In article ,
"Bob La Londe" wrote:

A crown makes for a pretty road, but it will also rut and wash away faster.
I guess you get the choice between standing water when it rains or ruts that
will break an axle when it comes to dirt road building.

Nonsense. A crown, correctly done, causes the water to run off the road
to the sides, thus NOT allowing any significant amount of water to run
down the road and wash material away - the most water any one section of
road sees is what's accumulated over 8-16 feet (if you have a dirt road
over 32 feet wide, whatever half the width is) as it runs from the
center to the edge. It also (with correct ditches) keeps the roadbed dry
and solid, resisting ruts (or as dry as it can - spring thaw is fairly
hopeless when the road is thawed but the ground under it is frozen.)
Lack of crown permits water to run down the road, carrying material with
it and washing it away, and also allows the roadbed to get wet, and
soft, thus making ruts when wheels run over it.

Crowned or not, any road that is not dragged regularly will start to
develop wheel ruts with time simply from material being moved aside if
wheels run in a regular path down it, and as soon as the ruts exceed the
amount of crown (if any) water will start to run down the road and wash
it out.

I'm not sure where you're getting your ideas, but it's not from a few
hundred years collective experience with making dirt roads. Or 30 odd
with building and maintaining dirt driveways and roads (with a civil
engineer and former seebee to help transfer those few hundred years
experience...)

One of the biggest labor-saving things I can do (between dragging, or
grading, which is a rare event since I don't own grader) is to go out
in the rain with a shovel or hoe and look for water running down the
road/driveway, and cut paths out to the ditch for it every 15-20 feet so
that it cannot get enough water to cut significantly into the road. If
the road is recently crowned correctly, there won't be any water running
down it, but as material moves outwards under traffic, it eventually
defeats the crown and will lead to large washouts if left to get worse.
Repairing those is a lot more work than preventing them.

--
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