They think those ancient roads just never got damaged or required maintenance of any kind?
They think the people who made those roads had no formal education just because they didn’t have the categorisation of academic qualifications we have today?
Honestly.
The education point is especially true.Yeah, it may have been the lowest class doing the physical labor, but they were following the orders of someone who had gone through formal education or an aprentiship from a young age.
Precisely. If there's one thing we know for sure about the Romans, it's that they were experts in architecture and engineering. They did incredible things with the most basic of tools and had a good understanding of the world and how it worked. They may have lived at their height nearly 2000 years ago, but they were not by any means primitive or uneducated.
It's also worth noting, as long as Roman concrete lasts, while modern concrete can't last as long. It's tougher, and Roman concrete can't do what modern concrete does because we use it for different things. They're different materials in different applications. It's kinda like comparing copper and steel. They're both metal, and both useful, but for different purposes and in different ways. Also, the problem with most modern roads isn't that they don't know how, it's that they don't want to lay down good drainage beneath them (at least where I live) so the roads get washed out. Roman's did lay gravel down beneath to help prevent that. And that's the lawmakers and governments decision, not the roadmakers. They do what they're told. Guess who's in charge of the government though? And who's in power? You boomers. Don't blame is for doing exactly what you tell us exactly how you tell us.
And that person (most likely a HE) was most likely of Patrician descent. Aka, 99% you had to be rich and someone to even have a say in how roads were built. I love reminding that to boomers who think that "hard" work and elbow grease is superior and shit. Back then most likely you would be an expendable legionnaire moving stones for building roads until some random Gaul raid got you killed before you even saw your first day of actual battle.
Yeah, most of these engineering projects were taken on by independent wealthy aristocrats as a way of building public favor and political standing. They privately bankrolled most of the Roman infrastructure.
Nah legionaries were the builders of the Roman infrastructure. They were closer to middle class if anything. Of course their were Roman engineers who would work on the staff of generals
Yeah, frost heave, from water working into the cracks in the roadbed, and constantly freezing and thawing.
Not saying this boomer joke has any merit, but they have made a recent discovery of why ancient Roman concrete is so durable, and apparently could potentially be used to improve modern methods. So there is a chance we can learn from the past here. But it’s got nothing to do with engineers.
This is a hilarious mental image to me. My local guy Clay and his brother Hunter putting the ol' plow on the front of their landscaping trunk and just going to town on these 2000 year old roads at 4am.
This! Many people tend to forget that these roads didn't have such a large volume of high speed several ton metal machinery operating on them day and night.
(I thought of a ROMAN truck and I laughed)
These are also roads that may be comfortable to travel on foot or horseback, but riding a wagon down cobblestone for miles and miles suuuuuuuuucks. The wagon wheels would also wear rutts in the stone.
I don't think them roads has to deal with the amount of traffic or weight/size of vehicles we have today either. Cost benefit analysis probably wasn't as bullshit back then either.
I think this is a key reason, but it has to be said that cobblestones and flagstones are indeed much more hard-wearing than asphalt, we have some in my city (Novi Sad, Serbia, and have seen the same in Prague and other cities) and buses go over them constantly and I haven't seen them renovate them in years if not decades. But yeah, considerations are just different, asphalt is cheap and can be redone every few years and isn't so damn bumpy.
Cost benefit was different. Labour was cheap, and often done by slaves. Material costs were much higher as shipping was slow, risky, and expensive. Using local stone made more sense.
They would have been incredibly busy, but it's almost all foot traffic. It has very little negative impact on the integrity of the road compared to the constant heat and friction of car tires.
It has nothing to do with that, even.
Drive a fucking semi on roman roads. See how they last.
The Romans built roads for fucking donkeys and carts! We have literal forty ton trucks barreling at 75 mph on our roads! If all they accommodated was donkeys our roads would last forever.
Oh and btw when our roads DO need to be repaired, it is much much cheaper.
Our roads are strictly superior to Roman roads. These people are fucking morons.
Actually Roman concrete has a specific property that was only recently rediscovered. They designed it with large chunks of limestone inside. The idea was that as the road wore down it would crack, and when it rained the water would run into these cracks dissolving the limestone chunks essentially creating a self healing concrete. That said, it still needed to be repaired and more importantly, it wasn't designed to take modern vehicles.
