In the desert, flash floods do this all the time (annually depending on luck), and in the forest fires can strip plant life holding steep hillsides up. Fallen trees, landslides, washouts, these are common obstacles to wheeled traffic. In Long Way Round, the team of motorcyclists and their chase vehicles get stuck in Siberia as the spring floods have raised a river high and fast, till it can't be crossed. Rather than wait for it, they try to cross anyway using serious all wheel drive trucks and chains to help them. Not a terrible idea, but waiting till later would have been smarter and less risky. Thanks to pavement and bridges, we don't have to delay our important deadlines for pesky floods or washed out roads. We have people who fix those, keep everything working.
What if we didn't? As it is, Civil Engineers give the USA a D+ rating for the state of our roads and bridges. These are structures that are contracted to be repaired and kept up properly and are so badly maintained the collapse of the crowded bridge near Minneapolis is considered to be the first of many. Think about that. People died, screaming, from the fall or drowned in the river or crushed under the weight of concrete and steel. Modern people rarely doubt their roads, but perhaps they should. We do have money for this, we're just spending it on foreign wars and many stupid things that have zip to do with the middle class. And we're the ones paying for it. However, road surfaces like concrete and asphalt are EXPENSIVE in materials and energy.
Concrete is made by cooking limestone in an oven. It chemically converts into an anhydrous powder that reacts to water and forms limestone. The gravel mixed with this powder adds strength, as does steel frameworks inside. Concrete cracks under tension, but under pressure it is very strong so it is sometimes prestressed using steel cables to resist its weak point. This is why we have bridges and causeways built of concrete that don't fall over. It is not perfect. If the steel gets exposed to air or water or both, it will oxidize and the pre-stress stops working, and the bridge collapses. This happens all the time and can't truly be avoided. Metals want to oxidize. They find a way. Most of the aluminum and titanium on earth is in oxidized form, in mud. Not metallic. Iron can be found in metal form, but its normally rust red in soil or sandstone, commonly mined from that. The upshot of that is why iron is common, it must be remade and replaced for use in our environment, painted to reduce the speed of corrosion. A person has to maintain it, and the harder they do that, the longer it lasts. And the more it costs.
Concrete roads either have reinforcing steel or they get broken, and broken superslab is everywhere. I'm sure you've seen it. Its usually the right-hand lane, where the big trucks drive, often with their tire pressures illegally high to reduce fuel consumption, cracking the concrete from tensional stress. Later trucks shift the pieces until a passenger car driving on that can destroy their own suspension or wreck, possibly killing the driver and passengers and anyone too close behind. This is a real thing, happens every day. That road has to be replaced, and the next overloaded truck with illegally high pressure tires will do it again. Over and over. The stronger you build the roads gives you a slightly longer time before a truck breaks it anyway. Can't be helped. The drivers point fingers, reminding us that they pay the highest road taxes which are supposed to pay for that, and the supreme court just ruled that road taxes have to pay for roads, not welfare checks or other Communism. I'm sympathetic, up to a point.
Now consider asphalt, which is kinda like concrete only its soft and deforms when hot, breaks when cold, and is made from oil and gravel. The oil sells for more money when turned into gasoline instead of left as tar, so the refineries mostly turn tar into gasoline. It makes the most sense for them. This unfortunately means that roads cost more since the tar is rarer and thus more expensive. The price of tar for asphalt has gone way up. We're paying for that in our taxes and when we buy gasoline, and in refinery accidents since refining tar means dealing with all the sulfur which eats through the pipes as acid and causes deadly poison gas leaks that send thousands to the hospitals and cause long term lung problems, even cancer. There's huge pressures on the costs of tar, yet it remains more profitable not to turn it into roads. And that asphalt will wash away, and plants can root in it, crack it, and potholes ruin the road surface of asphalt. And use of tar to mend cracks in the road makes for very slippery surfaces that are a major hazard for a motorcyclist, right up there with railroad crossings in the rain, or those metal plates covering construction holes in the road and manhole covers.
This gets to my next point. Both forms of pavement are really expensive, but they're used because they're non-water soluble. They don't wash away in the rain. They're durable, reasonably, and while they have to be reapplied every 3-7 years depending on how tough their surfaces and foundations are they have been okay during the Age of Oil. The trouble is, Post Cheap Oil, these are costing more and more resources. We're getting to the point that miles of road surface are going to cost human lives (hospital staffing, ambulance services, immunizations, wonder drug research), as that resource may have been better spent. Eventually we're going to be openly voting on what roads get pavement and stay First world, and what roads go to gravel or dirt and return to Third world. And pause to wrap your head around that.
