I'm not an expert when it comes to roads and highways. I mean, usually we talk about bike lanes around here. But today I learned, via Brian Potter over at Construction Physics, that there is such a thing as an International Roughness Index (or IRI). In simple terms, it measures how much a car bounces up and down over a given distance of driving, and it is usually expressed in units like "millimeters per meter." A low IRI is good. It means less bouncing up and down. And a high IRI is bad. It means more bouncing up and down, suggesting the road is poor. This, it turns out, is the most commonly used index in the world for evaluating whether a road sucks or not.

And in this recent post, Brian uses the index to chart out road quality across the US. Here's non-interstate roads for the 19 largest metro areas:

At least two things can be readily gleaned from the data in his post. Number one, US Interstates tend to be pretty good. More than 80% of the mileage is classified as "good" or "very good." Non-interstate roads are, on the other hand, much poorer. And in every single case, urban roads are worse than rural roads, presumably because of their higher traffic volumes. Number two, there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between climate and road quality. Intuitively, one would think that freeze-thaw cycles and road salt would give cold cities the worst roads, but that is not actually the case.

Los Angeles sucks the most.

Cover photo by Thaddaeus Lim on Unsplash

There was once a time -- generally in the early 20th century -- when some people used to order their new home from a catalogue.

You would pick the model you wanted and then all of the required materials, along with assembly instructions, would get mailed to you.

Mind you, this was never the most popular way to make a new home. According to Brian Potter, mail-order homes, even at their peak, represented less than 10% of all yearly housing starts in the US.

So arguably, it was never entirely successful as a model. Building a home is tough work, especially without fancy power tools.

Still, it's interesting to think about its relative simplicity: "Here's a bunch of raw building materials and some instructions. Go figure it out. It's like an Ikea bookshelf, except it's your entire house."

Contrast this to what it takes to build new urban housing today. There is a litany of new barriers. It's nowhere near as simple as ordering a kit of parts; so it's no wonder housing is more expensive.

For more on "The Rise and Fall of the Mail-Order Home", check out this recent post from Brian Potter's Construction Physics newsletter.

Brian Potter, of Construction Physics, recently tried to determine which cities build skyscrapers the fastest.

Here's how he went about that:

• He started by looking up the 50 largest cities in the world on Wikipedia

• He then pulled data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to get a list of every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was over 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area

• The result was a list of 986 skyscrapers completed in 39 cities, most of which (~740) were completed in the US, China, Japan, and Canada

• Finally, he calculated completed square feet per year and made some charts

Here are the results:

And here's one thing he had to say about them:

Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn't the US, but Canada, with an average skyscraper construction speed of half that of the US’s.

For a lot more information on this topic, click here.