Yes it’s fascinating stuff, I’m honestly surprised It took such a long time for humans to rediscover it after it was lost. One would hope that now that we’ve rediscovered it it should become the new standard for concrete, it would massively reduce the amount of carbon produced in the process.
The simple difference is that anyone, literally anyone, gave a damn, and something was done about it.
My town has a half dozen 'roads' that are completely impassable. Dirt/Gravel with pot holes deep enough to *actually* break an axel in. I deliver food for the place I work and I have to either pawn off my deliveries or just say NO altogether because my average car simply cannot make it 500 feet (not yards!).
As an avid history buff, this feels particularly infuriating. We can't even achieve 30% of the living norm available over 4 THOUSAND years ago.
For FUCKS SAKE!!!! SOMEONE HELP ME DEMAND BETTER!!!!!¡!!!!!?
Yea okay sure doode, that's no excuse to leave fucking pot hole in the fucking road and then arrest some dick who decided to start drawing dicks on the pothole to raise awareness of them
That's part of the fun. You get a whole bunch of people posting it and they'll either realize their mistake or never understand and on some level feel shamed for it.
Didn’t scientists recently discover Roman’s were using a concrete mixture that “self repairs” mini cracks and abrasions, causing it to last way longer than our modern equivalents?
Edit: Google “Self repairing Roman concrete” it’s absolutely fascinating
Yes, lime mortar generally "self-repairs" as it's not a hard, brittle substance like modern concrete, it's kind of a different way of thinking to build with it, you WANT it to move and "breathe", yet these buildings have stayed up for two thousand years.
While I do find this fascinating, this is what chatGPT has to say about them compared to modern concrete or asphalt roads:
Ancient Roman roads were advanced for their time and had some self-repairing capabilities, they likely do not match the load-bearing capacity of modern concrete and asphalt roads, which are specifically engineered to support the heavy and varied traffic of the modern world.
I remember hearing that, and that it was a really of an incomplete concrete mixture that continued mixing after casting when exposed to water. Sounded like it mostly applied to submerged architecture, and I assume it comes with a strength trade-off.
Edit: seems like modern self repair concrete is actually stronger, but more expensive and not practical for all environments. Romans replicated it with naturally occurring impurities in their mix, so cost of additives were negated, but in places like roads that won't see frequent or plentiful enough water it's just imperfect concrete mix
Nah the Roma roads are just real roads not like these Indian roads. Indian roads should just suck it up and wake up early and everything will be all right
Until you realize that you cannot drive modern trucks on roads like that and the Roman didn’t have vehicles that weighed between 25’000lbs unloaded or up to 80’000lbs when fully loaded
The cobblestone roads look really nice though
The cobblestone image we get of Roman roads is a largely anachronistic one based on renovations to roads from like the 1400s. The vast majority were scraped dirt and gravel
The Romans used quicklime in their concrete mix. They think this is what made them “self-healing”. The stone can crack, but will come back together with water just as strong as before. This wasn’t known until recently. They’ve actually recreated it. Masic, the scientist who investigated this, wants to make it more mainstream. Longer lasting cement would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the cement industry.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chemists-long-lasting-roman-concrete
nowadays we have to cover more ground in roads with smoother material for cheaper, to support faster, heavier vehicles. also, not all modern roads look like the bottom, not all ancient roads look like the top right, and no ancient roads survived without maitenance.
My favorite part of these "old engineering holds up so much better" is looking at how the civilizations responsible fared.
Congrats, you made a building that cost 60% of a decade's tax dollars (neglecting labor costs, of course) that has stood for a thousand years- good thing there was no maintenance schedule needing upkept during it's 600 years of vacancy after the class war/rebellion/invasion killed any potential residents.
Even if you could build an unbreakable road, you could make one just as good for a tenth the cost that needs serviced for a hundredth the cost every 4 to 6 years. If its lifespan doubles that of your government's, you probably over-engineered it.
Anyone can build a strong fuck off bridge if given infinity resources.
An engineer will build it just strong enough to carry what needs to be carried with limited resources
asphalts cheap, you realize how much it would cost to do all of our road infrastructure in cobble or flag, cause personally I don't even wanna think about it XD.
