.....I guess what we're saying is on our side of the globe, that isn't "paving". Paving in your area sure is different than in ours.
Sure is different - I doubt we'd have more than a few hundred kilometres of roads in the entirety of Australia that are 'paved' in the manner your roads are traditionally deemed 'paved'. Most of our 'paved' roads are actually more correctly called 'sealed', ie constructed of various mixes of asphalt & gravel, much of which is that 'chip sealing' that you all dislike so much but which we appreciate as being sooooo much better than the loose gravel & corrugated dirt or sand that's the most common alternative here!!
Putting it into all a little different perspective, we have almost 1,000,000 kilometres of roads here in Australia; with only a total of not quite 355,000 kms of that being sealed at all & even then those sealed kms are largely serving the over 85% of our population that lives within 50km of the Southern Eastern coastline!! And while our coastline length of almost 26,000 kms is just a little larger than the USA's at just under 20,000 kms, our total land mass (of about 7.6 million sq km vs the USA's 9.16 million sq km) is fairly close considering, so our population gets to spread out at a rate of about 360 sq km per 1000 people vs the USA's paltry 30.16 sq km per 1000 people!! Don't you always feel a bit cramped over there??!?
Anyhow, the point is that by comparison, you have a lot of people crammed fairly closely into a reasonably similar total area, with all of those people contributing in some way to maintaining your paved roads network; while our population is much smaller as well as much wider spread & further apart, so our road network (which undeniably is of a major significance to the health of our economy & btw, our economy is
still one of the healthiest in the world!!) has an exponentially smaller contribution base to fund its construction & maintenance!! So it's probably a good thing that so much of our country gets so little rain!! If much more of Aus copped the levels of rainfall our Far North Queensland area (North Eastern Australia & Cape York) gets annually for instance, we probably wouldn't have too much road network left at all after the very first Wet Season!! Our roads up that way are largely left as dirt anyway, simply because bitumen &/or concrete paving really doesn't stand up too well to the 'more than 6 feet of rain' that falls on it annually, but especially when it's concentrated into
just the couple of months of 'the Wet' as it usually is!! They don't call Australia
'A Land of Droughts or Flooding Rain' for nothing! :thumbup:
So making roads like that shown in the video clip is not only economically sensible here, it's pretty much essential if you want any form of sealing!