Are you going to end up on a gravel road? And how long before that happens? Even the suburbs need to think about this really hard. Do you want to pay a several months mortgage-worth a year in property taxes just to keep pavement in your neighborhood, and ONLY your neighborhood, hoping and praying that the next neighborhood over will do the same so you don't have to drive through mud bog 5 months a year and give up your shiny 2WD sedan for something nasty and dirty that gets laughed at your office or factory because it marks you as one of the New Poor? How much are you willing to pay to prevent their scorn? Will you rent a protected parking space so you can trade cars partway? Will you be ashamed of this secret? Will you recognize other neighbors doing this too? Will you put your saved taxes toward other luxuries so you can compensate for the humiliation? Will you give up your rural Third World dirt road house and move into an apartment, one that's overcrowded or has screams and gunshots in the night every so often but has Paved Streets outside? I lived in a place like that for eight years, gunshots and screams. And I was in one of the best places in the Bay Area. I can see a place like that letting the pavement rot anyway, let it fall apart because everyone is too poor. I can see it turn into dusty gravel, and then fight a losing battle with weeds springing up through the gravel, with shrubs taking over the edges and corners, with trees sprouting around the shrubs. It happens fast, in a couple or three years the roads are gone. You don't have to be in the boonies for this to happen. The suburbs get overrun by nature too. Look at Detroit.
I figure many of the suburbs of the Bay Area can't actually afford the taxes to keep more than their expressways paved. Hayward is impoverished enough. It will be a mishmash of paved and gravel soon enough. It's almost that bad now. Leaking water and sewer pipes are visibly seeping up through broken expressway pavement. You can smell the sewage as you drive those streets, see the algae growing slime in the gutter. Detroit has been shutting off streetlights and water/sewer in entire neighborhoods in their city, forcing people to either leave in fear of crime killing them off or the cost of drilling their own wells and putting in a septic system on the same property, which typically results in contaminating the well with sewage and a cholera outbreak. That's never a good thing. More and more of the suburbs are going to end up like Detroit, and I encourage everyone to stare at a Google image search for "Detroit ruins".
Eventually cities are going to be peopled only with the Rich, because they'll pay for the taxes and the high real estate prices in order to avoid the muck and wasted time of living in the suburbs where the jobs aren't, but the Poor are. The Poor in the inner city should be thinking really hard about life after Section 8. That's going away. We can't afford it, and cities are going to find ridding themselves of crime by ridding themselves of the Poor means they get higher tax base to play with. As far as the officials are concerned, the more money they get, the more money they get. The Poor are useless in a post-industrial society like this one. With all the manufacturing jobs shipped to China, and all the thinking jobs in India, what do we need concentrations of low-paid workers for anymore? So expect evictions, demolition of buildings, buildings failing inspection for structural or health reasons, enforced for the first time. Tear those down, put in some nice condos and wait for the neighborhood to improve. I have heard that Hunters Point, which was a murder capitol in the 1980's and 90's, is gradually being bought out and Gentrified. There are parts of Oakland this was going on too, even in Downtown near the Paramount theater. That is over temporarily. A change in police chief should restart that process again. In other cities, Gentrification is accelerating. The cost of fuel affects the cost of housing, with higher prices closer to jobs, lower prices further away from them. People living on welfare aren't working so they end up further away from jobs in the cheaper housing. This is why Stockton is now a shooting gallery. Stockton is another Port City, with a port city of problems, and the poor moving in from Gentrifying Oakland. This is ongoing, and its not going to stop because cities are supposed to be rich people. This is the reversal of White Flight. It was bound to happen once oil prices rose enough.
Gentrification is a powerful force because everybody Civilized wants it. It makes neighborhoods pretty, reduces crime, raises home values and taxes, makes police paid more so reducing crime has a good point for them, and pays for all the maintenance. It's all about pricing a place out of reach of the Poor. Ending Prop 13 is going to allow Gentrification to accelerate. Prop 13 allowed the Poor to stagnate the inner city, prevented growth, prevented change. Great for Gramma and her cookies. Bad for business. It forced massive suburbanization and decentralization of industries that should have been closer together. It cost transportation energy and even more pavement. Gentrified neighborhoods are going to be paved. Poor neighborhoods will be rutted dirt, mud bogs, eventually carless. I foresee that eventually the USA poor will be living in places that resemble Favelas, like Sao Paolo complete with smell and cholera outbreaks.
See, you can't have underground pipes under roads without pavement of some kind. The pavement spreads out the pressure better but they still break. Without it, your water supply is jeopardized. Normally, water pipes are laid next to sewer pipes, mostly because its cheaper to put them in the street. Fewer arguments about access and repairs. When the pipes break you get a cross-flow of contaminated water with sewage, so what comes out of the tap is often nasty, filthy, and possibly dangerous. Thank those heavy trucks, again. And the fools who opted not to pay more to dig trenches for sewer and water pipes that aren't under the middle of the street where they get crushed. There's a lot of blame to go around.
Preppers fear the sort of ugly jealousy that comes with Gentrification. Many of these folks move to the boonies and try their hand at subsistence farming. The government doesn't like that because its hard to tax people with no income. Of course, moving to the Boonies guarantees you as The New Poor, complete with dirt roads and resupply issues. Real modern farms are often closer to serious industry in the lowlands, where water supply and tools are easy to get. Whether you're on the flatland or up in the mountains, any land you own gets taxed, and tax rates change. That makes planning even more difficult, and with the current voting system reaching that critical failure point of Mad Communism, you may find yourself taxed out of existence and your home stolen out from under you, legally. Kinda like Zimbabwe.
