The road are actually in reasonably good shape

A very good effort to quantify road quality in the US from How Good Are American Roads? by Brian Potter.  

There is periodically Mandarin Class panics about the state of American Infrastructure.  The source of the panic frequently varies.  Sometimes it is bridges, sometimes the rail system, sometimes roads, sometimes maritime ports, sometimes airports.  And always, the panic has one solution spend more money.

Cheap, safe and reliable transportation is indeed a critical foundation for all modern economies.  But whenever you go looking for the empirical basis for any particular panic, it rarely is built on much more than anecdotes.  Which is no basis for allocating scarce capital on long term assets.

Fortunately, at the local and tactical level, engineers tend to be more level headed and do a better job of tending to the quality of the nation's infrastructure with the most critical elements usually receiving the most attention.

Whenever this does not happen, it is almost always where a taxing jurisdiction (City, County or State) has been unduly profligate (usually on pensions) and have foregone necessary maintenance or capital upgrades.  That is, of course, a governance issue more than an engineering one.

Potter finds it challenging to gather comparable consistent data (international being more obscure than within the US) to establish a clear and uniform picture but his findings are interesting.  

One facet of infrastructure that doesn’t get all that much attention is roads, despite the fact that they’re crucial transportation infrastructure, and probably the infrastructure that Americans interact with most directly and consistently. The US has the largest road network in the world, about 4.3 million miles of road, and Americans drive much more than residents in most other countries. Good-quality roads are important for a functioning economy, and rough roads inflict costs in the form of reduced vehicle speeds.

The US is about 4% of the global population, has 10% of the global roads, 25% of the global rail system, 28% of air travel/freight,  and is about 26% of the global economy.  The US also has a far greater riverine system and associated river transport than virtually any other country.  Altogether the US has an immense, intricate, and multi-layered transport network allowing an unusual degree of mode shifting (changing between forms of transport) compared to most other countries.

As a single example, Russia has very little national highway system and is primarily dependent on rail for most transport and haulage.

So what did Potter find?

How good is American road infrastructure? How does it compare with roads built in other countries?

Overall, the quality of US interstates is very high, while the quality of roads in major cities is quite poor. And while there’s some anecdotal evidence that US roads are worse than European roads, I wasn’t able to find much international road quality data to compare. The limited data I found points to the US not being a huge outlier in road quality. But more data is needed to compare accurately.

[snip]

With non-interstates, we see more variation. Broadly, highly rural states tend to have higher quality roads than more urbanized states, though there’s a decent amount of variation. California, which is reasonably rural, nevertheless comes in third from the bottom. Interestingly, I expected cold places to have lower road quality in general due to things like freeze-thaw cycles and the impact of road salting, but there doesn’t seem to be much correlation. Plenty of cold places (North Dakota, Wyoming, Minnesota) have good-quality roads, while plenty of warm places (Louisiana, New Mexico, California) have poor-quality roads.

[snip]

While urban roads are poor in general, there’s a large amount of variation. Cities like Atlanta and Minneapolis have less than 10% of their roads are poor quality or worse, while more than 60% of the roads in San Francisco and Los Angeles are poor. But in general, most major cities aren’t doing great: in 13 of the 19 largest US cities, more than 1/3rd of the roads are poor quality. And here again we see that cold climate doesn’t seem to have much impact on road quality, with cold places like Minneapolis and New York near the top, while warm cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Dallas are near the bottom.

I was astonished to see Atlanta rated so highly.  I travel all over the US and am moderately familiar with road quality in most regions.  I would have placed Atlanta much more in the middle, though the rating may be based on SMSA rather the City proper.

As Potter notes, weather conditions are not strongly correlated with road quality which is interesting. 

He doesn't draw attention to it, but road quality is also clearly correlated with policy.  The ten worst performing states, no matter which measures are being used, are almost always Blue States, even where they have large and strong economies (ex.  New York and California).  Only Louisiana as a generally Red State shows up in the shame category.

My suspicion is that this perhaps a function two different issues.  Blue states often like White Elephant type transportation projects (urban trams, high speed rail, etc.) which consume an immense amount of both Capex and Opex without generating the revenues for maintenance of the system.  Further, most of these states have reasonably shaky state budgets with especially high pension burdens which consume so much of the budget that infrastructure needs end up getting postponed.  

Anyway, an interesting effort on the part of Potter.