Bumpy ride
Why America's roads are in tatters

http://harpers.org/archive/2017/11/bumpy-ride/
Publisher:  Harper's Magazine
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article

A look at America's negleced infrastructure of roads and bridges. Despite declining conditions, particularly on secondary roads, Republicans continued to press for less State funding- which they termed "devolution".

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Speaking over the rattling of the truck, Slater pointed to the spot where an Amish woman had been driving a buggy when her horse stepped into a deep pothole and injured its leg. (Patches, age eleven, had to be put down after the incident, she later told me.) He showed me where he'd watched a school bus tilt sideways as the driver struggled to get out of a massive crater in the middle of the road. After the incident, Slater hauled in fifty cubic yards of clay and sand with a dump truck and filled the pit himself.

Like thousands of other secondary roads in the country, Brickyard Road is transforming into gravel and dirt. Before my visit, Nancy, Leon’s wife, had emailed me pictures of the street. If the photos had been black and white, it would have been easy to imagine they were from a hundred years ago.