Moving to Great Falls - Some questions

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by Minnesconsinite

I definitely agree about the bad roads. They don't take care of them here the way they take care of them in the midwest. They're mostly "man-plowed" (aka... if they're driven over enough times by the general public they flatten, haha!).

The difference isn't the maintenance level; it's the climate.

Winter in the midwest and points east is pretty much -- winter all winter. Once it freezes hard, it doesn't often thaw til spring. So roads only get one upheaval per winter.

But in Montana, what with the chinook winds that happen every couple weeks, the roadbeds get frozen and thawed and refrozen over and over and over. And every freeze means a certain amount of damage and breakup, as water that leeches down into the pavement freezes, expands, and breaks it up. So instead of one major upheaval per winter, Montana roads get hammered 20 or 30 times over the same timeframe. That's 20 or 30 times as much weather-caused damage as the same road would get in the midwest. (Plus a road with this microbreakup going on below the surface takes more damage from every vehicle that passes over it, since its structural integrity is affected, repeatedly.)

So even if that MT road gets 10 times as much upkeep as any road further east, it is still going to wind up in worse condition by the time summer arrives for good. And since MT doesn't have 10 or 20 or 30 times as much money to pour into road repairs compared to the midwest -- their condition is as you see -- often kinda rough by spring. (And you really can't do road construction/major repairs in winter.)

We used to joke about driving over the roofs of cars that had fallen into potholes on 10th Ave.South in Great Falls. They repaved the whole street every summer, and occasionally gutted and rebuilt bad sections from scratch (really big potholes happen because the repeated freeze/thaw cycles have disrupted the roadbed itself), but every winter would break it up again.