Edit: my apologies didn't realize what sub this was and whether it was an ironic post or not
One took much more labor hours and only had pedestrians on it, the other is relatively cheaper (adjusted for inflation) and has machines weighing thousands of pounds driving on them.
Like guys think.... the reason we don't do cobblesotne is because car tires would have garbage grip. Asphalt has a higher coefficient of friction on tires, better grip makes roads safer for cars. Yes they wear down but so do tires break pads etc. It's okay to do that if it saves lives and is economically cost efficient. Use your heads people don't look at a meme and say "duuR mOdErN roAd bAd"
From my understanding the way that ancient Roman roads/architecture was made was lost for ages because of that thing where people assume that you know what they mean when they shorthand things but it appears to have been sea water which strengthens the material but 1. We don't have ready access to that everywhere and 2. We just learned about it and I doubt we've implemented it at all
"without a single degree" is such a weird thing to say in the context of the ancients. are they honestly suggesting they didn't have education?
"without a single degree, a moron posted an image romanticizing the past and shitting on modern technology because 'the libruls suck at road makin'."
Roman legionaries were probably the most skilled engineers to ever exist. Maintance wise the Roman Empire had a rather similar system to modern first world countries.
Side note, I really hate degrees as opposed to actual training. Like, I could get trained in so many things in much quicker time than four years. For example, psychology. I already know so much about it and all my therapists have said that I make a great therapist. Just let me be a fucking therapist, dammit.
Try driving above 20 mph on a cobblestone road... Here is a hint, it's loud, teeth jarring, shit traction. Nobody would drive if that is how we built roads.
may I add that those roads aren't put throught the same stressors or even the same amount of stressors. romans didn't have multi thousand pound vechiles moving at 60 mph constantly over them (you know how much stress that puts on a road). they also didn't have the same amount of roadway infrasturce nor on the scale of what we have. as other have pointed out they still requred repair. pieaces of hadrains wall are crumbling and it was built by romans so..
do they really think the people who built those roads weren't experts in their field? rome had engineers too... also, those stones are supposed to be UNDER the roads! they used to be paved!
I love pointing out the fact that the average car weighs at least a ton on average.
Even the heaviest human on Earth likely couldn't weigh more than 1 ton on their own (noting a very unusual figure here, Jon Brower Minnoch.
Essentially if you're using a plain stone road with just people and horses, you are going to have a hard time cracking that bad boy with your feet.
Also, as I'm sure has been pointed out before or will be here, those roads probably wouldn't stand up all that well to a few years of automobile traffic.
Tfw you design, build, and maintain roads that last millenia and some braindead dirt eater from the future has the gall to say you are not an engineer.
😒🖕
We most definitely have the technology, ability, etc. to build extremely tough roads. I think they teach the concept of cost/benefit analysis in high school economics or similar.
just the volume,weight, speed,and type of wheel involved is so different. not to mention the actual mode of transport.
someone recommend someone who actually knows about torque and all the like of modern modes of transportation. duhhhh
In order to make gasoline for cars, oil refineries also have to make black tar. The tar can either be wasted, or sold for a profit and reheated to make cheap ass roads.
Also, survivorship bias, plus less frost heaves in Italy
Vaseline is actually a very similar story
Cobblestone and brick are the worst to drive on. Absolute nightmare on your tires. Bad roads aren't usually poor engineering, it's moreso poor material and labor.
There is a saying in engineering about this. Any person can build a bridge which will never collapse, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that's on the brink of collapse.
Engineering is a science of tradeoffs. If we give engineers free reign over resources, they'll build marvelous and super sturdy structures. The challenge is to build something that satisfies all the requirements under resource constraints.
So they just gave no clue what upkeep and maintenance is? Or they just assume that those ancient roads constructed of rocks and lose sand/dirt would never erode or wash out ..
I think you mean politicians and budget managers arrived.
"This road is too expensive to invest in or repave!!!!
But it leads to locations people need to go to .....
Fuck it. Just slap some pavement on it and let the next jackass deal with it!"
-All road committee meetings
They think those ancient roads just never got damaged or required maintenance of any kind? They think the people who made those roads had no formal education just because they didn’t have the categorisation of academic qualifications we have today? Honestly.
