While they probably wouldn't last a 1000 years due to car traffic, they'd still last longer than modern roads. Modern roads aren't built for durability, they're built for ease/speed of construction and repair, as well as smoothness of the surface (which matters a lot more to modern vehicles due to the speed they travel).Ugggh, this chapter triggered me so bad. I'd like them to see what one of those old roman cobblestone roads looks like after a year of thousands of trucks and cars drive over it each day.
Yes and no, it all depends on what they are used for, roman roads would outlast modern roads if it was with foot traffic and horse and carriage, but not modern industrial vehicles or even cars, however modern roads do have one fatal flaw, and that's the fact they are more susceptible to overgrowth and plants literally growing through them, which roman roads didn't due to how they were constructed (though it could still happen if done wrong).While they probably wouldn't last a 1000 years due to car traffic, they'd still last longer than modern roads. Modern roads aren't built for durability, they're built for ease/speed of construction and repair, as well as smoothness of the surface (which matters a lot more to modern vehicles due to the speed they travel).
That all said: Cars don't really matter, at least they don't cause much more wear and tear than wagons/carts did (maybe less, actually, due to rubber tires). Trucks are what fuck up roads.
My main annoyance about the comparison was this point, you can't compare apples and oranges. You can't build a road in Alaska and expect it to be the same as building one in Arizona, there are too many differences. If you build the road on crap soil or permafrost, it won't be a long lasting road, ask anyone who has had to deal with peat bogs.What really messes up a road isn't just the weight and frequency of the vehicles and plant growth.
It's also the land under the substrate and the weather.
Where I live in Texas, there's a lot of soft soil because a good deal of this land used to be the seafloor of a massive inland sea. Great for growing things, but terrible if you want something to have a solid foundation. It's why pier-and-beam foundations are so common in older houses here - it's easy to repair areas that sag from the foundation settling just by using hydraulic jacks and inserting taller supports.
And with the sort of rain we get here? Heh. News flash, people. Texas is most empathically NOT DRY. We may have our droughts, but in the wetter years? We get as much or even more rainfall per year than London does. (If you want "dry", go up to the panhandle, near Oklahoma. That's shit is dry.)
Soft soil plus torrential rains means sometimes our roads wind up looking like a horribly abused road in Pittsburg or Milwaukee. Even roads made of reinforced concrete wind up falling apart in a year or two because the engineers didn't properly prepare the substrate to handle this soil combined with our weather.
Here's an example of a concrete road in my town that's not even five years old... All this carnage is caused by the soil under the substrate shifting and eroding.