I finally stopped to look more closely. These ripples are about 10 inches wide ands look to be almost exactly uniform through long stretches of road. Where does this precision come from?
In: 879
It’s caused by tires slipping on the slick dirt surface, or in areas where cars accelerate such as after a tight corner or up a steep hill. Unfortunately I really doubt you’ll ever get people to understand this.
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The wavy appearance resembles ribs that form when fluids flow over finely distributed solids and relocate them superficially.
My father operated a piece of heavy machinery for years that we called a “road grader” (I can’t be bothered to Google the official name). The machine is maybe 15-20 feet long and 10-12 feet wide. A long, narrow blade sits beneath the cabin area.
The blade pivots on an axis and also slides along a plane to extend across the surface of the gravel road. The blade also can be angled to scrape the surface (top edge leads the bottom edge) or push/dig the surface (bottom edge leads the top edge).
The washboard surface is due to an improper angle on the blade which causes the blade to stutter as it moves along the surface of the road. Speed is also a factor. Higher speeds increase the intensity of the ripple. If the machine moves too fast, then the rippling leads to whole sections of the compacted surface coming loose, which causes potholes.
If you’ve ever pushed a table across a floor, that vibrating sound it makes is the same principle of the blade rapidly moving up and down due to an improper angle. Pulling the table reduces the stutter (because the weight is slightly off the front legs) and slowly pulling reduces it even more.
I thought it was caused by the tire gaining and losing traction rapidly. once it starts it’s self perpetuating
I spent a lot of time driving on dirt Roads in outback Australia, one of the old farmers told me that the corrugations, as he called them were formed by the average resonant frequency of the suspension and the average speed of the traffic on the road.
To Explain
If you walk up to most cars and press down firmly over the front wheels, the car will go down with your weight and come back up and then there will be a small bounce. This bounce changes the weight of the vehicle on the road, and as more vehicles travel along the road, you end up with the wave pattern in the dirt.
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Possibly a corduroy road? If it’s an old gravel road, it may have been originally been formed of logs laid down perpendicular to the direction of travel, and covered with sufficient dirt and gravel to make a road bed. The material is named for this construction style, with the word, possibly, deriving from French cour du roi, which translates to course of the king, or, the king’s road.
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