Change My Mind
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And some of those same Roads and Bridges are still in use today.
Also worth pointing out. Many of the issues with a Modern Roads stem from using cheap materials prone to breaking down. Partly to save money and partly because it ensures a steady flow of business to fix the same roads. Then you add in the complexities of the Unions and Bureaucracy. Not to mention graft and corruption endemic in some Governments. Both Local, State, and Federal.
And you end up with the current state of Modern infrastructure.
I recall reading an article- maybe 25 years ago - in Readers Digest of all places that talked about this. It compared the,quality of roads in Scandinavian countries to the US. (Scandinavian countries were looked at because of the harshness of their winter seasons.) They drew the same conclusion - steady flow of work and graft.
They have a deep frost,so the road base is several feet thick. They don't do that in the south.
Came here to say something to this effect. planned obsolescence is in every product in today's world. Just imagine what we could accomplish if we weren't spend every year fixing the shit we built 2 years ago...
Also, to be fair, most of the damage in modern highways is from trailer trucks and other heavy vehicles - those old roads would be destroyed in quick order if they had the same weighted vehicles traveling on then
and at the same speeds!
It is the same in all industries. No money in the cure... Doesn't matter if it is a road cured of defects or a human cured of disease.
I heard it simply...
If you ever poke around google earth, some of the roads the Soviets built in remote Siberia look like they are pristine condition today even as they town is in a near-collapsed state.
The reason Western roads suck isn't that they are built badly, or with terrible materials. They are made too thin. Thin layers means lower bids, means cheaper roads, which ensures constant rebuilding.
Ad an engineer, dont blame us. We design things to work properly. Blame the cheap ass contractors the govt pays to half ass the work and ingredients themselves. It's like blaming Dyson engineers because you bought a shitty knockoff Dyson vacuum from china on wish.com Oh, and the shady contractors do subpar work so that they can get the contract to redo the road in 3 years because the company owner got a no bid contract from their brother who works for the state. Shit like that is why roads suck. But roman roads simply used rock, and they did wear down pretty bad, you can see old roman roads under restaurants and the hump in the center is like 2 feet tall
I work in infrastructure and we are a low bid state. The quality of work is shit.
Also notably Roman roads were built by the roman government itsself, using the Roman Army. There were no contractors, bids, or private anything involved. It was 100% a government project. Private involvement was supplying the materials.
The US actually used to do a lot of this. Like until the modern Era the military manufactured all its own arms. Curiously enough until the Korean War the US also didn't do pointless proxy wars without clear military objectives. The way it worked is the government would commission private companies to design the equipment, but would run its own factories to build it itself. Thus the equipment was made to spec, and it was designed to a performance target instead of at lowest cost to a profit margin. WW2 was the first time they actually started to hire private companies to do manufacturing of arms and armor because of the extreme demand. And it would seem those companies really realized getting $billions from government was...kind of of nice.
IMO the government should be doing its own projects itsself. The whole contractor system is too ripe for abuse and corruption.
The sole purpose of Roman roads was to permit soldiers to march quickly from one part of the empire to another. Yes, civilian pedestrians, as well as human and animal pack trains used them as well, but they were too narrow for large wagons, and in some places were too steep for anything but foot traffic. However, the stone was hard on legs and feet when dry, and very slippery when wet, which is why both soldiers and civilians alike preferred to walk on the sides of the roads whenever possible.
And it also kept the legions fit and occupied when they were not fighting, and built support from the locals who could also use the roads for their daily agricultural hauling and other needs. Noone gonna get fat and lazy from swinging a pick in a quarry for hours every day to make all the gravel.
And happy provinces pay their taxes, treat the tribunes well, and dont host rebels.
Excellent point, although I'm not sure about how "happy" those provinces were, haha.
Pax Romana.
At least at first they got to go from literally living in mud huts (look up wattle and daub) to having actual state of the art infrastructure and an economic link to a massive empire. Most were VERY happy for the sudden, massive increase in their standards of living.
It was much later when everybody was used to the improvements, knew how to build it for themselves, and the Empire became predatory with its taxes as it increasingly leaned on the provinces to fund its own corruption that the resentment started to build.
Fair point, unrest will be present in the newly conquered areas.. but law and order, roads, aqueducts etc may well be looked on enviously by those who have none. Until things started going to shit with the empire anyways. As the saying goes, what have the romans ever done for us!
