Hard Roads.
Men with money and automobiles are vigorously urging that road-building materials everywhere be tested, that road graders, stone crushers, and other expensive road-building machinery be purchased, and that the preparation for commencing road construction be begun at once. In short, they are conducting a vigorous campaign in the interest of hard roads—and in so doing, they may defeat their own cause now as they have done in the past. “When the hard road enthusiast began to tell the farmer how much it cost him to haul his produce to market,” says Professor Baker, “and how much he could save by the construction of hard roads, he knew instinctively that the conclusions were ridiculous, and the continual harping upon these false statistics and absurd estimates led him to believe that an attempt was being made to force hard roads upon him, whether or no, and his attitude changed from one of indifference to one of open hostility to all road improvement.”[1]
What, then, should be the line of procedure? “Unless a community is willing and able to maintain the earth roads in a reasonably good condition,” says Professor Baker again, “it is useless to expect that it will be willing or able to support a high class wagon road; and therefore, the dissemination of correct information concerning the construction and care of earth roads is politically, economically, and physically the first step towards a better form of construction.”[2]
An earth road to be a good road must be “dry, smooth, and hard.” These three conditions could be maintained with comparative ease if the earth road could be protected from water, which is its greatest destroyer and one of the most important factors in the destruction or deterioration of all roads.
Since in Utah the rainfall is very small, compared with that in the Eastern states and in the states of the Mississippi valley, the road problem is a much simpler one here than there.