Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1889 — What Good Roads Would Cost. [ARTICLE]

What Good Roads Would Cost.

Philadelphia Press. Road making is worse-done in the United States than any other work paid by luxes, except teaching geography and grammar, and our roads are, without exception, the worst to be found in any counI try not The roads . of Pennsylvania arc, for instance, t infinitely below those of-back-' | woods countries like Spain or Italy, or poverty-stricken lands like India, where the greats mass •of people own but one shirt, and do not always wear that. Yet there | is no mystery about good roads, ! and they are not expensive. A i civil engineer, Mr. J. F. Pope, has i just been putting some hard facts I about roads in Texas papers. He shows that even in Texas, where labor is high and population sparce, a good road eighteen feet wide in the track, with four feet margin on each side, can be laid down for an average of 52,J00 per mile complete, and kept in repair for SIOO a mile. All that is needed is a good line in the first place, skilled supervision in in laying out the drainage, and broken stone, fine enough to go through an inch and a half ring, nine inches in the center and four and a half, inches on .the side, with the free- use of steam-rollers. Main country roads of this sort would eave their cost every ten years and their interest every six months. The money and labor now wasted on poor roads would build them; but we despair of ever seeing it done.