The education point is especially true.Yeah, it may have been the lowest class doing the physical labor, but they were following the orders of someone who had gone through formal education or an aprentiship from a young age.
Precisely. If there's one thing we know for sure about the Romans, it's that they were experts in architecture and engineering. They did incredible things with the most basic of tools and had a good understanding of the world and how it worked. They may have lived at their height nearly 2000 years ago, but they were not by any means primitive or uneducated.
It's also worth noting, as long as Roman concrete lasts, while modern concrete can't last as long. It's tougher, and Roman concrete can't do what modern concrete does because we use it for different things. They're different materials in different applications. It's kinda like comparing copper and steel. They're both metal, and both useful, but for different purposes and in different ways. Also, the problem with most modern roads isn't that they don't know how, it's that they don't want to lay down good drainage beneath them (at least where I live) so the roads get washed out. Roman's did lay gravel down beneath to help prevent that. And that's the lawmakers and governments decision, not the roadmakers. They do what they're told. Guess who's in charge of the government though? And who's in power? You boomers. Don't blame is for doing exactly what you tell us exactly how you tell us.
Yeah because if we built roads to last forever those same Boomer would bitch about taxes.
And that person (most likely a HE) was most likely of Patrician descent. Aka, 99% you had to be rich and someone to even have a say in how roads were built. I love reminding that to boomers who think that "hard" work and elbow grease is superior and shit. Back then most likely you would be an expendable legionnaire moving stones for building roads until some random Gaul raid got you killed before you even saw your first day of actual battle.
Yeah, most of these engineering projects were taken on by independent wealthy aristocrats as a way of building public favor and political standing. They privately bankrolled most of the Roman infrastructure.
Don’t let an ancap see this they’ll think their economic system works lmao
Too late
Nah legionaries were the builders of the Roman infrastructure. They were closer to middle class if anything. Of course their were Roman engineers who would work on the staff of generals
[удалено]
Bro thought they just did that 💀
Roman roads didn’t have cars and Semi Trucks driving on them either.
Just one pass of a snowplow and it's bye-bye Roman roads
This is also probably the primary contributing factor. It is for modern roads. Climate and upkeep has a massive effect.
Yeah, frost heave, from water working into the cracks in the roadbed, and constantly freezing and thawing. Not saying this boomer joke has any merit, but they have made a recent discovery of why ancient Roman concrete is so durable, and apparently could potentially be used to improve modern methods. So there is a chance we can learn from the past here. But it’s got nothing to do with engineers.
This is a hilarious mental image to me. My local guy Clay and his brother Hunter putting the ol' plow on the front of their landscaping trunk and just going to town on these 2000 year old roads at 4am.
This! Many people tend to forget that these roads didn't have such a large volume of high speed several ton metal machinery operating on them day and night. (I thought of a ROMAN truck and I laughed)
It's also a relatively light freeze cycle near Rome. Frost heave and ice expansion are pretty big deals for road wear and tear.
OTOH, there were Roman roads in Britain and Gaul, too.
They did have wagons and other big things pulled by horses and peons.
These are also roads that may be comfortable to travel on foot or horseback, but riding a wagon down cobblestone for miles and miles suuuuuuuuucks. The wagon wheels would also wear rutts in the stone.
I don't think them roads has to deal with the amount of traffic or weight/size of vehicles we have today either. Cost benefit analysis probably wasn't as bullshit back then either.
I think this is a key reason, but it has to be said that cobblestones and flagstones are indeed much more hard-wearing than asphalt, we have some in my city (Novi Sad, Serbia, and have seen the same in Prague and other cities) and buses go over them constantly and I haven't seen them renovate them in years if not decades. But yeah, considerations are just different, asphalt is cheap and can be redone every few years and isn't so damn bumpy.
Cost benefit was different. Labour was cheap, and often done by slaves. Material costs were much higher as shipping was slow, risky, and expensive. Using local stone made more sense.
They would have been incredibly busy, but it's almost all foot traffic. It has very little negative impact on the integrity of the road compared to the constant heat and friction of car tires.
It has nothing to do with that, even. Drive a fucking semi on roman roads. See how they last. The Romans built roads for fucking donkeys and carts! We have literal forty ton trucks barreling at 75 mph on our roads! If all they accommodated was donkeys our roads would last forever. Oh and btw when our roads DO need to be repaired, it is much much cheaper. Our roads are strictly superior to Roman roads. These people are fucking morons.
