After Roads

I live in the mountains. It is full of tall trees, canyons, rivers and streams. Roads twist and wind around these canyons, and the ground tends to move when there's been fires or deluges, or just the wrong amount of erosion. As a trained geologist, I am VERY good at spotting the tops of landslides, before they slide. A local arterial road here is going to collapse soon, which will be inconvenient to me and others, and destroy several houses and possibly an important fire station. You can pave over the top of these things, but they'll keep moving until they've physically balanced out their weight from one side to the other. This is intro-level Civil Engineering, btw.

I have written before how dangerous it is to stop paving your roads. Paved roads deal with water relatively well, provided the ditches are cleared and concrete is used in areas of high ground water, such as springs. If you do these things, the roads last pretty well and can be travelled during and after serious storms. The water hits the surface, runs off, and is steered away. You don't get serious erosion from a rainstorm of pavement made of asphalt or concrete. This is what people are used to. Change that pavement surface however, to something which can erode from rushing water, like gravel or dirt? Transportation becomes a serious challenge. "So what?" you say. "The road is already paved." Well, yes and no. See, concrete breaks under tension, such as from passing trucks with 100 PSI tires and heavy loads, and asphalt is also made of pebbles, some of which dissolve in water. The tar in asphalt also evaporates at higher temps, such as a hot day, which is why you can smell a hot road. It is "outgassing" hydrocarbons as they break down in the sun. Eventually the tar stops being tar and the surface pebbles are released and roll away. Left alone a few years a tar road can actually evaporate to nothing. This doesn't always happen, but I have seen it in the desert. Anywhere it rains, like here, you get great problems from either line springs underneath, frost swelling to break the asphalt when it is cold, causing pot holes, as well as other problems such as tearing and shifting which opens cracks through the pavement to further erosion. You generally treat this by pouring and painting tar into the cracks. This is a temporary fix and is famous as a road hazard to motorcyclists, scooterists, and bicyclists, what are colloquially known as "tar snakes". They are very dangerous, moreso when wet. Hit a tar snake on a wet road into a corner and your front wheel loses all grip and you fall onto the pavement, possibly sliding off the road into a tree and find out of God exists or not. Tar snakes are in the top 5 serious road hazards for motorcyclists.

 

Tar to make roads and patch roads isn't free. Tar is oil, and it can be turned into gasoline, which is higher profit than tar so refineries generally do that. There is less tar available and roads cost more to pave and repave so nice smooth paved roads are going to be a fond memory, sort of like 70's musclecars with big throbbing V8 engines which makes the wimmins excited.

 

Unfortunately, while fracking COULD provide sufficient tar to keep the roads paved, most of the California counties with oil beneath them have outlawed fracking entirely in the last election, largely due to fear of benzene contamination of their water supply, which is unfortunately justified. Benzene doesn't break down, it just waits, and it is a transport mechanism to bring chemicals through your cell walls, many of which will kill you. The choice to ban Fracking will likely lead to punitive costs for paving to all state residents in California. And punitive costs leads to stricter resource allocation, such as cancelling future road paving, and more importantly, current road repaving.

 

That means we probably have the most paved roads now, that we will EVER have, forever and ever. Or at least until a suitable paving material can replace tar in asphalt which is cheap enough to bother with at that scale. And by the time something becomes available we'll be used to having dirt roads so repaving probably won't happen. This is a bad thing, but it is, I suspect, the future. By then many of the roads we see today will have lumber growing in them and we'll have abandoned many routes and places thanks to that difficulty.

What's so bad about unpaved roads? Roads without asphalt or concrete wash away in strong rain. Normal rainfall in the Sierras is 60 inches a year. A heavier year, which we get every 6-7 years, is 100 inches a year. That's rainforest levels of precipitation btw. During the last ice age California averaged 180 inches of rain a year, and its rivers and streams surged with water, our deserts were grassland savannah with active trout streams draped in willows and cottonwoods and those flowed into wide lakes full of birds, including migratory geese, ducks, pelicans, and of course flamingoes. One does not normally think of flamingoes in Nevada and the Mohave Desert, but they were there and not all their corpses have had time to petrify. I personally found one merely dried in the desert near Tecopa. A single forlorn flamingo. Very odd, but the Great Basin is a good place to migrate through and its wide shallow lakes lacked the alligators of the east. Most of those lakes are salt flats much of the year, however if the big rains came back, including more summer hurricane based storms sifting out of the Sea of Cortez and Eastern Pacific down from Mexico you could refill those lakes again, and the birds would come back. But I digress.

 

In a good storm, runoff can shift gravel off roads into runnels and piles and spray off the road surface, downslope and away from doing any good for travelers. Hauling more gravel and spreading and compacting it is an ongoing expense, something to be done with nearly every storm. Gravel also does a great job of trapping seeds and providing a good growing environment for the MANY plants willing and able to take advantage of open sky to grow like... weeds, particularly lupin which is a nitrogen fixing bean that self seeds and requires no soil to grow, just bare rock. Lupins were spread along all California roads to stop erosion onto the road surfaces and reduce the costs of clearing runoff. This accidentally caused more wildfires since bare rocks don't catch fire from cigarette butts but lupins do. The nitrogen soil created by lupins gives a place for weeds and grasses to grow. And weeds provide space for bushes, and bushes for taller shrubs like 12 foot high manzanita and the various trees that grow here and in a mere 3 years after paving with gravel, you can't find the road anymore. And it really is that quick. I have seen it personally. So now the road department has to cut away brush from the roadside rather than sweep debris off the road surface. Six of one, half a dozen of another.

