A key to good road maintenance is drainage. Getting the water away from the road, so it doesn't erode the surface and turn the road into canyon or pond with indeterminate bottom. I'd like to laugh and say I'm joking, but I live in the mountains so I'm really not. I have seen, personally, roads disappear in less than 3 years. Even without much water, lupins can cover a surface with soil from their nitrogen fixing efforts, that soil hosts scotch broom, a 7 foot tall shrub, which allows for both trees and manzanita which gets into the soil and even fire only delays its return a year. Nature is relentless. All those scifi movies covered in ashes and dust are created by ignorant Hollywood morons. Nature covers abandoned human stuff in green most of the time, far quicker than you'd think.
The Europeans have done well building Roman roads of big boulders covered with smaller ones and smaller ones, then gravel covered with cobblestone pavers. Those roads are 2000 years old. Many are still in use. They last far better than gravel skinned with asphalt. When the asphalt evaporates and cracks, plants get into very quickly, and the cracks allow the pavement, now brittle, to break out into potholes by passing trucks and expose the gravel that swirls away downslope in a decent rainstorm. Then where's your road? Riding over these disasters will require much lower speed and very limber suspension, thus the Enduro.
If you stay in town, keeping up the pavement is far more affordable and scooters are all over Europe for good reason. They even work on narrow pathways and alleys. And the economy in Europe is much worse than here. When you're poor and actually NEED something to work, you have to buy quality so it will work when you need it. If you buy crap, it will fail at the worst possible time making you unemployed and possibly kill you. This is one of the better reasons to buy quality and avoid Chinese stuff. Only buy Chinese when there's nothing else.
The current drought in California will likely be followed by floods next year. They usually are. I've lived through two droughts and several floods. Serious flood years are bad for road repair, and missing a drain clearage makes for serious messes and sometimes landslides.
Landslides are caused by water removing the friction in existing fractures allowing them to slip. The only way to stop them is to deny the water entrance, which rarely works, or to physically dig out the land on top of the slip until the curved cup of land is balanced front to back and side to side. And once the land comes down, if there's enough air frothed into the water, it can allow the slide to go quite a long distance until the air comes out, where it stops. The lovely alluvial fans at the base of the mountains in Los Angeles, where people built entire neighborhoods, are at the bottom of canyons scraped clear by big landslides, usually started in severe rains, and continue to happen because the fault (San Andreas etc) is raising the mountains, physically, exposing more rock to stress and fractures which can fill with water and move. Building roads across that makes for pretty views, and paving them with asphalt is probably best since those roads aren't going to last either way.
The area of Big Sur on Highway 1 between Carmel and San Luis Obispo is going to be fracked too. There is oil beneath it. Local wells have accidentally drawn salt water from the ocean inland, poisoning wells. You have to push a lot of fresh water into those wells to push the salt back to sea again. And live on what exactly? It is illegal in California to cache rainwater. Rain barrels are against the law. This is one of those absurdly ridiculous laws we've got.
Fracking will fill the aquifer with benzene contamination, which is bad. The benzene dissolves the tar-oil from the shale and helps it flow out as heavy crude oil. 80% of the benzene is recovered with the oil, but the other 20% isn't. It stays down there.
The rock containing the oil is often deeper than landslides, but might not always be the case. I have personally smelled tar-oil in many sandstones and shales at beaches here in California. Fracking is going to take everyone's water, and everyone's salads and jam, and convert Eastern Debt into more debt for Eastern snobs to tell us how much better they are than the rest of us, and why they deserve to ignore our constitutional laws because they are right and we are just dirty smelly peasants because our drinking water is going into oil wells being shipped to China. I do not like them, Sam I Am.
Seeing roads destroyed by El Nino floods, which are probably coming this October since historically El Nino floods follow multiyear droughts and El Nino is clearly forming in the Pacific right now.
These events produce landslides that take out roads. They produce flooding that destroys levees, which takes out roads and farmland. We don't have the money to fix them, or the money to prevent them, or the money to do the maintenance to delay them either. We just have to live with the consequences. Jeep claims they are the car of California. This is untrue. Subaru is the car of California. Closely followed by Honda. I have a Honda. Most of my neighbors have both a Honda AND a Subaru. Around here owning a 4WD/AWD is sensible because it snows. It also allows them to go hiking up in remote locations, not all of which have paved trailhead parking lots. I hope to go hiking and such at Sardine Lakes this summer. That place held glaciers, and most of the lakes are what's left behind. They freeze every winter and the trout like it. It is good fishing. People up there take personal responsibility to use the right vehicle for the available pavement. I think that responsibility will climb down the mountains to the lowlands, where eventually only the interstates and wealthy towns will have pavement, and all country roads will be gravel, which will wash out during the winters. Or overgrow rapidly until the road disappears if they aren't used often enough. Home invaders will have a field day following these roads to pot farms, which will be able to afford to mow those roads to keep them open. Real farmers will try to avoid growing pot just to stay safe. Nearly ALL home invasions are drug related. They rarely say that in the news, because the detectives won't share anything about an ongoing investigation, but that's how it is. This is why I'm often baffled by the home invasion fears of most preppers. If they aren't in the drug trade, what are they afraid of? Invaders have nearly always bought drugs at that location before. Only rarely do they try a new place after scouting, because there is a lot of risk going into an occupied home. They might hit a meth cooker, and those are heavily armed and trigger happy, which is why DEA sends tactical units after them. Meth cookers are the reason I got out of firearms design as a potential career. I don't want one of my creations making some poor widow cry. Better to make engines.
