I had to travel from PA to Herndon, VA today for work, it’s about a 4 hour drive the way I go to avoid Philly/Baltimore/DC traffic.

What angers me every time I do this drive is the condition of our roads here in Pennsylvania. They are always busted up, a mess, a patchwork of repairs and cracks and bumps and divots. Then I’m driving into Maryland and the roads are just great, then into Virginia and the roads are even better. Smooth, contiguous, no patchwork no potholes no bumps no divots, no cracks.

What the hell? Is my state just incapable of maintaining its roads? Or is there more to it?

I know we normally get a shitload of snow and ice in winter and therefore there’s a lot of salt going on our roads. Is the geology maybe to blame here as well? PennDOT is also known to be highly corrupt and our insane high state gas tax money gets diverted to the PA State Police budget and not for the roads as intended.

It also seems like we use a lot of concrete for our roadways in Pennsylvania and I don’t see that in other states.

I just don’t understand why every other state around us seems to have better roads yet ours are almost third world like condition in many areas.

Any ideas here?

I had heard, years ago, that the mob was involved in any and all road contracts in PA. Never doing a good job and thus always having shitty roads is a never ending source of state money.

I have no idea the veracity of that story, however.

I do know that state contracting for roads is the biggest allocation of taxpayer monies for many states. In Illinois former Governor Ryan got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and got Federal time.

Some years back on a flight home to PA we hit a little turbulence mid-state.....all we hear is some Mom say to her child "See honey..you can tell we're in Pennsylvania - even the sky has potholes!"

The whole flight lost it laughing.

LOL if you think PA roads are bad you should come on down to Preston County, WV. I agree MD and VA roads are nice but PA roads are not that far behind. The dirt road I live off of gets a bit of gravel tossed out a couple times a year to fill the holes but they're back within a month. The ditches get graded out maybe once a year. One mile north the road is turns to pavement with chip seal applied every 3 years. No "Welcome to Pennsylvania" sign is needed it's obvious by the road. The sad thing is going south on this road it "T's" into what once was a paved road that is rougher than the dirt one. It has deteriorated to the point of being patches and gravel on what's left of the pavement. They really should just grind it up and let it go back to dirt. This road should have been repaved over 10 years ago, every year I call and get told the same thing, "we don't have the allocation pavement for that road but we will add it to the list of roads to patch. I should take pictures.

Oklahoma is the same. You can tell when you enter Kansas or Texas.

quote:

It also seems like we use a lot of concrete for our roadways in Pennsylvania and I don’t see that in other states.

Warning: "Cliff Clavin"-style post ahead.

Non-continuous-laid concrete is terrible to build roads out of. It is fine when new, but in time it sags between the expansion joints, forming peaks (at the joints) and valleys. While the last time I traveled through the area was 13 years ago, Oklahoma's and Arkansas' portions of I-40 were awful. In Oklahoma City a few years earlier, my brother was driving a pickup truck with a loaded bed and a car on a trailer. He said the up-and-down oscillation (not trailer sway, which is from side to side) got so bad he was afraid of losing control. I think he said he had to slow down to ~35 mph. California used a lot of similarly-constructed freeways, some of them even with rain grooves (fun to ride a motorcycle on). In San Bernardino, CA in the 1990s, they used this giant, yards-wide grinding wheel to flatten out the expansion joint peaks. In the late 2000s here, there was a stretch of I-26 that got almost that bad; it is now blacktopped. That of course doesn't explain all your potholes and other problems.

I'm happy to say that Tennessee has, for the most part, nice smooth roads. When I drive US-19E or 321 into NC, the moment I cross the state line, the roads turn to crap. Small local projects take forever, though. It took almost 3 years to reconstruct an interchange (bridge widening and reconfigured ramps) on I-26, longer than it did, no doubt, to put the entire original interstate through.

Didn't your state level congressional critters enact the 3rd highest gasoline and diesel tax in the nation a few years back with the promise to fix the roads?

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Originally posted by tatortodd:
Didn't your state level congressional critters enact the 3rd highest gasoline and diesel tax in the nation a few years back with the promise to fix the roads?

Ummm…I think it’s now the HIGHEST state gas tax in the entire country now. Yes, they sold it as “going ONLY to fix our roads and bridges” but it turns out only a small percentage goes to that, the majority of it goes right into the PA State Police budget, the LARGEST and most well funded state police force in the entire country.

^^ Start a recall campaign for the bill's sponsors since they raised taxes but didn't fix the roads as promised. Best way to hold the bastards accountable.

BTW, as of January '22 PA is 3rd.

It is my understanding that PA has more STATE roads than all of New England COMBINED. This may be one of the reasons for the challenge to maintaining them.
Comparing PA to MD, the mean income is higher in Maryland (more taxes in to the state) than in PA.
Additionally, MD is a much smaller state. 12k square miles vs 46k sq.miles in PA. While MD has half the population of PA, PA is almost four times larger.
Smaller population, more money, less roads - you might begin to see an uneven comparison.

Hopefully it is to shake the cell phone out of their hands?

When I was a sales rep in the funeral service business covering east Texas, my territory included everything up to the Louisiana line.

The running joke about how bad the state roads are in Louisiana was that if a mortuary service was taking a body from east Texas into Louisiana, as soon as the hearse hit the state line the body in back would wake up and scream bloody murder.

A local road here in W. PA was in poor condition. The local officials told a contractor how much money they had and asked what he could do. He said he could repave part of the road this year and finish it the next year when they had more funds for a permanent fix. They said no,do the whole road this year. He said he could tar and chip the whole road but it wouldn't last. They spent their money on the tar and chip job. Four months later the road was as bad as before.

Here in Michigan, the roads are so bad that a candidate for governor won election because she promised to fix our roads.
Which was a lie. She planned to hike gas prices 45 cents a gallon to pay for it. Which she failed to mention during her campaign. Too late! Shes now the Governor. And the roads still suck.

When I drove a truck back in the early 70's Overdrive Magazine had a road condition poll every year. PA was always voted the worst.

At least we're consistant.

To answer the OP succinctly, SYSTEMATIC CORRUPTION AND EMBEZZLEMENT.

Occam's razor.

quote:

Originally posted by DoctorSolo:
To answer the OP succinctly, SYSTEMATIC CORRUPTION AND EMBEZZLEMENT.

Occam's razor.

This, and we're in a belt with the most freeze/thaw action.

quote:

Originally posted by preten2b:

quote:

Originally posted by DoctorSolo:
To answer the OP succinctly, SYSTEMATIC CORRUPTION AND EMBEZZLEMENT.

Occam's razor.

This, and we're in a belt with the most freeze/thaw action.

Colorado has all of it.

BAD

Yep, the top 3 reasons have been covered:

1. DoT Corruption

2. PA is smack in the middle of the ice / snow / rain belt and the change in seasons (Fall -> Winter, Winter -> Spring) oscillates more variably than any other state I know of.

3. Lots of roadway - tough to upkeep, but having grown up and worked in PA there is a huge advantage here in that one can take a half dozen roads to get someplace. Literally, taking a side road in PA is always an option. I've lived in 17 states total (yes, that many with the accompanying driver license) and there is no state that can match PA in the number of side routes one can take to get somewhere quickly.