 

Few people think it is their problem to spend days clearing a road they use all the time, and will call up the county to do it instead, but a county that can't afford tar roads is also a county that can't afford thousands of man-hours clearing brush several times a year from your road. They'll use their available funds to focus on the main arteries that carry food and medicine and possibly ambulances, and ignore the rest. This may be unfortunate if you live out there and have a heart attack, but moving into town is your problem, and might save your life when the time comes. Eventually encroachment by nature will turn a road into a doubletrack, with inches of topsoil blowing onto the surface, grasses rooting, their roots becoming another place for topsoil to be expand and before you know it there is a faint grassy lane, perhaps with blackberry brambles taking over that too. These things are reality in many parts of this country, and the world itself. Road clearing can become a major issue. It may become easier to ride around the mess on an Enduro bike rather than spend weeks with a shovel, particularly if your neighbors won't help because they're busy growing pot and think you're nuts to make it easy for the Po-Leez to arrest them using those roads you want to clear. Screw that, they'll say. It is easier to learn how to ride a motorcycle than it is to devote weeks a year to clearing a road that will overgrow again in a few months. Nature never gives up. Those movies with cities burnt to the ground? Those overgrow with vines and such really quick. Do an image search for the area around Chernobyl, or even Abandoned Detroit. Green takes over fast. One of the important things one learns visiting Alaska is that man is still at war with Nature, which is still trying to kill us. You forget that in New York City, but it is a fact.

 

Getting around on roads going back to nature becomes a seriously challenging problem. Getting through the mud bogs and ruts without having a wreck, and getting used to riding slowly enough to not die is crucial there. Gravel is not a very good surface for braking, as the rocks are loose and don't offer much grip. I have wrecked on my bicycle trying to brake down a gravel slope. Learning experience, right there. Dodging broken off tree branches waiting to impale you is something I've seen in many offroad motorcycling videos. It is a good reason to wear plastic armor over your rib cage. It does what it says. Eventually people living in the suburbs are going to find themselves in the boonies because the roads are largely gone and the critters are wandering around, especially when the take out the garbage. Someday there won't be that wonderful garbage pickup service. You'll have to deal with hauling it yourself, burning, and hauling the recycle to their center yourself. Sucks, but that's what happens when a civilization collapses, like this one is. We overextended. This is just one of those things.

And lets not even talk about the bears, cougars, coyote packs, feral dogs, highwaymen, and others who dislike travelers passing through. Mountain bikers have been killed near LA by pouncing cougars, which then ate most of them. Some poor hiker was eaten by a black bear in a park near New York a couple weeks ago, and took pictures of it before it chowed down. This is what a world without guns is like, btw. Animals eating you. There was a case of an Iditarod trail competitor getting his dog sled attacked by a moose, which are natural enemies of wolves and can't tell the difference between those and huskies in the dark. His gun mechanism froze (revolver, everything is exposed), so he had to fight the moose with an axe. And axe. It took 45 minutes of exhausting battle to kill the thing, and it destroyed 3 of his dogs. He lived, obviously, to tell the tale. How happy would you be to have a hungry black bear chasing you down on your bicycle towing your little kids to school for the day? Are you sure voting for "gun control" is in your personal interest? Bears live everywhere, and they are adapting to the new world. The fewer cars moving around, the more places bears can go in daylight so they are.

There's a fair number of trimmers around here who are riding dirt bikes out of the boonies for groceries and visiting friends, town errands, then back into the boonies from the highway onto narrower and worse quality roads. This is a poor county with many roads, due to the slightly higher population. A lot of the timber logging roads have squatters living near them, growing pot all summer so they have a means of buying ramen the rest of the year. They're in true poverty. That poverty is what most people are going to end up with, eventually. Poverty is funny that way. Like the man said in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: "And the money always runs out". It's the nature of groupthink, of consensus, to harm the individual and defend the majority for its many atrocities and failures. This is why individual artists accomplish great works, but committees only demolish the catering and any artistic effort is muddled and boring. Any real artist will verify this too. And this is also why people who like committees, such as Democrats and Communists, hate Ayn Rand. Because its rather easy to point to great works of art created by single devoted artists and architects (The Golden Gate Bridge), and boondoggles created by committee, such as Galloping Gurdy and the Chicago Housing Projects.

Success vs failure. Duh. And before you point at the space program, recall that the entire mission was based on a scifi novel written by Robert Heinlein, but did so uncredited because he married a hot communist babe in 1929, rather like a certain father of the atom bomb. That's the trouble with communists. They employ honeytraps that are good in bed and can ruin a man's reputation. All Heinlein did was poke a pretty woman who was willing to be poked, after all. Committees make mediocrity. If the artist had been left on their own it would have taken longer but been perfect instead of adequate.

 

I suppose we'll get used to gravel and dirt roads because its that or ride trains, which are easier to maintain the tracks for. Clarkson won't like it much, but England has way more railway lines than we have. And building comfy passenger railcars is easier than hundreds of supercars and paving all those roads. The UK is running out of oil and natural gas, so they'll be going back to gravel before we do. Top Gear may become Top Cart before you know it. Or Top Buggy. Will they build Amish horsedrawn buggies with blue underlighting and HID lights, maybe a bouncy suspension and carbon fiber with a linked F1 type suspension? Drawn by a horse, whose butt you stare at and have to smell. That just doesn't sound like a fun time, but it will likely be one people opt for in place where there's enough pasture. Will there be a land rush onto the Great Plains again, Post Oil? One has to wonder.