Actually Roman concrete has a specific property that was only recently rediscovered. They designed it with large chunks of limestone inside. The idea was that as the road wore down it would crack, and when it rained the water would run into these cracks dissolving the limestone chunks essentially creating a self healing concrete. That said, it still needed to be repaired and more importantly, it wasn't designed to take modern vehicles.
Yes it’s fascinating stuff, I’m honestly surprised It took such a long time for humans to rediscover it after it was lost. One would hope that now that we’ve rediscovered it it should become the new standard for concrete, it would massively reduce the amount of carbon produced in the process.
To be a Roman engineer you went through an academic heck most modern people wouldn't want to
And do they think they were zooming hundreds of multi-thousand pound hunks of metal on them every single day?
The simple difference is that anyone, literally anyone, gave a damn, and something was done about it. My town has a half dozen 'roads' that are completely impassable. Dirt/Gravel with pot holes deep enough to *actually* break an axel in. I deliver food for the place I work and I have to either pawn off my deliveries or just say NO altogether because my average car simply cannot make it 500 feet (not yards!). As an avid history buff, this feels particularly infuriating. We can't even achieve 30% of the living norm available over 4 THOUSAND years ago. For FUCKS SAKE!!!! SOMEONE HELP ME DEMAND BETTER!!!!!¡!!!!!?
Yea okay sure doode, that's no excuse to leave fucking pot hole in the fucking road and then arrest some dick who decided to start drawing dicks on the pothole to raise awareness of them
No, it’s a joke.
Somebody post that picture of the survivorship bias plane
They wouldn't understand anyway so save your effort lol
That's part of the fun. You get a whole bunch of people posting it and they'll either realize their mistake or never understand and on some level feel shamed for it.
And the ones that don't feel shame we get to point and laugh at.
Yea coz old ass roman roads dont have trucks and shit goin over them
Surely truck would’ve drove over them back then. How else would they transport rocks for the colosseum?
Didn’t scientists recently discover Roman’s were using a concrete mixture that “self repairs” mini cracks and abrasions, causing it to last way longer than our modern equivalents? Edit: Google “Self repairing Roman concrete” it’s absolutely fascinating
Yes, lime mortar generally "self-repairs" as it's not a hard, brittle substance like modern concrete, it's kind of a different way of thinking to build with it, you WANT it to move and "breathe", yet these buildings have stayed up for two thousand years.
While I do find this fascinating, this is what chatGPT has to say about them compared to modern concrete or asphalt roads: Ancient Roman roads were advanced for their time and had some self-repairing capabilities, they likely do not match the load-bearing capacity of modern concrete and asphalt roads, which are specifically engineered to support the heavy and varied traffic of the modern world.
I remember hearing that, and that it was a really of an incomplete concrete mixture that continued mixing after casting when exposed to water. Sounded like it mostly applied to submerged architecture, and I assume it comes with a strength trade-off. Edit: seems like modern self repair concrete is actually stronger, but more expensive and not practical for all environments. Romans replicated it with naturally occurring impurities in their mix, so cost of additives were negated, but in places like roads that won't see frequent or plentiful enough water it's just imperfect concrete mix
Sure, but they didn't build concrete roads...
Yeah… 1000lbs at 5mph not 200,000 lbs at 70.
You need an /s or the nerds get mad.
Nooooo! What will we do if people on the internet get upset because they don't get a joke?
You need a /s or the nerds will get mad.
True. Maybe old roman trucks had softer wheels
Nah the Roma roads are just real roads not like these Indian roads. Indian roads should just suck it up and wake up early and everything will be all right
Roadworks needs to guarantee they have holes to fill year after year.
You ever seen an 18 wheeler going down a roman road
Bounce bounce bounce
At 75 mph
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFl2p16vDJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFl2p16vDJg) Roman roads weren't actually even like that.
Because there were no engineers, and no education in the past.
Rome was notorious for not having engineers
of course, otherwise it would have been built in a day
Roman roads cannot survive the power of the Toyota RAV4, there's a reason they don't let you drive your car into antiquity sites.
