Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
any city with savage amounts of freeze/thaw cycle in the winter (like chicago) will have worse street surface conditions than any city that doesn't (like phoenix).
that shit utterly destroys paving of all types. and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it other than spending trillions to literally repave every linear mile of road surface every other year.
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Older cities that simply laid down some asphalt over old brick and cobblestone streets (this includes Chicago) have particularly short service lives, especially when those old brick streets were built cheaply and without proper paver base preparation, and on top of very old collapsing water/sewer lines.
Asphalt in particular needs routine maintenance and sealing or the freeze/thaw wrecks it, even with a good road base. But if you maintain it (which many suburbs do) you can still have a long service life in our climate if the road's foundation is solid and drains reasonably well. Where it doesn't - i.e. most of the city proper and the older suburbs - you're basically just boned.
Well constructed concrete roadways last plenty long when built right, even in Chicagoland - there are parts of the Eisenhower where you're still riding on 1950s pavement, and the Kennedy south of the junction is already 25 years old but still in fine shape.