Originally Posted by
Gresp15C
I wonder another thing, which is whether it even works to prolong the life of the roads. Maybe it's snake oil. One street in particular along my commute was just as lumpy a few months after chip-seal as it was before the treatment.
And of course different climates have different road problems. Here, the main killer of roads is freeze-thaw cycles. To protect a road from breaking up, it actually has to be sealed well enough that water doesn't get into the cracks
I've had my share of flats thanks to cheap tires, but most seem to be the result of glass on a certain stretch of bike path. At least, the flats that weren't self inflicted by careless tire installation.
Chip seal is a surface treatment. It seals the surface from water infiltration, and provides a new wearing surface. It doesn't do anything to correct large scale irregularities.
In a lot of the midwest, lots of rural roads aren't really paved with asphalt or concrete. They're gravel roads to which a chip seal topping
has been applied. They work pretty well for low traffic roads, say less than 200 vehicles a day. Because they're still really gravel roads, they move like them, and get heaves and lumps