Additionally, modern farms produce huge crops efficiently, which a small farm can't compete with, so small farms are often hobbies or very specialized product, which more often than not leads to unanticipated risks/consequences. That's the big downside of rural farming. And the cost of parts and fuel is another. The big upside is you're safer from cholera and most of the kinds of crime that impact the impoverished lowlands. You can feed yourself if you're modestly successful at serious produce farming, and you'll have protein from eggs and chickens to eat. It will probably be a boring diet, but a safe one.
Getting your crops to town to sell, or to the city where they'll sell for a higher price, is one of many problems you face. Doing so down miles of dirt roads, likely overgrown with brush and weeds, will be even harder to overcome. You may need to dedicate your own time to cutting out the worst of it, by hand. You may need to fill in the holes or build bridges, while your neighbors do nothing to assist you. They may even sabotage you or kill you for your load, sell it themselves. They are likely desperate, and unfortunately desperate people do desperate things.
The belief that rural people are nice is just a Disney-fication of the truth. They're not under the population pressure so they're considerably more polite, but there's vicious people in the woods too. They're just not vicious for the same reason as a person who is living too close to other people and has hit their limit break. If you are fortunate enough for your neighbors to also be working people and stable, and those people each do their own stretch of road maintenance, then the gravel road will be as good as can be expected. In my own travels, I recommend the county draining and paving the Mud Bog sections of a road, and places that tend to be flood plain meadows. They generally do that. Dry places can be gravel, its the Springs that are the huge pain to cross, so give you the most bang for the buck spent on a road. Maintain the culverts and small bridges across streams so we avoid washouts. Sometimes a washout is hugely expensive to repair.
Finally, because of the end of pavement I have to recommend a basic vehicle path to follow as your roads decay. First, an all wheel drive, diesel powered car. While electric would be great, if it really existed and could scale up, diesel does exist. Its not a fantasy. Subaru has diesel all wheel drive cars and station wagons which would work nicely on crappy roads. They aren't here yet, but they will be. Demand will draw them here in time. This keeps off the rain, its a reasonable compromise with the roads and your existing car comforts, and the weight penalty is acceptable. When sections of your road stops being paved, you can manage with chunkier tires. There are lots of people doing this already, up here where I currently live. This is not the end of the road for you, however. Someday the roads will get too spongy for the Subaru.
A vehicle that can't get stuck is the best kind, but they can't get stuck because they're too light, not because of a winch. That's the Enduro motorcycle, aka Dual Sport. Most people recommend Yamaha, but there's many kinds. Suzuki makes a really dandy one, the DRZ-400, aka the Dr. Zee. Its not that cheap, but even at $7000 new, its well liked for its excellent suspension, a good compromise of power and weight and fuel economy. I'm pretty sure they can be had for a couple grand used. It can take lots of roads and serious offroad for pretty much any person with long enough legs. There are other good bikes for crappy roads. The Yamaha SR500 is a very popular machine for rebuild. I see many good examples on BikeExif.
Remember that you have to brake BEFORE the corners and slippery corners means braking a lot sooner too, and taking those corners way more slowly. The good old days of hardly paying attention and watching the lights on your dashboard? That's over with when the pavement is gone. Offroad plastic armor is probably a good idea. Around here, Scotch Broom (a type of green bush 7 feet tall with yellow flowers) can cover a road in a single year. Manzanita can grow to 20 feet high and fill a road or field with impenetrable brush that burns frighteningly hot in a wildfire. You can saw it out or use a bulldozer but it needs twice yearly clearing once roots get established. Manzanita and Scotch Broom are two big road cloggers in California, in the Coast Range and the Sierras. The armor on your legs will prevent most damage from brush. On your chest it should stop an unseen branch impaling you. That does happen. It can kill. If you're using a road frequently and you have decent neighbors, those won't be a common problem. While you'll probably start out with modest safety gear and obstacles, over time nature is going to make it more complicated and expensive to retain your road surface and ability to travel at more than very minimal speed.
At some point either you won't have fuel to justify using the bike anymore or the road will just get too unsafe to ride on. Then you'll want a good pair of boots and a frame pack so you can walk into town, buy or sell whatever you need, then walk back to your place. That won't be fun, and at that point everyone will be desperate so probably not very safe either. You'd better be praying for some kind of technological miracle, both for road surfaces and for electric cars so we can all maintain our civility in rural places.
For some good examples of ways of getting around, and the sorts of roads the Third World is living on, I encourage you to go on YouTube.com and watch a program called Ireland to Sydney: By Any Means. Its Charley Boorman of Long Way Round using trains, boats, elephant, motorcycle, helicopter, etc to travel to the far side of the world. I found it fascinating. I doubt it will be available much longer thanks to some new Internet Service Provider law that allows them to ban you from the internet for life if you "download" (which might include streaming videos) copyrighted material three times. I hope to learn exactly what they mean by "download" because that's anything you see on your screen, and even things you don't if your browser doesn't display them. And from any source. Not only are we losing our roads, but we're going to lose our TV on demand as well. Thanks very much!
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