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Comment by vermilingua | Hacker News Reader

This is entirely off topic, but scrolling around the map you linked, it looks like massive portions of Nebraska and surrounds are gridded by roads. Is this true? I'm an Australian, never been to the US, but is that common? I can't imagine that kind of project here.

EDIT: Massive portions of the US! I find this mindblowing.

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Note that each grid square is 1 mile by 1 mile. Long history of that, it is an interesting historical rabbit hole.

An interesting historical note is that across much of the west, each of those mile square sections was divided up into 16 pieces at 40-acres, which IIRC was the smallest unit of land you could purchase from the federal government.

You'll still find a lot of old homestead remnants across the west -- I used to climb through a few of them on a ranch I spent time at as a kid.

See:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(United_States_land_su...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Ordinance_of_1785

Also, if you look closely, many of the boundaries are just dirt path, not maintained road. And some don't have roads - it just appears that way from above because one crop/field ends and another starts.

But, yeah, the amount of roads, even just basic gravel or dirt double-track, is pretty amazing. I knew some of it existed, but didn't quite realize it spanned the entire middle third of the US until just now.

People sometimes forget that the middle of the US was populated by millions of immigrants from Northern and Central Europe. Lots of those towns you're looking at were German-speaking towns up until WWI. There are still tons of Norwegian and Swedish cities and towns out there. All of those immigrants were given plots of land to farm, and developed communities accordingly. The Homestead Act was the way that millions made a new life for themselves in the new world.

If you want to have even more fun, most of those roads have Street View.

I find this fascinating! Do you mind if I ask what you found surprising, exactly? Is it more that those fairly sparsely populated areas have so many roads, or is it more that the inland areas are populated at all? For what it's worth, quite a few people live in the plains states in the US. Not many relative to the real population centers in the country, but I think perhaps significantly more than the inland areas of Australia.

Primarily the sheer number and scale of roads, yes. I’ve done a lot of driving inland in Aus, and even where there is a lot of arable land it is not nearly so neatly or densely carved up, generally just hectares of paddocks/farmland with fire and access trails and fences.

I’m utterly awed at the scale of infrastructure that must’ve been involved in building those thousands of kilometres of roads, let alone maintaining them (I imagine they aren’t particularly “maintained”, but all the same).

As an American who has traveled abroad, I can assure the vast majority of our roads are "maintained" only in the sense that they are passable roads. There really are no standards that are adhered to. It's common where I live to find potholes that would destroy the front suspension of any car attempting to traverse them.

But they could be maintained, if people wanted...

They absolutely cannot. Not in their entirety. The sheer number of roads necessary to be maintained will require more labor and material than we can afford at that scale.

Additionally, many of them criss-cross private land. And some segments of the US population is pretty particular about keeping people of their land. Yeah, hard to do in the mid-west and plains, but that doesn't stop them putting up threatening signs all over.

Car's aren't nearly as fragile as people make them out to be.

You might be surprised how well maintained they are. We (I am from the US) spend a lot of money on infrastructure for cars and trucks. This trades off to some extent against rail infrastructure, though freight rail is more robust than commuter / passenger rail.

Thanks for pointing this out! I'm also an Australian, and my mind is similarly blown. I grew up in Sydney, and whenever I would fly into Melbourne it was always a point of interest to compare the aerial view of Sydney's sprawling mess of streets with Melbourne CBD's clean, and logical grid layout.

It's all carved up for farming. This was the norm in my home state (Iowa). They're all gravel roads mind you, so not ideal driving if you don't live there. You kick up dust the whole way.

I would imagine that the middle of the US would look a lot like the middle of Australia if it wasn’t good farm land.

There's a slow-rolling crisis as many local governments find they can't afford to maintain (much less rebuild) so many roads. Many are being downgraded to gravel.

Ohio is the U.S. State with the highest road density, IIRC.

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