Road Decay

I went for a local hike and took pictures of the roads I see every day. For those of you who scoff at the idea that there will be less roads in the future, I offer you proof to the contrary. This is a real thing that is already happening. Roads are made of stuff using energy that is worth more elsewhere, so it mostly will be. The OPEC oil dump going on is going to send sooner or later. At this point, with nuclear proliferation and the race to get (and USE) atomic/nuclear weapons in the middle east and South Asia the happening thing since the current president removed all embargos from the declared terrorist nation (Iran), OPEC MUST SELL ITS OIL before they are all burned to cinders in nuclear hellfire. After that... well we'll be trying to get oil from fracking in the various other nations in the world and complaining about nuclear isotope contamination downwind, which is mostly countries which are as bad or worse so probably not that loudly when all is said and done. The downshot is we'll be turning tar into gasoline, and natural gas will be too valuable for home heating, cooking, and fuel to waste on concrete for roads. We are going back to gravel and dirt, and there is nothing we can do to prevent that because we stood by silently and allowed a president to cause a genocidal nuclear war as his personal legacy. This is his fault. Remember that when you are slipping and bouncing down a gravel track.

 A nice driveway off a paved road. When you are rich, you can afford such things. Someday the street will be gravel, but the private driveway will still be concrete because it belongs to a person, not the public. Public property is not cared for. This is called the Tragedy of the Commons and is the reason that Communism fails. Only private ownership leads to maintenance. Public property is the public's problem.

 A modern road, paved, striped, with underground utilities, sidewalks, and drainage. Perfect in every way, and made from asphalt, which is composed of sand, gravel, and tar to glue it all together. That tar is oil, and can be turned into gasoline instead of road surface, for a tidy profit. This is why asphalt prices have dramatically risen over the last 15 years.

This is a concrete road. It is made from concrete, which is created by cooking limestone in a kiln using natural gas. It chemically changes by adding heat. It is very expensive in energy cost and the concrete used in a house foundation is often around 1/4 to 1/2 the material cost of a home or building. That is NOT cheap. Concrete also cracks under tension, such as when a big truck tire rolls over it and stretches it. The broken part becomes a jagged edge that will then move independently from the remaining slab and will eventually need to have the entire slab chipped out and replaced. Since concrete changes size with air/ground temperature, you also have to cast the slabs in a limited size, with expansion joints. Roads with concrete slab underneath their asphalt pavement make a common "ba-dump, ba-dump" noise as you travel over them and annoy the crap out of people. They are also a safety hazard, and heavy trucks are taxed and fined for the damage they do to roads. It is worth pointing out that communists in the govt then funnel those road repair funds into racists projects rather than fix the roads. This infuriates everybody but the racists who benefit.

Around here we have paved roads and underground public utilities, city water and sewer, garbage pickup, and street sweepers. When it snows, there's a plow that comes and clears the roads if there's enough snow to justify it. This is what the rich neighborhoods get. In more remote locations people have well water or access to an irrigation ditch (literal, a holdover from the mining days) they then pump into a holding tank and treat before using. This is rural, keep in mind. Poor neighborhoods don't have good roads, or their ability to pay means lousy roads lead to nice driveways. This is a thing, too. It comes down to ownership.

When the resources for luxuries like smooth roads run out, replacing broken pavement is delayed. Patches are applied. Tar to glue it together while a proper repair comes.

This sidewalk is shattered because the road and the land beneath it is moving. There is a landslide underway. I am not joking. This is obvious to my Geologist training. This is a DRY YEAR, and a 4th year of drought. When a wet year comes, this slide will move feet instead of inches and the street will be cut off. Landslides move until they reach a physical equilibrium, so it could move 50 feet vertically and wreck a dozen houses before that happens. This spot is on the wall of a canyon, you see. This is an El Nino year. Satellite warming data shows the typical El Nino hot spot in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. This means we will get torrential downpours starting mid or late summer and continuing through next fall and winter and spring. We should expect 100 inches of rain. This landslide is going to let go then, and about 15 houses will be damaged or destroyed in the landslide. That's a Darwin Award too. Nobody pays geologists to point this out to them. Suffer.

These plants grew up this spring. There's a bunch of places like this, where gaps in the pavement fill with seeds and the local bean-plants (legumes) sprout up, growing more beans and widening the cracks, creating soil and giving more places for more plants to grow. In California, the growing season is anytime there's water supply because it is only cold enough to stop plants above the snow line. Down here, they grow till the water stops. Now, a person could come along and rip this out by hand, but its always someone else's problem, so there it sits. Imagine this same approach happens, only the street sweepers and maintenance stop coming, due to budget cuts. How fast is the road overgrown?

