The increasing size of American cars has done a lot of damage to our roads. They’re less safe for the roads, for pedestrians, and even sometimes for the occupants.
Tangentially, thanks to red light structure in the city, I often make just as much forward progress as the cars around me on my bike.
But i need my ford f350 heavy duty or my co-worker might think i’m gay
The roads are in such bad shape because sprawling road (read: car) infrastructure is unsustainable and bankrupts cities. What we need is economically sustainable micromobility and public transit infrastructure.
If you ever go and look around America on Google maps, it seems insane how much sprawl and unnecessary road infrastructure you have. I can’t imagine America being able to effectively maintain these
I contribute to OpenStreetMap through surveying and tracing. It’s given me some perspective on how wasteful our infrastructure is and how colossally unusable it is on foot.
(If anyone’s interested, please, please ask me about it; I highly recommend it as a way to have more fun on walks and hyper-familiarize yourself with where you live. The built-in, web-based iD editor is great on desktop, and the third-party Vespucci editor is great on Android. Unfortunately, the appearance of Go Map!! on iOS seems possibly lackluster, but it seems just as functional.)
As a fellow OSM mapper, thanks for advertising. :D
Building roads is only sexy every twenty years or so. Maintaining roads has never been sexy, to my knowledge.
Moving away from roads and cars almost entirely? I dunno how we get political will for that.
Maintaining roads has never been sexy
Well I can’t say building or maintaining roads gets me sexually aroused, but why is maintaining roads not “sexy”?
Politicians don’t campaign on maintainance of infrastructure, so it’s not sexy.