When I lived in Portland, OR I often thought it would be nice to have a rough road race. One that went on all the paving stone roads, rough old concrete roads, streets with train tracks in them and what not. There were more to choose from back then though.

Yes He did, but that was just the construction,large stones on the bottom with decreasing sizes in the layers above so that they all bedded down, NO Tar, the mdern stuff is Tarmacadam,and thats fine when rolled nice and flat.

Although not a primary purpose of the chip seal, it is nice in cold climates. I haven't seen it used much in Utah. I'm from Montana and it's common there. The rougher surface does provide better traction in snowy/icy conditions where the tips of the chips will melt through and provide a traction surface.

Windshields don't like it though.

Tennessee generally has very good road surfaces. Pennsylvania, not so much ;)

Come "WAY DOWN SOUTH" to Sussex. We just have broken roads with potholes.

Not much chip and seal this year after the bad- long winter as many of the roads are so bad they are being stripped and relaid.

Mostly smooth asphalt around me. If you go out into the rural areas where it's "county maintenance" then it's often chip seal.

the bad- long winter , Aww come on , in Sussex ?
I envy your temperature's though, 12 deg with heavy rain and wind for the last 48 hours here.
cheers

I was touring in Canada and New England/New York recently. I was amazed at how poorly surfaced a lot of highways were. I can understand them getting potholed - you have hard winters - but the quality of the repairs was often terrible. It appeared that someone had come along, dumped some asphalt into the holes, made a desultory effort to smooth it over and no effort whatever to integrate it into the surrounding road surface. As a result it was bumpy and absolutely certain to fall apart as soon as the frost gets into it next winter. This was true in much of Quebec but reached its peak in Maine/New Hampshire. I was surprised. I'd have imagined that the US love-affair with the car would have ensured that there was a lot of public pressure for better maintenance.

The original Macadam was stones bound in clay. Later on, the stones were bound with tar, or "Coal Tar" . Also known as "Bitumen", on account that it's extracted from "Bituminous Coal". Thus it is called "Tarmac".

I watched a rider go over the bars on an Eastern Washington highway when a relatively fresh chip unstuck from the road and stuck to his tire -- it was large enough to jam between the tire and the fork crown.

Made me glad I was on a touring bike designed with enough fender clearance that banana slugs stuck to my tire roll through without sticking to the fenders ;-)

In my region , which the Highway officials call "District Ten" of the New York State DOT. (though we locals refer to it as Long Island), the new roads are hot rolled asphalt. Nassau County does a better job than the state of NY.
Repaving is done quite meticulously. First the road is marked up with white spray paint. Second , patches of badly broken asphalt are cut out with a diamond rotary saw, and replaced with fresh hot rolled asphalt. Then the whole road way is covered with two inches of hot rolled asphalt.

In other words, the roads are repaired before they are paved over with new asphalt.

It doesn't always work as planned. Most of the bad areas break up again, and it always seems that there is water seeping out of the ground in those places. Perhaps they paved over a natural spring? In front of my house in Matinecock, they actually dug down 5 feet, replaced all the clay soil and rocks with fresh aggregate, and installed a "French Drain" , or 12 inch diameter perforated pipe, and connected that to the storm drain. They also replaced the Kerb in front of my house. Kerbs in general seal out water , to prevent the road from being undermined by frost heave. When water gets under the tarmac and freezes, it expands (as ice) , and breaks the tarmac into small pieces.

Here's a photo of a paving job at a Long Island Rail Road station:
http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...e/IMG_0078.jpg
Note the bricks for the pedestrian areas. This has become more common in recent years.
I know in the UK, "pavements" means what we Americans call "Sidewalks" , but in this case, the bricks are called "pavers". Recently , some roads are being built with the crosswalks being paved in bricks.
I was going to show a photo of the road in front of my house, but it only shows the driveway.

Yep, lotta sidewalks built from pavers these days. Lotta "brick" crosswalks too, but the "brick" crosswalks around here are actually just concrete with a brick pattern mold and brick coloring.

Yikes! I've had chipseal aggregate stick to my tire and ping off my brake caliper or fork a number of times but never had one jam like that - knock on wood.

It's different everywhere, especially in Texas where you have so many different types of subgrades. The older roads here along the Gulf Coast are crap unless they're brand new and/or not used very much, mostly black tar or concrete depending on a lot of factors.

Chip seal is mostly used further inland where the subgrade is better and not gumbo as it is around here, but I've seen it used along the coast too depending on anticipated traffic and other factors. They supposedly do hold up better to heavier traffic and are considered maintenance free.

The gumbo subgrade here is a big problem right now because of the heat, as you can see in the picture below. I'm having to switch back to my old MTB for a while because of the 1"+ cracks in the local mup, that the city is taking their sweet time in fixing, probably because of all the heat damage going on now with broken water mains, and roads etc.

Seems like it's mostly good ol' asphalt here. No trouble with the road surface material itself at all. Unfortunately, the stone in it has lousy temper, and it turns into a cracked and pitted monstrosity almost immediately. Anchorage was similar, but instead of cracking and breaking up, it just got horrific ruts from the studded tires. They had a far lower tolerance for surface irregularity on account of snowplows.

It's just kind of garbage here. Potholes and bad patching as long as they can get away with it.

Yea the winter was bad here. 3 months of frost and we and the Highway departments were not used to it. What made it worse was the Patch and fill done the previous year that did not stand up to a second bad winter.

And Don't know if you have noticed it but the South East is now the Holiday spot for England. Plenty of sun- plenty of warmth and plenty of Wind. Not much Rain so drought conditions prevail. We could do with your rain but you can keep the 12Deg C.

Ffffuuu, so that is what it's called. Whenever I see references to chipseal roads, I always thought it was something else but I drilled down google images to find a few different 'varieties' to what I thought chip sealing was.

Where I live, all of the roads are smooth asphalt. The chipseal surfaces I know of are like secondary sidewalks, and they are pretty rare. Usually this is only through parts that are strictly for pedestrian walking, and though parks and such. All of the road surfaces are originally smooth paved, but as we all know over time it cracks and develops 'character'.

Overall, we got average roads here I guess. The local newspaper likes to put out small articles now and then highlighting how potholed our streets are, but those are usually on the heavier trafficed roads. Taking the secondary roads as a cyclist isn't an issue.

http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/h...ril2010365.jpg

http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/h...ril2010355.jpg

The USA is a huge country and it is not nearly as uniform in either customs or attitudes or roads for that matter as many may think, especially those from afar. We have all sorts of roads from deer trails to super highways. I live on a dirt road. Just depends where you are in the US, I think out biggest problem is autos, not the roads. Nothing like being a bug on the grill of a F150.

LC