Worlds without Roads

[atpollard]

Do you want me to check with my friend on the cost of building new roads and maintaining them in Lake County, Illinois? It should be noted that this is a well-developed area with a large labor pool and plenty of companies familiar with road construction and maintenance. We do not have any problems with terrain, such as building in mountains, crossing large rivers, or dealing with large areas of swamp or virgin forest. All of those add to the cost.

I do have information from my various Army manuals on the time it takes to build a given length of road in a given terrain and area. However, that data would assume a high level of mechanization and ready availability of construction materials.

My numbers are fair for across the US at current TL. They run about half that in the best cases and orders of magnitude more in some urban areas ... Over $1 billion per mile in the most expensive areas.

The trouble is estimating the effects of future technology.

 

[whartung]

This is where these questions about roads first arose. From attempting to connect small scattered towns across a great savanna.

I'll just make my point clearer.

If you're talking about a developing society, that's as a whole self sustained (vs bootstrapped and fed externally), then you won't have "roads to nowhere". You won't have roads with no purpose, the roads have to be justified.

As a corollary, you won't have communities that are not connected by roads.

Now to be clear, instead of using the word "road", let's use the term "path of efficient travel".

The communities need to be connected for trade and support. None of the communities are an island as they all need finished goods made somewhere else, and someplace to ship their raw or intermediate materials (or finished goods of their own, of course) in order to facilitate commerce. Because none of that activity is done in a vacuum.

If the slow tracked vehicle traffic on poorly maintained paths is "good enough", then that's fine.

But I think civilization has always trended to more efficient travel for more efficient commerce and mobility. Also note historically that private roads and other transit features (ferries, private canals, the railroads) were fixtures. We have two toll roads that were a private/public partnership to get them funded.

Similarly you have things like old Route 66. Especially through the western deserts. Early on you had stops on the map dominated by essentially water holes. As transport because faster and more reliable, the need to stop at these holes lessened, allowing newer, more efficient routes. The old route decay, and the towns dry up and blow away -- since there is little need for them anymore (i.e. way stations for travelers).

There's a little gas station/mini-mart out in the desert. They have signs basically saying "Quit whining about the prices, do you have any idea what it costs to keep a place like this going in the middle of the desert."

So, fundamentally, you can have "just enough paths of efficient travel" or "too many paths of efficient travel". You can't have "too few" paths of efficient travel, save just on the fringes -- who will be getting paths soon enough, or die waiting for them.

Also consider the developing world that's foregoing wired communications. They're simply going wireless right out, so they won't have "electric roads" with towers stringing wires across the wilderness. They'll just plop an access point every few ticks on the map. Enough to support the communication traffic.

Add in local solar power (or whatever), forgoing the need to pipe in electrons from far away generation stations.

 

[Timerover51]

As an agricultural world, this world is a near-ideal environment for producing quality foodstuffs of plant, animal, and other forms. Quality foodstuffs are a major export commodity for this world.

Given the thin atmosphere and reduced water coverage, I am not sure if the idea that Biter has a "near-ideal" environment for production of foodstuff is right. While you do have some agriculture on the Bolivian Plateau, I am not sure on high the altitude it for it. That is just a comment on the world description in the Wiki.

One problem you do have is the limited population. To maintain a Tech Level A or C society with 3 million people is going to be tough. You are going to have some intense problems with shortage of labor, regardless of how you assume technology is going to help. I question if you have sufficient labor for any major road maintenance program.

I would say that your transportation is going to be dependent on water for the most part, and then aerial vehicles of some type. Given the thin atmosphere, that will likely be grav vehicles. With respect to tracked cargo vehicles, the maintenance costs are considerably higher than wheeled vehicles, as are the building costs. Also, 30 kmp across country is going to be over fairly level plains of reasonably hard going.

 

[epicenter00]

I think the implications of grav would be very marked on worlds like these. As I see it, it's an analogy to telecommunications networks on our own Earth. Developing nations, which are "behind" the TL of the industrialized nations, are not busy setting up copper-line telephone systems (as would be suggested by their native TL in the view of many Traveller players); they're just buying wireless cellphone equipment from industrialized countries and skipping the hugely expensive landline networks entirely. They cannot manufacture them locally, nor do key maintenance on them and thus depend on imports for it, but international trade means that such imports are available.

