Submitted by ultimate_bulter t3_yxteau in boston
Can someone please explain to me why the Massachusetts road infrastructure is so bad? I understand that the city is old and the weather is crap, but the cities should be spending more money on repairing.
Years ago one of the local public radio stations had a story about it. Basically we pay the contractors to build and we pay them for any necessary repairs. It pays to build bad roads. In Europe they make the contractors fix bad roads within a reasonable number of years from initial completion.
Funny you post this today, there is an online article hitting the airwaves this week. According to "Google search statistics over the last year" Massachusetts ranks 12th for potholes and Boston 34th in cities.
https://quotewizard.com/news/pothole-damage-costs-us-drivers-3-billion-dollars-per-year
Makes sense with the amount of cars and people commuting in on like major road systems. Roads will go to shit much quicker than others
12th is about where I expected us to be too. The freeze/thaw cycle in the northern states unsurprisingly makes most of them bad for potholes. It's the southern states with bad roads that have no excuses.
As for why Maine is so much lower than MA, Maine (~47k) has about 2/5th fewer road miles as MA (~78k).
The roads suck here and always will.
Also ME and NH are constantly redoing the roads even though they don’t need to be
Being a fairly recent transplant here. The roads so many other places are so much worse.
Today OP learns how expensive it is to maintain road infrastructure for cars and that money doesn't grow on trees!
Buddy wait till you see the conditions of other states. I moved to Texas a year ago and the roads here make Mass roads look perfect. I would love for Texas roads too be half as good as Mass
Or sheltered
The roads here aren’t bad, try bumfuck Alabama
The real and honest answer is because repairs are done cheaply. Asphalt taken up and replaced with 4" of new asphalt in this climate guarantees a relatively short lifespan. Thus, they really can't keep up with the repairs.
If you want to really improve things, you need to replace the road with 6-8" of asphalt. But you're significantly increasing the cost of road repairs and given that most of the budgets for this stuff is planned years and advance, those same budgets are eaten up by inflation (rising prices of equipment, consumables, etc.) and those accounts are dipped into for other things.
Want to truly fix it, increase taxes, increase thickness (THE THICKKKKNEESSSS!!), and get rid of the whole "Only police can flag wave" BS argument. Until then, put monies aside for new struts.
Where exactly...I spent 18 years in the Texas panhandle and about 10 in south Texas before moving to Boston...Boston is way worse.
Part of it is Charlie Deferred Maintenance Baker, part of it is the state capture that results from effective single party rule allowing a small number of companies easy access to the people making the rules on bidding jobs and procurement, and part of it, perversely enough, is Prop 2½. Because municipalities maintain good bond ratings by borrowing money, and because every bureaucracy 's primary objective is to expand, the override rule incentivizes expanding every budget by 2.49% every year, so a lot of things that should get done only get done in small portions (one year we borrow the money to bury the fiber or whatever, and the next year we borrow to fix the road we destroyed the year before, and each project only gets done 130 feet at a time to maximize the number of joints in the road and splices in whatever utility they're running.
There is also a multi year infrastructure plan involving water pipes and gas pipes in a handful of towns. You see patch over patch because of it. A few towns have delayed repaving for years until the work is finished.
Looking at you Wakefield & Stoneham.
Also how much heavier and larger they are than they used to be. Road damage goes up by the about 4th power of the weight of the vehicle, so all these SUVs damage the roads a LOT more than the sedans people used to drive.
Why should the contractor be liable for building to the specs from your engineer?
You're pointing the finger at the wrong people.
That put Texas in the worst fifth of the nation in terms of road quality, where 22% of roads are deemed “non-acceptable.”
https://quotewizard.com/news/states-with-worst-infrastructure
San Antonio area. Roads are shit. Holes, bumps, no markings whatsoever etc
SNOW
Guess it was that road trip to FL
I understand, but on a spare day, go on Needham St in Newton. AT least fix that place. They've been trying to fix it for the past 3 years. Also explains the US work rate.
And today I learn I do pay taxes
And the contractor charges them a lot more upfront.
Corruption.
There are also large portions of Maine that are consistently stuck below freezing most of the winter. You don’t have constant freeze thaw cycles when it’s always 25 degrees or lower in the winter.
Lol. Go to Philadelphia and then come back to Boston and our luxurious, only kind of potholed roads.
I believe NH spends more on their roads than they do on education. I’d look up a citation, but I’m going to bed.
Because the vast majority of these are design-build, where the contractor is the chief stakeholder
Mass spends less per capita on state and federal highways than most, def less than Me, NH, Vt and Ct. Mass doesn’t have county roads like some states—NJ and NY for example—so the comparable roads here are either state or local. Mass limits property tax revenue so the towns and cities can’t spend too much on roads or anything else. Other than the Big Dig Mass is pretty stingy with your tax revenue.
So your second chart has MA with a higher percentage of unacceptable roads but a slightly lower cost per driver...but I think the methods here probably dont capture everything. I also suspect it's somewhat difficult to make direct comparisons for the simple fact that Texas is much much larger, with huge swaths of little to no population and a large network of dirt roads, that while crappy, are only being used by farmers. At any rate, I am aware I'm just offering an anecdote here, but I've driven a lot in all these places, as has my wife, and we are constantly in awe of the number of skull rattling pot holes and rusty, run down, crumbling bridges here.
Hmm. Fair enough. I drive out of San Antonio up to hill country once or twice a year to visit family and haven't noticed issues on the highway that stand out but I've literally never gotten off the highway and driven around town. Up in the panhandle Oklahoma was what came up...as soon as you crossed the state line driving to OKC the highway was just like a rumble strip, but I've heard they have a new turnpike and the highways are nicer now...
Yeah they’ve been fixing all the highways in SA recently so they aren’t too bad. It’s all the other major roads that are brutal. For example Atone oak parkway is pretty much just off-roading with all the potholes and bumps. It’s like they didn’t flatten and just paved over small mounds
Needham St is pretty much fucked yearly with all the new construction and the weight of trucks used. Add in water main repairs, fire hydrant line repairs, you end up with the road being in bad shape pretty much yearly.
Until they're majorly done with large developments, Needham Street is gonna be a crappy road.
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PennDot for the win, or not.
emu22 t1_iwqbth2 wrote
You must be new or really young.