Back To The Future?

[spenser1058]

The New York Times has this article about Omaha reverting to gravel roads to save money:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/omahas-answer-to-costly-potholes-go-back-to-gravel-roads.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

Oftentimes, we seem to see that with Glenda's brick streets here in downtown O-town, whose undulations and potholes have no doubt increased revenues of alignment shops across The City Beautiful. On small side streets, traffic calming with brick is a wonderful thing. Doing it on major through streets like Summerlin (especially with all of Howard's school buses) and Central is obnoxious. There is a compromise as demonstrated on Mariposa as opposed to just ripping up the asphalt off old brick streets.

[popsiclebrandon]

The worst part about the brick streets is they just pave the potholes with asphalt instead of re-bricking. So might as well just pave them.

[JFW657]

Summerlin was paved with asphalt for several decades up until around the late 80's or so. They did a big underground utilities upgrade on East Pine St one summer that involved pulling up all the bricks, digging up the street, laying new sewer pipes and fiber optic cables etc, etc, covering it all back up then replacing the bricks.

About the same time, they brought in this huge machine that used a combination of flames and a big grinding contraption on the underside, to melt and scrape the old asphalt off of the bricks on Summerlin.

 

[spenser1058]

It might be just my imagination, but it has never seemed like the roads taken back to the original brick by the process you noted have been as smooth as the streets that were brick all along and certainly not as smooth as the new bricking along Mariposa (part of which has since been damaged by construction trucks over by the new apartment towers.)

[JFW657]

7 hours ago, spenser1058 said:

It might be just my imagination, but it has never seemed like the roads taken back to the original brick by the process you noted have been as smooth as the streets that were brick all along and certainly not as smooth as the new bricking along Mariposa (part of which has since been damaged by construction trucks over by the new apartment towers.)

Maybe it's because they don't pull the bricks up and smooth out the underlayment beneath them then put them back down.

[codypet]

Bingo or they use roadway limerock base which shouldn't be getting wet as the base.  It'll wash out.  A brick road done right is Curry Ford Road between Bumby and Fern Creek.