Biter is not an Amber or Red Zone, so merchants (theoretically at least) are not discouraged from visiting the world, should they be interested. It is also an agricultural world. So for off-world export their offer agricultural products. In the grav universe, they might not need large road or rail networks - the buyers fly their starship over to the homestead, extend cranes or large hoses and hoist up the sides of meat and suck up the grain directly from the silos. Homesteads have to knock their prices down to make it attractive to the merchants to fly out to each township or homestead to do this, of course, making it more of a buyer's market. The homesteads themselves use ground vehicles to get around and to do most of their work locally because they are cheaper.

Planetary communications and bulk transport likely relies upon a mixture of grav and local solutions as well. Any reasonably sized homestead or village worthy of the name likely has a grav vehicle or two; this isn't a air/raft but more along the lines of a large grav prime mover that is used for bulk hauling to local population centers (wealthier communities probably have more, and smaller grav vehicles). During harvest season, they likely hire someone whose service is providing grav transport (eg; a combination of a modern trucker and barge operator) to provide additional hauling if there's not enough off-world merchants visiting to buy their stuff. Any shortfall or lighter-duty communications shortfall are likely made up using locally manufactured aircraft (likely drone aircraft - I'd imagine TL7-8 air transport starts looking distinctly unsafe compared to TL12 grav so is used to transport things and not people) and riverine transport, and offroad vehicles with the exact mix dependent on local conditions.

Roads aren't obsolete in this world - they do exist - on an agricultural world with mechanized agriculture, it's entirely possible that during the off-seasons, villages get together and work on maintaining road networks. But that kind of effort isn't going to cover huge distances and they know it; a lot of communities are probably linked by roads with the further you get from a community, the paved road abruptly becomes unpaved and rapidly into little more than a dirt path; reasonable enough for off-road vehicles which aren't doing heavy hauling.

 

[Condottiere]

By the time you hit tech level eight, a lot of industries are going to be automated, or at least potentially could be with the capital investment.

With their version of the internet, they can get Amazon to ship goods from a centralized warehousing facility, and that provides the basis for a concentration of regional or continetal large scale manufacturing, not counting the three dee printers they order from Amazon.

 

[Enoki]

I doubt that road building would be as expensive at the low end as the OP suggests. Building a mile of dirt road on a relatively level landscape, and assuming few culverts or bridges are involved, would be as simple as driving vehicles over the same route to produce ruts to using a bulldozer or similar equipment to scrape one out.

Adding drainage, compacting it, and doing other upgrades would raise the cost some. But $1.5 million per mile sounds more like most of the money going into engineering drawings, government regulation, and other administrative costs rather than the road itself.

If simply bulldozing or grading out a mile of dirt road such that it was drivable at low speed took an operator say 8 hours, the cost would be closer to $2000 to $5000. That assumes a minimum of pre-engineering, no government regulatory requirements, and the dozer operator being able to pick the route himself.
That cost would rise as the difficulty of the terrain increased. Having to build bridges or other structures would also greatly increase it.

Gravel on that surface (assumes a 7 meter / yard wide road) one mile long with 4" of gravel, compacted, (approx. 1400 cu yds) on it might run $200,000 to $300,000 with the gravel costing $100 a cubic yard / ton.

 

[atpollard]

I doubt that road building would be as expensive at the low end as the OP suggests. Building a mile of dirt road on a relatively level landscape, and assuming few culverts or bridges are involved, would be as simple as driving vehicles over the same route to produce ruts to using a bulldozer or similar equipment to scrape one out.

Adding drainage, compacting it, and doing other upgrades would raise the cost some. But $1.5 million per mile sounds more like most of the money going into engineering drawings, government regulation, and other administrative costs rather than the road itself.

If simply bulldozing or grading out a mile of dirt road such that it was drivable at low speed took an operator say 8 hours, the cost would be closer to $2000 to $5000. That assumes a minimum of pre-engineering, no government regulatory requirements, and the dozer operator being able to pick the route himself.
That cost would rise as the difficulty of the terrain increased. Having to build bridges or other structures would also greatly increase it.

Gravel on that surface (assumes a 7 meter / yard wide road) one mile long with 4" of gravel, compacted, (approx. 1400 cu yds) on it might run $200,000 to $300,000 with the gravel costing $100 a cubic yard / ton.

