This is a great analysis but it does focus exclusively on ‘roughness’, which is obviously important but isn’t the be-all-end-all of road quality.

One area I notice in particular that roads in the northeast US subjectively feel worse than Europe is in quality of road markings. Constant plow scraping and harsh salting seems to destroy markings.

I think it also shows up in the overall fit and finish of road infrastructure - edging and barriers, signage, lighting, maintenance of medians, how curbs and furniture contribute to junction legibility… and of course bridges.

One major reason is that European countries typically have national road agencies and consistent standards across the country (because, generally, smaller and less federal). US’s patchwork of federal, state and local road maintenance leads to vastly different budgets and department priorities across the network.

The article, and as of this comment, this thread, don't seem to contain particularly deep (ahem) comparisons of road construction, such as this article from Nature about bridge layer differences between US, Germany, England, and France:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12987-8

For roadbeds, here's Canada versus various EU countries, unfortunately US isn't included:

https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl07027/llcp_07_03.c...

This piece starts with 4 different paving approaches, relatively distinct, yet each having ~40 year lifespans (US old and new, France, Germany):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209575642...

The discussion goes into what might we mean by "how good"?

PS. US road builders better hope the measure is never total quality divided by time-to-construct. They'd have some real ground to cover (ahem):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw3K_obepyo&t=1s

> Interestingly, in all cases urban roads are worse quality than rural roads, presumably because they see higher traffic than rural roads.

There's more infrastructure under urban roads. Crews come in to fix some utility, shred a section of a lane, patch it poorly with dissimilar materials, and leave.

The SFBay I-880 and US-101 are always packed, often under construction, but still pothole-filled, with sections of extreme roughness. Compare this to our OR neighbors, where there are signs saying "your tax dollars at work" by ORDOT everywhere. I used to scoff at this as a display of insecurity, but apparently (from TFA at least), Oregonians' tax dollars _are_ at work.

CA takes so many tax dollars from my hands. Why aren't they "at work"?

> Interestingly, I expected cold places to have lower road quality in general due to things like freeze-thaw cycles and the impact of road salting, but there doesn’t seem to be much correlation. Plenty of cold places (North Dakota, Wyoming, Minnesota) have good-quality roads

Not sure about those states in particular, but I have anecdotally noticed that some of the places with the harshest winters do some of the least road salting -- because salt is mostly usable for light to moderate snowfall and the people who live in the harshest climates are often better equipped to drive on hard packed snow.