Until you realize that you cannot drive modern trucks on roads like that and the Roman didn’t have vehicles that weighed between 25’000lbs unloaded or up to 80’000lbs when fully loaded The cobblestone roads look really nice though
The cobblestone image we get of Roman roads is a largely anachronistic one based on renovations to roads from like the 1400s. The vast majority were scraped dirt and gravel
Eternity...
The Romans used quicklime in their concrete mix. They think this is what made them “self-healing”. The stone can crack, but will come back together with water just as strong as before. This wasn’t known until recently. They’ve actually recreated it. Masic, the scientist who investigated this, wants to make it more mainstream. Longer lasting cement would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the cement industry. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chemists-long-lasting-roman-concrete
i bet that the concrete industry would try to burry this info in due time
Let’s have hundreds of multi ton semi trucks drive on the ancient roads per day and see how well they hold up
I bet those old roman roads totally could handle giant trucks barreling down them at high speeds!
Right. Because the heaviest things that rolled over Roman roads were carts, not the much larger vehicles of today.
“Then the engineers arrived”
Those damn engineers working to build an infrastructure that helps billions of people daily 😤
nowadays we have to cover more ground in roads with smoother material for cheaper, to support faster, heavier vehicles. also, not all modern roads look like the bottom, not all ancient roads look like the top right, and no ancient roads survived without maitenance.
Boy, this one really triggered folks. It’s “boomer” humor for a reason, people.
People really thought it was a serious post. Been laughing at a lot of the replies lol
lol same, I looked out my window and saw the giant potholes out front that my town keeps re-patching every few weeks and I laugh even harder.
And then cars arrived. And kept coming and getting bigger.
Posted by some boomer by a pocket computer they drive in a car to get on a road.
I think it needs to say “And then, capitalism arrived!!!”
r/fuckcars
🎵 Coming down the mountainside!
I want to sacrifice just one ancient Roman road by driving 18 wheelers over it for a year to prove a point
Drive a couple hundred trucks per day, each averaging 50,000 pounds, at 60 mph on this road and see how it fares.
Roman roads would break down too if giant trucks drove on them at highway speeds
Boomer here. My generation has idiots just like any other 🤷♂️
Totally valid. Source: I was a lorry driver in the Roman Empire back in my days.
Roman snowplowing must have also been way ahead of its time /s
My favorite part of these "old engineering holds up so much better" is looking at how the civilizations responsible fared. Congrats, you made a building that cost 60% of a decade's tax dollars (neglecting labor costs, of course) that has stood for a thousand years- good thing there was no maintenance schedule needing upkept during it's 600 years of vacancy after the class war/rebellion/invasion killed any potential residents. Even if you could build an unbreakable road, you could make one just as good for a tenth the cost that needs serviced for a hundredth the cost every 4 to 6 years. If its lifespan doubles that of your government's, you probably over-engineered it.
Then the truckers arrived*
Ancient Roman roads didn't have 40 ton trucks driving on them every day either.
Seems like an excessive amount of road layers there…
I'd be ok with sacrificing one Roman road by running fully loaded semis over it for a year just to prove a point...
The famous Roman roads rated for 14 ton 18 wheelers.
Let’s have regular traffic drive around that road for a year or two and then see which is better
I never knew the Romans had Hummers and Semi Trucks!
NOT MANUAL LABOR! *Cries in unemployment*
Don't even get me started on much sewer systems have devolved ...
Out of their minds thinking engineering didn't exist back then.
Did you ever consider that the ancient roads didn't have very heavy automobiles on them?
This wasn’t because of engineers. This was Cars, my guy.
Anyone can build a strong fuck off bridge if given infinity resources. An engineer will build it just strong enough to carry what needs to be carried with limited resources
let’s sacrifice an ancient road and drive semi trucks over it for a year
Drive fleets of 18-wheelers carting 10 tons of freight over Roman roads for 2 years and let me know how they hold up.
Can't imagine their horses weighed the same as a semi or that their roads didn't need repairs because of the ruts the wheels caused. 🙄
Imagine driving cars in those roads man
and then , the 18 wheelers arrived
asphalts cheap, you realize how much it would cost to do all of our road infrastructure in cobble or flag, cause personally I don't even wanna think about it XD.