Just for clarification, that dirt road would include acquiring ROW in rural areas and creating a 12" stabilized subgrade compacted in 2 lifts. You are correct that less expensive Dirt Roads could be built, that dirt road was capable of heavy truck traffic and ready for asphalt paving. The data on road construction showed a constant plus a per lane cost for 2 to 6 lane roads and that was the dirt road that came closest to the constant or each lane of asphalt. It made the math easier.

I have designed lesser dirt roads for public use and the maintenance costs to keep them drivable will be a killer. Depending on soil conditions some will need regrading several times per year and some will simply become unusable during the rainy season. Compacted Limerock (or concrete or crushed stone) is going to be a minimum for significant truck use and will be most of the cost listed on the OP. In my experience, one might get the $1.5 million down to an absolute minimum of $0.5 million per mile with free land, cheap local stone and good native soils.

 

[Condottiere]

This may be very dependent as to the distance between the satellite settlements and the regional centre.

If it's too far away, they may just decide on a dirt track and an airfield.

 

[aramis]

A lot also depends upon what the dominant travel mode is...

It's entirely possible a TL9+ colony might rely upon imported (but locally maintainable) grav vehicles for inter-locus modes - no landing strip, just a parking lot - and riding animals for local, so not even a formal road grid, just some well used paths between homesteads. Heavy deliveries use a grav-crane direct to the home. Underground slidewalks connect the greenbelt divided "urban centers", while stables at the edges of the urbanization allow one to "park" one's riding beast, go into the urban center, do one's shopping, hire the crane for heavy stuff, or load the saddlebags for the lighter stuff.

Why riding beasts? Local domesticates are the least likely to do major ecospheric damage, they're relatively inexpensive to make (they breed!), and they are already adapted to the local environ.

 

[Timerover51]

Since the discussion does involve agricultural products, shipping them to a central collection point, then moving them to the starport, and shipping them to other planets. Let us put in some actual weights of agricultural products and also some current values, and see how viable the idea of interstellar shipping of agricultural products is. Atpollard is using the following conversion factor to go from dollar cost to credit.

1 Credit = $4-5 ... Use $4.50

Shipping cost for interstellar trade is 1000 Credits per Traveller Displacement Ton of 13.5 cubic meters or 476 cubic feet. For shipping, you would not totally fill all available space, so loading will be based on slightly less than the 13.5 cubic meters or 476 cubic feet. Perishable items will require shipment under refrigeration, either in a specially fitted refrigerator ship or in a refrigerated cargo pod.

Weight per cubic foot of some common agricultural products, data taken from TM 55-15, Transportation Reference Data, Dept. of Army, December 1963.

Perishables:
Beef, forequarter, 27 pounds per cubic foot. Note, this is contain a high portion of bone.
Beef, hindquarter, 19.1 pounds per cubic foot, more meat, less bone
(Note: I do have the approximate weights of beef carcasses acceptable for use by the Army if someone wants it.)
Lamb and Mutton, 9.4 pounds per cubic foot in carcass form.
Veal, 13.7 pounds per cubic foot, carcass
Frozen Fruit, average for a wide range of fruit, 36.2 pounds per cubic foot.
Frozen Vegetables, average for a wide range, 27 pounds per cubic foot.
Fish, drawn (i.e. cleaned), 32.8 pounds per cubic foot
Pork, butchered, average about 36 pounds per cubic foot
Potatoes, Irish, 35.7 pounds per cubic foot
Potatoes, Sweet, 31.3 pounds per cubic foot

Staple foods:
Corn (maize), 45 pounds per cubic foot
Oats, 26 pounds per cubic foot
Wheat, 48 pounds per cubic foot
Rice, 50 pounds per cubic foot
Coffee, green beans, 37 pounds per cubic foot
Flour, packed, 47 pounds per cubic foot
Sugar, Brown, 45 pounds per cubic foot
Tea, 16 pounds per cubic foot

Additional Foods as examples:
Bacon, 12 pound slabs, 37.6 pounds per cubic foot
Beans, dry (100 pound sack), 39.2 pounds
Coffee, 16 pound bag, 30 pounds per cubic foot
Flour, 98 pound sack, 36.1 pounds per cubic foot
Hash, corned beef, 5.5 pound pack, 33.1 pounds per cubic foot
Luncheon Meat, 6 pound pack (aka Spam), 49.5 pounds per cubic foot
Milk, powdered, 5 pound container, 31.3 pounds per cubic foot
Salmon, 1 pound cans, 47.7 pounds per cubic foot
Salt, 100 pound bag, 39.2 pounds per cubic foot

