Visitors to the Dairy State often admire our roads. Most, even county and township roads, are paved, so milk trucks have access to farms in most weather. It took 30-plus inches of snow in our March blizzard for me to hear a lament I recall from my Hoosier childhood – that a farmer had to dump milk because the milk truck couldn’t get through. And that was on a paved road.
Wisconsin has more than 115,000 miles of paved roads. Ninety percent are local roads. Winters are hard on them. So one rite of spring is the annual inspection of roads by elected local officials. Those surveys help the people who represent us decide how to allocate the budgets and resources available for repairs. That’s never not a challenging task. But this year, they also have to consider a war in the Middle East and the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.
Like us, our local elected officials have felt price increases at the gas pumps, seen rising transportation costs reflected in grocery bills, and heard concerns about disruptions to the fertilizer supply chain at the start of the growing season. And now they’re learning, on our behalf, how uncertainty about the availability and price of petroleum products may impact rural roads. Much can change between when this is written and when you see it. But the timing and nature of recent geopolitical events will likely be felt on rural roads, not just this summer but for years to come. Repairs deferred now tend to become more expensive later.
So let’s talk about potholes, patches, and rural road repairs.
Asphalt or blacktop? About 94% of paved roads in the United States are paved with asphalt mixtures – aggregates of crushed stone, sand, and gravel bound together with bitumen, a tarry black material found in natural deposits or refined from petroleum. We might call it blacktop, a term that may apply more to driveways and parking lots instead of roads. Blacktop generally has a higher percentage of coarse aggregates than the finer aggregate materials mixed with asphalt for use in roads. It gets confusing when the term asphalt is used for both the mixture and the raw material refined from petroleum.
Heavy crude, light crude. Most asphalt used in road projects comes from crude petroleum, but it’s not a primary product. It’s what is left after more profitable products like gasoline and diesel fuels are distilled. A barrel of light crude oil might yield, as a byproduct, a small percentage of asphalt. Heavy crude, on the other hand, might yield about 60% asphalt.
U.S. oil field production skews heavily towards light crude. Domestic refineries – built decades ago to process heavier crude – lack the capacity to refine all the light crude we produce. So, much of the light crude from domestic production is exported to where there are refineries that can process it profitably. When you factor in global trade agreements, we have a scenario where companies export U.S. production to other countries at higher prices and import cheaper heavy crude to refine here to meet domestic needs for things like asphalt.
Disruption. The Strait of Hormuz is a choke point in that global scheme. Maritime traffic in the 21-mile-wide passage between Iran and Oman came to a standstill in March. Let’s call it an Iranian economic sanction against the global economy.
Those who remember the 1973 OPEC oil embargo could not have been surprised that the 2026 closure of the Strait sent the price of oil skyrocketing. Concerns about asphalt are very, very far down on the list of likely impacts. That is, unless you serve in local government and are responsible for the maintenance and repair of rural roads. And elected officials in areas like mine, where the weather window for getting road work done is open for such a short time each year, are starting to sweat.
In a normal year… Where I live at 45 degrees north, it’s difficult to gauge the condition of paved roads until the frost is out of the ground. Decisions about road repairs are finalized after the annual roads inspection by the township supervisors. And while those supervisors bring great skills, talents, and rural life experience to local government, most have limited background in road construction and maintenance. So they rely on tools available from the state and from associations of municipalities. Preparation of those tools needs to be done early enough to get them into the hands of local governments. So those tools would have been based on conditions and prices from the past five or six years – not the current geopolitical situation.
The early bird. Suppliers anticipating a normal year would have been readying asphalt materials anyway. And in areas where road repair season arrives earliest, it may even feel like a normal year if they have already locked in contracts at pre-war prices.
For local governments farther north, the situation may be quite different. And it’s not just early bird buyers in the U.S. they’ll be competing against. Road building and repair materials are also in demand in China, India, and other markets. So our local government officials will be making some difficult choices based on changing conditions, unknown availability, and, possibly, sticker shock pricing.
No one-size-fits-all. Every road project is different – different widths, different subgrade soil, different pavement thickness, different age and condition, different traffic amounts and weights, and more. Rural municipalities also factor in funding variables like state General Transportation Aids and other options like Wisconsin’s new Agricultural Road Improvement Program (ARIP). There’s also history (good and not-so-good) with project bidders to consider, and comparables to study. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that local government officials use the Old Farmer’s Almanac to factor in weather predictions while deciding what road projects seem doable. And that’s in a normal year, where labor plus equipment plus materials to repave a road can add up to about a million dollars per mile in some areas.
The choices. For those who need a reminder: Global affairs have local impacts, so downballot races matter. In these uncertain times, people we elect to serve in local government will be making tough choices.
Last year, they may have accepted a bid to pulverize and pave 9,485’ x 18-20” for $196,910. This year, what would have been a less expensive but shorter-lived “wedge and overlay” repair may be all that’s doable. They may have to delay or defer projects, despite knowing the road condition continued deterioration will increase the scope of a future repair project and increase its cost. Analysts are suggesting that this situation is not just a short-term shock and may have lasting impacts on our infrastructure.
In the meantime, there are safety and liability concerns for the municipality. Filling potholes and patching cracks may be all that rural areas can do on some roads. For now, yes. For how long? Hard to say.
But that won’t stop folks from asking: When are you going to fix that road?
Donna Kallner writes from Langlade County in rural northern Wisconsin.
The post 45 Degrees North: Potholes, Patches, and Rural Road Repairs appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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