Badness of roadology!!

Did you know that there is a term called as roadology, which means the study of the impact of roads on the areas through which it passes!!
Anyways, the article is about "what should be the optimum amount of badness of the road to have a better impact on the society"
Did you ever wonder, what is the good thing about Indian roads. They are bad and filled with pot holes in most cases, and hence what good they can offer.
On the contrary, I'd say the roads are good because they are bad!!
While I understand how a good road helps in commercial transformation of the society, I somehow think that bad roads will do more justice to India than good roads.
I am actually referring to the interior roads and not the highways. The potential benefits to be accrued due to bad roads are:

  • A bad road would mean that the vehicles travelling on that road will get depreciated faster, making people purchase a car earlier. 
  • Because of bad road, the traffic slows leading to the potential for street vendors to do some small business ( Idea of my friend)
  • Bad roads will actually increase my health problems, thereby more business for the hospitals. You may say that the productivity of the candidate is hampered (we anyways are under utilizing our potential, so it would not create a major decrease in productivity of the person)
  • Bad roads will ask for more investment on insurance leading to more insurance companies coming in.
  • More time spent on the roads will make sure that people are listening to radio leading to more advertisement options.
  • Due to bad roads people will prefer public transport leading to increase in overall efficiency and energy optimization.
All the above factors directly contribute to the GDP growth rate.
Hence bad roads actually help GDP growth. I am not suggesting then that all the roads should be dug out and made worse. Good roads obviously will be appreciated and worse roads hated. Hence an optimum amount of badness is always good for the society.

Keeping all these in mind, I actually suggest the usage of a metric (roadofactor), which is the optimum badness that a roadness can retain in order to ensure benefit to GDP. It can be the function of the no. of potholes in an unit area of the road, depth of those pot holes and the frequency of re-occurrence of those potholes. 

From next time onwards, the roadofactor should become a metric for awarding road contracts. Anyways the contractors are making bad roads. Why not dis-incentivize them by saying that, we want bad roads and hence you will not be able to get any money out of it.

The best practices of Indian contractors in developing bad roads can be extended to the likes of China who is developing express highways in a frenzy. Lets tell me how to ensure bad roads in the fastest time!!


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