Wheat, unprocessed, at 48 pounds per cubic foot, works out to be 10 metric tons per 460 cubic feet, which should give some idea as to how much of the other foods can be loaded per Traveller dTon. It is one of the denser agricultural commodities shipped. How meat would be shipped would depend on the ultimate buyer, if he wishes to have the carcasses or wants frozen butchered meat, or processed meat with respect to pork.

Some sample current agriculture prices, either per metric ton or per pound.
Wheat, $4.60 cents per bushel, or $169.29 per metric ton.
Rice, $409 per metric ton
Corn (maize), $4.7875 per bushel, $188.48 per metric ton
Beef, $1.87 per pound, $4,123.35 per metric ton
Pork, $0.86.175 per pound, $1,900.16 per metric ton

Using the $4.50 per credit conversion factor as given, the value in credits per metric ton of the above commodities are as follows.

Wheat is 37.6 Credits per metric ton, Rice is 90.9 Credits per metric ton, Corn is 41.9 Credits per metric ton, Beef is 816.3 Credits per metric ton, and Pork is 422.3 Credits per metric ton.

The above meat prices are carcass weight, not butchered, and the carcasses would need to be refrigerated while hanging. Carcass shipping is the most uneconomical way of shipping meat, in terms of poundage per cubic foot. Processed meat would have a much higher value per pound, and also give the shipper a denser pack per Traveller dTon.

Just looking at the value of the basic commodities, rice, beef, and pork look to have the highest possibility of turning a profit in interstellar trade, while the outlook for corn and wheat is not that favorable.

As a rough estimate, a planetary population of circa 3 million will consume about 2.4 million metric tons a food in a year. The transportation system will have to be able to move at least that quantity of food following the harvest period, so about 2 to 3 months. Meat production would be spread out more through the year, and I did not include poultry production in any of my calculations, which definitely would have a fairly even yearly production.

The more spread out the population is, the more effort is going to have to go into your transportation system. That is why I assume low-population planets will have most of their population concentrated in a limited area. Low population planets simply do not have the manpower to operate a large transportation system.

 

[atpollard]

The more spread out the population is, the more effort is going to have to go into your transportation system. That is why I assume low-population planets will have most of their population concentrated in a limited area. Low population planets simply do not have the manpower to operate a large transportation system.

I reached the same conclusion, but here is the rub...

On Earth, do we settle 3 million people in the fertile plains of France and enjoy the weather, but ignore the Radioactives that could be mined in the North American deserts? and the Diamonds of South Africa? and the Petrochemicals of the Middle East?

If we exploit those ultra valuable resources, then we are spread around most of the globe.

That was when I started to focus on transportation that does not need infrastructure (like Ships, Flying Boats and Tracked Trucks).

Personally, I like non-rigid airships.
Unfortunately, Biter had a thin atmosphere.


When I started working on regional economies for the IMTU Biter, it didn't take the extraction of very much Radioactives to pay for the import of a lot of goods from other regions.

 

[Condottiere]

The advantage is that you could live in the Alps, and then commute to the plains to frack them over.

 

[atpollard]

I'll just make my point clearer.

If you're talking about a developing society, that's as a whole self sustained (vs bootstrapped and fed externally), then you won't have "roads to nowhere". You won't have roads with no purpose, the roads have to be justified.

I agree with everything you said (including the snipped part).
The issue in the OTU is that 'logical development' happened more than 1000 years ago on most worlds that you will visit. A lot has happened on Earth since before the year 1016. I suspect some population centers may have increased and decreased in importance and there may be 'roads to nowhere'.

In the case of Biter (the world I started looking at), a war 700 years ago reduced the population from 20 million to a current 3 million. That could leave former cities built around valuable resources struggling to survive as towns with 700 year old roads long since reclaimed by the wilderness ... because no town could afford to rebuild all the bridges.

Most Traveller worlds are not new colonies. They are ancient colonies with long histories unknown to us. Anything is possible for settlement patters. I am attempting to figure out what is probable.


