From northern Wisconsin here - I always had the impression growing up that gravel roads became gutted with potholes from the snow after a few winters if not maintained, and generally pretty horrible. Especially in WI, our small roads are "milk roads" where they drive the heavy milk trucks in for collection.

Certainly like the idea of cutting back unnecessary expenses, but I'd also like to see some data on this.

In Australia, there are lots of dirt tracks, and it's standard to regrade them ever year after the rainy season. (At which point they're pretty much impassable.)

But those are dirt roads, which are not the same thing as a proper, old-fashioned gravel Macadam road. They can be excellent, and are pretty easy to maintain --- if potholes develop, fill them promptly with the right grade of gravel --- but don't do high speed traffic well. (Gravel is flung up by the wheels, which was why they started gluing it down with tar --- hence tarmac, or tarmacadam.)

Can find a good video of a grader in action, so here's a bad one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFoN5LD0Q-w

In the parts of the US discussed in this thread - there really isn't a rainy season. They get moisture pretty much year round - snow in the winter, rain in the summer.

So more frequent gradings are needed if the traffic is heavy enough.

Surely you have frost heaves in Wisconsin? Aren't paved roads severely potholed by your winters as well?

oh, definitely! simply trying to remember back to what the gravel roads were like (been a while since I've lived there)

I seem to recall they get pretty awful, and ones that are not proper county roads become impassable at normal driving speeds

So for comparison of 50-yr maintenance costs (in Maine):

- Low-use gravel roads are ~50% of paved road maintenance cost.

- Moderate-use gravel roads are ~350% of paved road maintenance cost.

Yikes.

TL;DR Road maintenance is expensive, and the bill is about to come due.

And the scary thing is that it's not just road maintenance. It's sewer/water, electricity, and bridges, too. There has been so much exurbian expansion in the past two decades where the initial infrastructure costs were paid by the developer but then handed over to the town/county/state for maintenance. The municipalities count on property taxes to cover the cost, but with A) the real estate crash in many markets, and B) a general recession and a move of many younger earners back to urban areas, that money just isn't there.