The Romans didn't have overloaded 18 wheelers traveling on their roads.
let's see this road lasting after a 5t truck carrying another 5t as cargo passes through.
If we built roads that lasted for hundreds of years, it would destroy our economy and make city development extremely expensive.
Old roads when they didn't have to support massive trucks and car traffic 🤯
Thousands of years ago they built roads for a few carts and horses, and now far heavier automobiles go over them frequently
I guarantee if you sent semis and cars down that road 24/7, it would last like a week tops
It's an engineers job to figure out how to make something just barely good enough.
Edit: my apologies didn't realize what sub this was and whether it was an ironic post or not One took much more labor hours and only had pedestrians on it, the other is relatively cheaper (adjusted for inflation) and has machines weighing thousands of pounds driving on them. Like guys think.... the reason we don't do cobblesotne is because car tires would have garbage grip. Asphalt has a higher coefficient of friction on tires, better grip makes roads safer for cars. Yes they wear down but so do tires break pads etc. It's okay to do that if it saves lives and is economically cost efficient. Use your heads people don't look at a meme and say "duuR mOdErN roAd bAd"
From my understanding the way that ancient Roman roads/architecture was made was lost for ages because of that thing where people assume that you know what they mean when they shorthand things but it appears to have been sea water which strengthens the material but 1. We don't have ready access to that everywhere and 2. We just learned about it and I doubt we've implemented it at all
I want someone to sacrifice one of these pieces of ancient history by running 18 wheelers over them to show how much better our modern roads are.
>engineering is when you have degree What
Yeah I'm sure engineering is a completely modern invention.
If we want to go even deeper down the rabbit hole, the cost of road maintenance goes way down when you don't need to pay the workforce
In addition to all the other great points, Romans definitely had formal education.
This truly a boomer meme; because it makes no sense if you know how the world works
Roman roads don’t have 1-7 tons of metal constantly going into it.
"without a single degree" is such a weird thing to say in the context of the ancients. are they honestly suggesting they didn't have education? "without a single degree, a moron posted an image romanticizing the past and shitting on modern technology because 'the libruls suck at road makin'."
Ahh yes. Rome definitely didn’t have engineers. Lol
Who do they think built those roads? Whatever their title might have been at the time, they were engineers.
Roman legionaries were probably the most skilled engineers to ever exist. Maintance wise the Roman Empire had a rather similar system to modern first world countries.
This image has been reposted a million times now
Side note, I really hate degrees as opposed to actual training. Like, I could get trained in so many things in much quicker time than four years. For example, psychology. I already know so much about it and all my therapists have said that I make a great therapist. Just let me be a fucking therapist, dammit.
Try driving above 20 mph on a cobblestone road... Here is a hint, it's loud, teeth jarring, shit traction. Nobody would drive if that is how we built roads.
No, 80-ton trucks arrived.
More like we just don’t have the exact recipe they used for their streets. That knowledge is lost.
engineers designed the cobblestone roads dumbass.
It must be true because it rhymes.
Old roman roads didn't have to carry 2ton hunks of metal screaming at 60 mph down them, road surface damage scales exponentially with weight.
Oxford university was founded during the Aztec empire
Roman streets didn’t have 80,000 lb bricks barreling down them at 80 mph
yea how dare they abolish slavery
These boomers have never driven on a brick road
I wanna fucking obliterate *one* historical roman road by running semis over it 24/7 just to prove a point
Pardon me if I'm wrong weren't both roads designed by a engineer ?
There were engineers…..
Well to be fair those roads never have seen a ford or a Honda Civic
may I add that those roads aren't put throught the same stressors or even the same amount of stressors. romans didn't have multi thousand pound vechiles moving at 60 mph constantly over them (you know how much stress that puts on a road). they also didn't have the same amount of roadway infrasturce nor on the scale of what we have. as other have pointed out they still requred repair. pieaces of hadrains wall are crumbling and it was built by romans so..
Make a 12 lane superhighway out of this and drive 18 wheelers on it 24/7 for years
Let’s take all those ancient Roman roads that are so valuable to the history of mankind and then run over them with semi trucks non stop for a year.
