What Was the Good Roads Movement?

@MrMoody - There is another reason to improve the highway system – weather. On the roads conditions get a lot worse during inclement weather. If you have potholes and cracked roads all over the place, I think that the condition gets even worse.

Couple that with the fact that most of our roads and highways are over fifty years old, and you can see that we have a ticking time bomb. How long will it be before we start experiencing major disasters that will jolt the national consciousness on this issue?

@Charred - We need more bicycle paths where we live. Our city is a small metropolis where we have a lot of people who choose to bike to work.

Bike paths in my opinion are not a luxury – they are a necessity. Enabling cyclists to have access to these paths is needed to make it safer for them to bike to work. You don’t want cyclists on the main roads, if you can avoid it at all.

@NathanG - I don’t know. But our nation has needed highway road improvement for a long time in my opinion. I know that the government has passed some stimulus measures to direct money towards these infrastructure projects.

I only hope that a lot of money has been properly spent and that we are in fact building our roads again. Do you realize how dangerous it is to drive on crumbling roads? We don’t have an excuse for this. If Europe can do it, as the article points out, we can too.

The city where we live must have more potholes in its roads per square mile than any city in America. It seems that there are always crews on the roads; construction is always taking place here or there. While they are doing so they reroute traffic until the work is done.

Why is there so little emphasis on good roads? I guess I should really ask why it takes so much time, since it’s obvious that something is being done, but it’s so late in my opinion.

Is it possible that city and state governments think that there are so many other things that are more important, that roads get pushed down the list of priorities?

I always thought the current state of our highway system was because of all the road construction that took place during the Depression. How interesting that the idea of the government maintaining the roads actually took off around 1880!

This also sounds kind of like a safety issue to me, but from what I understand, people weren't always so obsessed with public safety as they are now. But I feel like poorly marked and potholed roads are a recipe for a lot of accidents to happen!

@SZapper - Good point. I'm actually really surprised that bicyclists were the first to lobby for road construction. As the article said, most people think that highway and road improvement started because of cars, not bicycles. I know I for one never learned about the Good Roads Movement in history class.

I also agree that most roads aren't cyclist friendly these days. I see bicycle lanes in some cities every now and then, but they're usually not laid out in a particularly bicycle friendly way. I know I wouldn't want to ride a bike on some of these "bicycle lanes."

It's hard to imagine this country with unpaved, terrible roads. The government, at both the state and local level, puts a lot of money and manpower into building and maintaining our highways and roads. I imagine this is probably a direct result of the Good Roads Movement.

I actually agree that having a good highway system and easy to navigate roads is good for our economy. How could you transport good and services across the country if the roads are terrible? You couldn't! Also I imagine less people would drive from state to state for vacation if the roads were unpleasant.