security age, rated a zero. The rest followed suit, very bad patches interspersed with fairly good blacktop. On average a 3/10. Happily we are stopped 35 miles from Vicksburg.

The Louisiana Road Dept seems to be incapable of putting blacktop on top of the awful concrete surface for the whole 150 miles or so. Bridges are awful too, mostly concrete.

The eastern 70 miles or so of Texas I20 were all good in contrast.

wing_zealot wrote:

Grit dog wrote:

wing_zealot wrote:
So the question is, how much are you willing to pay to fix them? Gas tax revenue keeps getting less and less, You willing to pay a tax per mile you drive. Or maybe we should just keep on putting it on the credit card and hand the bill to our kids and grandkids like the infrastructure plan under consideration now proposes.

This might be part of the issue, but the larger issue is the revenue that should be for infrastructure maint and improvement being re-directed to "other" things.

Having been in supervision and management of Heavy civil, heavy highway general contracting since I got out of college, and having performed work in about 10 different states, from my standpoint, alot of the country is in a lose lose scenario. Many states are so far behind now, that even in the best of times, they cant even keep up, much less get ahead.

The appropriation of funds is astounding, how much of the "transportation" budget gets used for other things.
We have a large project going on in Seattle currently. $450M project reconstructing the last part of the SR520 approach onto the Lake Washington floating bridge. Of that total contract value (design and construct), almost $200M of it is being spent to effectively improve the Montlake neighborhood and provide a sprawling park/nature experience for the peds and pedal pushers, by way of building yet another lid over the freeway that is about 1000% larger than it needs to be to simply convey vehicles and all other multimodal traffic over the freeway.

Talk about corruption....essentially the City of Seattle gets a free, massive, capital improvement project for it's residents and the transportation department and FHWA is footing the bill!

With all due respect, this must not be a real problem because the same people making these decisions keep getting re-elected; for 20, 30 even 40 years.

^A perfect demonstration of politicians selecting priorities for their own gain. He/she might say "Can't see how the underground stuff is crumbling, and I want to get re-elected. Lets build a great big beautiful park/swimming pool/whatever that everyone can see and give me brownie points to use to get re-elected."

time2roll wrote:
the pitch after WW2 was to have a national highway system to move troops and equipment for if we would have to defend our own borders. For this primary function the interstate system is far better now than ever.

How's that working at the southern border right now?

rk911 wrote:

jdc1 wrote:
The federal infrastructure plan from 2017 to 2021 never materialized. Things will get better soon.

LOL

Yup. Seems to me that $174 billion on electric vehicles and $6 billion on a library won't help the roads much. There is $115 billion earmarked for roads, bridges, etc. but somehow I'm sure it will never make it there.

time2roll wrote:
the pitch after WW2 was to have a national highway system to move troops and equipment for if we would have to defend our own borders. For this primary function the interstate system is far better now than ever. JMHO

And for which the recovery from the Great Depression extended and resulted into economic boom.

^ I don't get into politics, virtually at all, but it certainly appears, in our state (WA) at least, the biggest voice, which happens to be in and around Seattle, also gets the most consideration.
Which outwardly appears like that should be the case.

But what happens is my Montlake example above. The highest population density in the state gets a new park. The space for that park is now an elevated structure over a freeway because there's no room for the park elsewhere. And why? So the city dwellers, who apparently like being packed in like sardines and walking their shitzerdoodle dogs with their Rona masks on, while stepping over homeless people passed out on the sidewalk, now want a "nature" experience to make them feel like their not in the middle of the cesspool that is called Seattle and that their shitzerdoodle has some grass or mulch to take a c rap on rather than next to the homeless guy where they have to make a conscious decision to not only bag their dog's poop, but the homeless guy's dinner from 2 days ago that the dog just stopped and sniffed which prompted the dog's bowel movement!

My cynicism is largely fueled by a meeting I just got out of, where a couple dozen user groups of that major city were assured through the last 10 years of planning that they would receive something we are not under contract to provide and the public sector "owner" whom we are contracted with is burying their head in the sand and deflecting to us, over a similar, but smaller scale issue to the above one.

Blazing Zippers wrote:
After traveling from North Idaho to Florida towing our trailer---I have to say the Interstate highway system is horrible! Dwight Eisenhower would be ashamed of the way our states and federal governments have allowed the roads to deteriorate.

the pitch after WW2 was to have a national highway system to move troops and equipment for if we would have to defend our own borders. For this primary function the interstate system is far better now than ever. JMHO

Grit dog wrote:

wing_zealot wrote:
So the question is, how much are you willing to pay to fix them? Gas tax revenue keeps getting less and less, You willing to pay a tax per mile you drive. Or maybe we should just keep on putting it on the credit card and hand the bill to our kids and grandkids like the infrastructure plan under consideration now proposes.

This might be part of the issue, but the larger issue is the revenue that should be for infrastructure maint and improvement being re-directed to "other" things.

Having been in supervision and management of Heavy civil, heavy highway general contracting since I got out of college, and having performed work in about 10 different states, from my standpoint, alot of the country is in a lose lose scenario. Many states are so far behind now, that even in the best of times, they cant even keep up, much less get ahead.

The appropriation of funds is astounding, how much of the "transportation" budget gets used for other things.
We have a large project going on in Seattle currently. $450M project reconstructing the last part of the SR520 approach onto the Lake Washington floating bridge. Of that total contract value (design and construct), almost $200M of it is being spent to effectively improve the Montlake neighborhood and provide a sprawling park/nature experience for the peds and pedal pushers, by way of building yet another lid over the freeway that is about 1000% larger than it needs to be to simply convey vehicles and all other multimodal traffic over the freeway.

Talk about corruption....essentially the City of Seattle gets a free, massive, capital improvement project for it's residents and the transportation department and FHWA is footing the bill!

With all due respect, this must not be a real problem because the same people making these decisions keep getting re-elected; for 20, 30 even 40 years.

Keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result and see how that works out. The infrastructure plan in the works now being a prime example.