If everyone is clustered in a small area, then the area near the starport can be a lot like Earth. It also means that there are undeveloped Uranium Deposits and Gold Mines and South African Diamond Mines waiting among the unsettled wilderness for a small colony to land and start making money.

If everyone is spread out to take maximum advantage of the planets wealth, then there are small isolated communities with innovative solutions to unique transportation needs.

I am just trying to figure out which is more likely and starting by estimating whether they can afford roads.

 

[Condottiere]

One thing you could figure out is what's the birth rate like.

If after seven centuries you only have three million, either that place is very dangerous to your health, or out of that twenty million, only ten thousand survived, and they've spent a great deal of time just re-establishing civilization, and rebuilding any form of urban centre(s).

 

[atpollard]

One thing you could figure out is what's the birth rate like.

If after seven centuries you only have three million, either that place is very dangerous to your health, or out of that twenty million, only ten thousand survived, and they've spent a great deal of time just re-establishing civilization, and rebuilding any form of urban centre(s).

Yeah, it hurts when I try to do that. There are just SO MANY worlds with no population growth and no logical reason why.

It becomes like trying to figure out why 10 million people live on a hell world when only 5000 people live on the garden world J1 away.

Apparently, the same force that prevents inflation, also controls population growth rate. My personal theory is those tight spandex outfits cause infertility.

 

[Condottiere]

Bicycle shorts, which would solve the issue of urban transport system.

 

[whartung]

A collapse scenario is quite different from a growth scenario.

After a collapse, a lot of cost of making the road has already been spent. ROW, laying the bed, etc. Now it's more a matter of maintenance. Obviously a lot of this has to do with the terrain the road is built in. A jungle road is a much different thing than a desert road.

In a collapse scenario, you can certainly have lingering communities that if the world were "reset", would likely not exist. But, again, the infrastructure costs have already been paid to the point that maintaining these communities may be more efficient than certainly building a new one, or even collapsing and consolidating. At a minimum, they can simply be failing communities on the downward trend that can survive, but not thrive, and simply waiting for the last person to leave.

There's a great example of this in Japan. There's an abandoned train stop that the railway is no longer maintaining.

But it turns out that there's a girl that uses that stop for school, so it now has 2 scheduled stops -- one in the morning, and one in the evening, simply to support her for a another couple years. When she finishes school, they'll shut it down completely.

 

[Timerover51]

Yeah, it hurts when I try to do that. There are just SO MANY worlds with no population growth and no logical reason why.

It becomes like trying to figure out why 10 million people live on a hell world when only 5000 people live on the garden world J1 away.

Apparently, the same force that prevents inflation, also controls population growth rate. My personal theory is those tight spandex outfits cause infertility.

If you take a look at birth rates in highly industrialized societies on Earth, you will see a very limited increase to negative growth rate. In an industrial society, children are an economic burden as non-producers, while in an agricultural society, especially one using low tech production techniques, children are producers. You may also have a steady stream of emigrants leaving Biter for nearby planets where conditions are better. Lastly, the population could be depressed by continual raiding from other Sword Worlds. I will not go into some of the bizarre population-planets in the OTU.

As for resources, since the planet at one time had a much larger population, many of your resources are already going to be located. You could have a situation like Chile, where you have a fertile coastal plain backed by a resource rich mountain range, or South Africa with its resources and agriculture, or Australia, with the fertile eastern coast and the resources of the interior. As there is not much on the Wiki with respect to what Biter looks like, you are free to place things where they work best.

As another example, while Illinois is a major agricultural producer, at one time in the early 1900s, it was also one of the U.S. leading petroleum producing states. Then consider Texas and Pennsylvania as well. The island of Great Britain is excellent for agriculture, but also had rich deposits of iron and coal, along with tin. Resources and agriculture are not mutually exclusive.

 

[Condottiere]

I won't say Japan is unique, but few other countries maintain that level of social support, outside such issues as dying off of Japanese villages and highly networked nature of Japanese transport infrastructure.

 

[Timerover51]

Another factor is there is the possibility of water transportation, which is much less manpower intensive. A population of circa 3 million would be able to sustain a small nautical ship-building program for moving goods, especially if they are high-density materials. The main factor is having some reasonable construction costs in the game for nautical vessels.

That would also give you some immediate adventure possibilities for ships being hijacked or pirated, with your adventurers party going after the missing vessel.