Reverting paved roads to UNpaved status
One place it has been done is Butler County, Alabama.
Some cities and counties in the U.S. are avoiding the cost of repaving roads by converting them to unpaved roads.
Among the municipalities in the report is Butler County Alabama, which is listed as having 250 Miles of unpaved roads and spending- $4-Million a year on roads. The county officials say the decision to covert a road from paved to unpaved was made because it was the most cost effective way to deal with a problem road. The report does not identify the road.
In some cases, officials just let the roads deteriorate. In others they crunch up the existing road surface and add gravel to create a new road surface.
There have been about 70 such conversions, stretching along 550 miles of road in at least 27 states, according to a 2015 review of the projects produced by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.
You can read the report HERE.
You can read a story by PEW’s Stateline HERE.
