RobWNY wrote:
! Maybe if the campground gets some people complaining about the dust, they'll stone the roads or pave them and the problem is solved.
Not quite that simple. Paving with asphalt costs around $50.00 a running foot, not counting prepping the base. That prep is at least another $10 per foot, meaning a park with 1 mile of interior roads is spending $300,000+ for that pavement. Then you have the issue of maintenance. With gravel, you throw down a couple shovels of road base and potholes are repaired. With an asphalt road, not so simple. Same issue if there is a need to dig up a water, sewer or electrical line, the repair of the road will likely exceed the costs of the repair of the line. In severe winter climes like we have in Montana, the roads take a beating.
We do add rock to our roads on a regular basis. It too is expensive,and is only temporary. As vehicle drive over the rock, it is forced into the ground and the fines rise to the surface. The only other treatments are either a calcium chloride spray or one of several vegetable oil treatments such as a soybean oil.
Our exerience, and we have tried them all, is they also only last about 1 season. The best treatment is environmentally unsound, which is waste motor oil. That stuff works great but is very messy and either highly frowned upon or outright illegal many places.
Unfortunately, by late in the season dust becomes more of an issue due to the fact that any treatment of a gravel roads decays over time. I wish there was a better way, but with 40,000 LB plus rigs driving over the roads every day and budgets that don't have the advantage of taxpayer input, parks with existing gravel roads are likely to stay that way.