I really do need to get my motorcycle license and my scooter or underbone. I am really curious about owning the MadAss 125. I think it is the most cost effective option and while it has gears to shift, I suspect I can handle it. If the job I'm interviewing for works out, I will soon have the money to buy it. And there really is something amusing about getting your bike shipped by crate to your driveway. Since the local DMV has a notoriously short 8 minute wait (rather than the 90 minutes of most urban areas), registering it will be amusingly easy. And with this lovely sunny weather, the ideal local transportation.
See, even with the roads going to crap, and jobs paying far less, and health insurance turning into pure rip-off that violates our Constitutional rights (it is against the law to require people to buy things, and the supreme court needs to be jailed over ignoring this very basic right), and all the other crap we're having to deal with, you may as well be happy despite this. Adapt and overcome, the Marine Corps motto. I agree with this. Reality requires it, and the Pioneering Spirit, which Easterners know NOTHING about because my ancestors were pioneers and theirs aren't, is all about adaptation. The East is even more corrupt than California. California is more aggressively Darwinist. The East is stagnating, and has turned to economic cannibalism. It is eating the poor, eating the middle class, and eventually the rich will be eating each other, trying to stay on top of a smaller and smaller pile of what comes from eating the weaker ones. It smells bad. The West would like to not be associated with Wendigoes. Thank you. We've got enough trouble trying to keep our roads from washing away, and keeping our machines working to cross what remains of the road.
Yes, I'm sure you live somewhere the roads are mostly paved, and the tar snacks over the cracked pavement are good enough to keep it from fragmenting completely, and the county road crews fill the pot holes if you get enough neighbors to call about them, and for now, you can still get around with a front wheel drive and its fine. And for now, temporarily, it will do. But how will it be in 5 years? How about ten? Will the road still have asphalt pavement in 10 years when oil will be cutoff from Russia, and Saudi is regrettably empty, the Iranians will have the entire Persian Gulf and the Arab states embroiled in a nuclear war, and China is getting all the oil the USA can produce to stave off full collapse of The Fed and the Dollar itself. How good will your roads be then? No, I'm sure you never think about that. That far into the future, like you'll even be alive in 10 years, I'm sure it feels like a ridiculous question. Twenty years ago, gasoline was $1.24/gal. And it would never go up, right? And ten years ago, gasoline was $2.90/gal. And it would never go up, right? But 8 years ago, it rose to $5.00/gal. And that shouldn't have happened, yet it did. Economic disasters are reliably common, and the globalist world means economies aren't really insulated from each other like the good old days, so a disaster far away means consequences everywhere. So half of Eastern Ukraine "voting" to join Russia with troops on the border with tanks and planes, ready to invade and start ethnic cleansing, and if the vote goes their way doing exactly the same thing, and scaring the Ukrainians into running for central Ukraine which is also ethnic cleansing, only cleaner. I hope that the Ukrainians burn their houses and barns when they flee so the Russians can't just walk in and take over easily. Because that is their goal. Thank the United Nations for this disaster. Its very much their fault for setting the precedent in Kosovo. Sigh.
Americans don't have the money for pavement. We can't spare resources for saving Ukraine from Russia. We will be able to sell our oil for more, except the Chinese are going to take oil off the open market, end the fungible oil market entirely, and shift oil into a tradable good, sold and delivered under contract. They want to do this with Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran, everywhere that still has oil to sell. And some of that oil would have gone to paving our roads.
It is in your best interest to look hard at your local roads and imagine them eroded, partially missing, overgrown. That eventually even 4WD won't work on what is left because the surface is too narrow, and too many washouts and fallen trees. It becomes Singletrack, passable by motorcycles, mountain bike, or on foot. The road in Japan wouldn't be passable with a jeep without a lot of stopping and breaking out the chainsaw, and probably a shovel. It's going to need a lot more maintenance. And when the maintenance is more than people care to do, because only the fool further up the road uses it? Screw them. Let them do it. And that's how our roads will fall apart.
Someday in the future, when we're riding electric scooters or simple mountain bikes through the brush and hoping not to startle a black bear or rattlesnake or take a bad spill, those old enough to remember roads with smooth pavement will feel the most regret. Those who grow up without it will sensibly live in town instead of cling to the notion of independence we have. They will know it is not romantic, merely inconvenient.
