Road Maintenance

Hi all - I'm a little confused about the basic Road Maintenance rules (so far I've been building up a level each turn, so no problem yet with pot-holes). Correct me if I'm wrong on any of the following. Roads are maintained via Poor Relief. Basic Poor Relief is £10,000 pa for 1 million pop. The rule (p.14) says "Roads are maintained via Poor Relief (£1 needed per £1 of road)..." I take the "per £1 of road" to refer to the "cost to upgrade to next level" cost (?) So - for the sake of argument, if I have a pop of 1 million and a cost to upgrade of £50,000 I need to set Poor Relief at £50,000 pa to keep things running smoothly on my roads?? (and at the same time prevent unrest amongst the poor?)

Be well all

Jim

Confuses me too. I don't think the rule is applied that mathematically.

The number of paupers depends on EH (lower EH, higher paupers), so if you have a low EH, you may find you need to pay more for poor relief, irrespective of the level of road improvement.

However, if you have a low EH, then presumably the roads are not being used as much (less trade), so should be less susceptible to potholes which need mending. By the same logic, a higher EH should mean less unrest among the poor (there are fewer of them), but the roads get more use so are more likely to have potholes.

p.14 states poor relief expenditure includes money used to pay gangs of paupers to mend the roads, which suggests to be safe you should pay a higher level of poor relief as some who need it will be unable to do that kind of heavy work.

Alternatively you could use work gangs on permanent pot-hole filling duties, perhaps 'recruited' from vagrants. The ratio (p.13) is 1000 men for every £10,000 cost of road construction, which implies that if it costs £50,000 to upgrade your roads and half as much to repair them, a gang of 2,500 men would be sufficient to permanently cure the problem. I haven't tried this myself, but I do sympathise with the frustration when potholes appear as soon as a new road is constructed!

Hmmm, interesting stuff. You can certainly see why chain gangs were invented.

How did the Romans manage their massive road networks? was it simply that they were better engineered? Had great stone masons? Were used less or mainly by foot traffic?

There is always the Turnpike option (quoting from Advice for Princes supplement page 28)

"A turnpike is a road for which a toll is levied to pay for its maintenance.
In terms of the game this would mean there would be no risk of the road network becoming pot holed or degraded as a consequence of insufficient poor relief being made available. But riots are possible as people are used to using the roads for free.
Turnpikes cost the equivalent of a road level to establish, but cost nothing to maintain once this has happened."

Mustang Shooting Stars wrote:Hmmm, interesting stuff. You can certainly see why chain gangs were invented.

How did the Romans manage their massive road networks? was it simply that they were better engineered? Had great stone masons? Were used less or mainly by foot traffic?

My understandings is that the answer was soldiers. When you weren't campaigning, you were road building.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads

"Building viae was a military responsibility and thus came under the jurisdiction of a consul. The process had a military name, viam munire, as though the via were a fortification. Municipalities, however, were responsible for their own roads, which the Romans called viae vicinales. The beauty and grandeur of the roads might tempt us to believe that any Roman citizen could use them for free, but this was not the case. Tolls abounded, especially at bridges. Often they were collected at the city gate. Freight costs were made heavier still by import and export taxes."

I imagine in period our soldiers would think it beneath them to do such base work...

I recall reading something about how far roman soldiers were expected to march each day (fast!) a while ago. Can't recall the exact figure sadly. Their level of stamina was just crazy though. Especially as they probably had to build a fort at the end if it before dinner and bed!

And there was me hoping for an easy answer...

I don't know. I think maintenance is, however, less than building them.

Without resorting to using manpower, the only way i've found of avoiding pot holes is to pay a maintenance cost equivalent to upgrading by one level. eg. upgrade cost of £50,000. maintenance cost also £50,000.
I've given up using manpower as the great unwashed would wander off if not guarded and any monies saved were instead used in maintaining the guards.

Thanks, a nice clear answer from experience. But it does make you wonder about the logic of the rules that mean there's no reason not to up-grade roads (since it costs the same to go to the next level as to maintain what you've got). (Minus the 10K for basic Poor Relief, of course... but still not much difference)

Deacon wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads

"Building viae was a military responsibility and thus came under the jurisdiction of a consul. The process had a military name, viam munire, as though the via were a fortification. Municipalities, however, were responsible for their own roads, which the Romans called viae vicinales. The beauty and grandeur of the roads might tempt us to believe that any Roman citizen could use them for free, but this was not the case. Tolls abounded, especially at bridges. Often they were collected at the city gate. Freight costs were made heavier still by import and export taxes."

I imagine in period our soldiers would think it beneath them to do such base work...

I think soldiers were used for road construction in our period-I think they were in Prussia and am pretty sure after the Jacobite uprisings the military roads in Scotland were constructed using military labour.

The Roman example is also primarily about construction, maintenance was a local responsibility and it added to the tax burden of the civitas (esp towards the end of the Western Empire)-interestingly in England, "Anglo-Saxon" land grants often record the requirement placed upon towns and landowners to maintain certain
roads and bridges, it has been suggested that this requirement was actually a residual memory of the Roman requirement placed on local communities. It's a theme in early medieval studies that in many former parts of the Western Empire, the early land law codes of the post-Empire kingdoms often drew on elements of Imperial law.