This is a one lane access road, similar to most driveways, but also what happens when you don't apply normal amounts of maintenance. This is what happens in 4 months without trimming back the brush. There are deer, bears, and cougars living in this brush, along with homeless bums and feral dogs and wild pigs. It is about 10 feet wide, but in a summer that will drop to 6 feet as the brush grows to gain sunlight. It is a luxuriant growth area, and it is nobody's job to clear. If you live down this road, you will scrape your paint off your car driving down it. And that's without trying to make room for a car coming the other direction to pass by you. Those of you in cities don't appreciate just how fast this happens.

This is a gravel road. It has been cared for a groomed by maintenance several times a year. They spray weed killer so you can see the rocks, and it is flat so the gravel hasn't washed away in a storm. There is a cable across it to prevent anyone using the road without the key to unlock it. If you stop spraying weed killer and stop doing maintenance, weed seeds that fall between the stones quickly cover it.

This is the same road 200 feet down. You can still see gravel, but it looks more like a pathway than a road. Seeing the road is a major skillset in the country. If you get off this nearly invisible surface you will get stuck and your vehicle will become a smoking ruin, and you will have to walk. Going anywhere on gravel roads in the country means you may have to walk out, so thinking about walking is actually a requirement in any decision made here. That means you need to carry supplies in the car to walk back to civilization again. Really. It is very much NOT like the city.

This is that same road a couple hundred yards away. Its now just a singletrack, covered in weeds and hard to see. This is what happens to gravel roads in about 6 months with no maintenance. Poof. Gone.

This is a road after two years. See the road? Nope. Its a field now. You can see for 100 miles to the north, and the sort of singletrack and gravel and vanished roads like this are most of what's up there. Anywhere that isn't paved turns into this within about 3 years time. Even paved roads can overgrow from the sides, and any cracks first fill with legumes (beans), then grasses, then bushes, then trees and before you know it, you can't really tell there used to be a paved road there.

This is a singletrack under the trees. They cut down the bushes, and it is used daily. See it? Its that faint dirt path. There's quite a few roads that look like this. In the real boonies, nearer to the Yuba River, places like this have pot growers living in tents or shacks, and cougars pounce on the unwary and actually eat them. There are signs warning of this on the south Yuba. We also have packs of coyotes that surge out of the canyons on moonlit nights that eat people's pets and their garbage if it is left out. The yelping can be quite loud. This place is wild. And it wants to go back to this wild condition as soon as we stop paving and cutting it back.

Soon enough parking lots will go back to gravel. This is nice enough now, but what about after 100 inches of rain this Fall? How many parishioners at this Church will be stuck after their cars sink up to the axles in mud? Uneven road surfaces and central high spots catch on the transfer case of your car, leaving you stuck. The solution is a taller vehicle with 4WD so all wheels are powered, but smoothing the road would be better... only roads are empty most of the time and who has money for that kind of thing when all the jobs are in China? And Diesel Fuel isn't free either. Rich people who own their own tractors say it costs about 100 gallons per mile of gravel road, twice a year, to scrape and clear it and lay more gravel back down, and the next time it rains, that gravel piles up unevenly or washes away, and you need more delivered, and more diesel fuel to smooth it and pack it flat and then plants grow in the spring and you have to bulldoze those down too and if the roots remain, they will grow back in a few months, so you have to do that again. If you don't, the road vanishes into manzanita and scotch broom.

Scotch Broom. Five feet tall, highly flammable even when green, and grows this tall in 1-2 years. Found all over California. The Manzanita (not pictured) grows to 12 feet high, burns very hot, and requires a serious bulldozer to remove. Roots will regrow a plant you can't drive through in 1 year. This is a dominant shrub in the California hill country and mountains, and clogs gravel roads. Deer and pigs and rattle snakes will live under and around it. These attract coyotes and cougars and black bears.

Sooner or later, roads get ceded from maintained status to neighborhoods that don't care or can't afford the costs and eventually those roads that aren't used are lost entirely. Tiger files from the department of the Interior keeps records of old roads and treats them as all active, those many are just history, long gone. This is already happening, the loss of roads, thanks to the economy collapsing under this Administration. The last 6 years of incompetence will continue to erase all the gains made in attempting to civilize America. We will fall back until we resemble the Anasazi cliff dwellings, with wildness between the occupied towns, cleared by hand and defended from predators. It isn't very nice, but this is what happens when you export your jobs and pretend nobody has to work.