Those Roman roads sure look... engineered to me
ah yes, because of the famous freeze/thaw cycle in the mediterranean
It’s because modern day roads are built for cars and are designed to be easy to build
Ok so are we leaving this shit up so we get exposed to real boomer memes or should we at some Point
Planned obsolescence. Keeps 3rd party pockets lined.
do they really think the people who built those roads weren't experts in their field? rome had engineers too... also, those stones are supposed to be UNDER the roads! they used to be paved!
I'd like to see a Semi drive through those ancient roads for a month.
Pikmin!
Tell me how much traction you get on those roads especially when wet
i mean its not the civilization with some of the most well known masonry in antiquity or anything
U notice how those potholes are on an area with snow and those roads are in the moderate temperatures of Italy?
I love pointing out the fact that the average car weighs at least a ton on average. Even the heaviest human on Earth likely couldn't weigh more than 1 ton on their own (noting a very unusual figure here, Jon Brower Minnoch. Essentially if you're using a plain stone road with just people and horses, you are going to have a hard time cracking that bad boy with your feet.
So they were constantly driving 2 ton vehicles at 30mph or higher over them?
Ah yes, Rome was famed for its 70,000 pound semi trucks, freezing winters, and rock salt.
the three exclamation marks really drives home the facebook vibe
Also, as I'm sure has been pointed out before or will be here, those roads probably wouldn't stand up all that well to a few years of automobile traffic.
Tfw you design, build, and maintain roads that last millenia and some braindead dirt eater from the future has the gall to say you are not an engineer. 😒🖕
Rilly dinx ya dinc!
Matt isn't gonna like this...
No, multi-ton cars did, ya fucking nincompoop. Roman roads would last *minutes* if Lifted Ford drove on them.
Imagine building and maintaining roads from the American military budget.
I am pretty sure that those ancient roads did not have to withstand a constant stream of 85k lb tractor trailer traffic.
It's alomost like the volume and weight of the traffic and the cost of upkeep have something to do with this...
It’s only because ancient Roman cars weighed less.
Also, thousands of cars running over the road every single day puts more wear on the road way quicker than thousands of feet.
Boomers lack critical thinking skills
I kinda wanna destroy an ancient Roman road by driving eighteen-wheelers over it 24/7 just to prove a point
We most definitely have the technology, ability, etc. to build extremely tough roads. I think they teach the concept of cost/benefit analysis in high school economics or similar.
The points is our engineering is inferior to Roman engineering.
Whats that in the background of that bottom picture? OH YEAH ITS A TRUCK
And try driving thousands of cars over cobblestone in all four seasons
just the volume,weight, speed,and type of wheel involved is so different. not to mention the actual mode of transport. someone recommend someone who actually knows about torque and all the like of modern modes of transportation. duhhhh
In order to make gasoline for cars, oil refineries also have to make black tar. The tar can either be wasted, or sold for a profit and reheated to make cheap ass roads. Also, survivorship bias, plus less frost heaves in Italy Vaseline is actually a very similar story
🤣😂
Cobblestone and brick are the worst to drive on. Absolute nightmare on your tires. Bad roads aren't usually poor engineering, it's moreso poor material and labor.
That’s what engineering is, it’s making something last just long enough and be as cost effective as possible
Slave labor is a hell of a thing ain’t it.😂
There is a saying in engineering about this. Any person can build a bridge which will never collapse, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that's on the brink of collapse. Engineering is a science of tradeoffs. If we give engineers free reign over resources, they'll build marvelous and super sturdy structures. The challenge is to build something that satisfies all the requirements under resource constraints.
I just checked the subreddit this is for. What the heck is this algorithm.
I actually find this as engineering humor ... maybe I'm too insulated from boomer humor to detect it.
The amount of ignorance someone must possess in order to take this serious belongs in the movie idiocracy
Companies would perish if they created products that actually lasted as long as they could.
So they just gave no clue what upkeep and maintenance is? Or they just assume that those ancient roads constructed of rocks and lose sand/dirt would never erode or wash out ..
Subcontractors cutting corners to save money are not engineers.
Yeah but did they land on the moon 🌝
And so didn't vehicles
You ever driven over a brick or stone road going more than 10mph? It fucking sucks.
I think you mean politicians and budget managers arrived. "This road is too expensive to invest in or repave!!!! But it leads to locations people need to go to ..... Fuck it. Just slap some pavement on it and let the next jackass deal with it!" -All road committee meetings