Worth watching by the way, is 'The Truth About The Fall Of Rome'.. plenty of parallels to what we are seeing today all over the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGYVWrjRMXU
Made by a guy who got booted from youtube (the above one is the video re-housed on a different channel), and whose main channel is now on bitchute at https://www.bitchute.com/channel/freedomainradio/
It’s not the engineers, it’s the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats that siphon money from properly designing and maintaining infrastructure into their pockets.
Change my mind.
Plus, dudes in the first picture ARE engineers.
Civil Engineers, not real ones like Mechanical/electrical/petroleum engineers.
You actually forgot the ones that can do any and all of them: chemical engineers.
Snow plows arrived.
modern day engineers are designing things to specification.. they don't have the liberty of designing something that will stand the test of time unfortunately.
Dont blame the engineers for the stuff the fuckheads in charge plan out
...and have provided the budgetary framework the engineer has to stay within.
In my small town I think they tear up the roads for make-work projects. They'll lay down blacktop and a year later, they have to replace sewer or water lines, rip up the middle of the street and then throw gravel in the spot for a month or two then throw more blacktop. Then in a couple of years they scrape the top layer off and lay down more blacktop. Drives us crazy. Constant tear up, lay down etc...
In my town, they fix one spot road next to the town hall 2 times in 3 years, just their parking lot and the path to the main road, while neglecting the far worse rest of the road for years on end. Meanwhile they keep patching potholes that make the road even bumpier. Thanks town.
I know a civil engineer with now 15 years experience who has designed major road projects in the region...
He says they don't even calculate for cars, because they don't matter. Its the 100 ton trucks that matter. They are so heavy they actually make literal "waves" in the ground as they compress the earth under them at speed. Sure its less a wave and more a vibration, but they do move the earth under them with the pressure.
So the huge problem is trying to design roads that can accommodate the flex of the 100 ton trucks without shattering.
Of course the bigger problem is the fact we are moving bulk materials long distances on the roads via truck which is just not ideal. The problem is the rail networks in America haven't been expanded since the 1960's, if anything they shrank as lines were abandoned. We should have massively expanded the freight-rail networks for city-to-city hauling of everything but light goods, and have lighter 20-40 ton trucks do final miles delivery. This would GREATLY ease the stress on road infrastructure which we as a nation waste endless $billions rebuilding roads that cannot handle 100 ton truck traffic. And for installations that need high volume heavy delivery like factories, they should have their own rail attachments. Rail being flexible steel has NONE of the problems that gravel, asphalt, and concrete roads have with accommodating impressively heavy things.
No problem.
And to expand on it a bit, its not like the materials to make durable roads don't exist, but we don't have enough of them to pave hundreds of thousands of miles of road, nor could EVEN DREAM of affording it. Its already something like $1 million a mile to lay interstate, these materials would make it like $100 million a mile.
Conversely steel rail is QUITE cheap, and recyclable. It also doesn't break down since steel for all its firm strength, also gives, it is after all the material they make springs out of. 1 million ton trains are possible with steel rail. There is no road ever that could accommodate that weight.
Its the reason why they went though all the trouble of inventing and laying rail in the 19th century, when they could have to shoved steam engines on wagons, and the McAdams road already existed by the time.
And all of Eurasia continues to this day to extensively use rail for the shipment of goods and travel of people. North America shifted away because of the undue influence of Ford and GM in the era of Crony Capitalism coupled with a fad of "car culture." We see now that both companies are no longer as influential as they used to be, and car culture is now limited to gear heads, we are seeing pushes being main to "re-rail" America, though they are still being blocked...actually by older "boomer" liberals of all people who want their trashfire Amtrack and to burn ALL the oil with trucks to not only keep commuter gasoline prices high, but to make way for ruinous electric trucks from their god the Globalist egomaniac Elon Musk of Tesla. Tesla in turn sells very, very, very expensive "non solutions" that will cost more to make than they worth when a good old diesel or electric locomotive is >>>> all the electric trucks for both oil consumption and even carbon emissions.
THIS is going to our youngest daughter - Civil Engineer works for the TX DoT building roads....
The cobblestone/brick streets didn’t go through the freezing/melting cycles that the shitty asphalt roads do now. We salt our roads and giant semi’s roll over them year round. We need them to be cheap/replaceable/patchable in some parts of the US.
At least, I doubt the brick streets of Philadelphia were used the same way the asphalt streets of today are so comparing them is complicated.
You would love Jon Levi. Here's his latest:
https://youtu.be/syqlJa-FfdE
Hundreds of people working for years vs a few guys with some machines for a couple weeks. I think both have a place though.