19 October

I drive this road every day, and it's made me think about whether we've got lazy with road building. Lots of hilly bits like here, where instead of cutting the road into the topography of the land, to prevent large inclines, the road is just plonked straight on top of the topography. You drive up and down hills constantly. With modern cars you can get away with that, because they have the power to do it (note the old road nearby was designed to avoid large hills as much as possible, because large hills were a problem for old cars). Are we saving (government) money during construction, but then pushing the costs to our individual wallets over the millions of vehicle trips in the decades afterwards? For comparison, train tracks are never like this. They're built to avoid inclines wherever possible, not least because trains aren't good on hills. But it also saves energy per trip. That's a longer-term view, it costs more at first, but is much more efficient over decades.