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Old 02-12-2019, 05:53 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Location: Western Australia
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Typically , they'll use a lot less road working equipment. The vast majority of roads in the outback are unpaved because it's simply too expensive to seal them and then maintain them. They scrape the road out of the gravel and then level it every few years with a scraper and that's about it.

Australia has an average population density as of late 2018 of 3.3 people per square kilometre. In some outback areas, that density can drop to as little as 0.02 people per square km. We have a number of towns in outback areas revolving around primary industry and the distance between those towns can be hundreds of kilometres from each other so basically, it's just too damned expensive to maintain those "roads" as anything more than wide gravel tracks.

Only specific roads (e.g. state or national highways) are sealed and maintained however they generally travel from one major city to another (or major regional town) and if some smaller towns along the way happen to be nearby, they can claim the benefits of a sealed road as well. Everywhere else gets gravel tracks.

Any Project team will have to be far more self-sufficient than teams in North America or Europe because of the lack of population here. When you're 500 kilometres away from the nearest town with a doctor, you have to manage any medical emergency yourself. When you're 200 kilometres away from the nearest service station, you have to carry plenty of spares, not just fuel but tyres, fanbelts, radiator hoses, tools and more importantly, water, plenty of water (unless you know the area, you aren't going to find anywhere with water until you hit the next town - unless you're lucky and happen to be travelling near a river).
And so on and so on.

I think in this regard, a Project set up for Australia could probably focus more on re-establishing trade/transport and connecting societies with each other rather than spending major effort in rebuilding towns etc. etc. Most of those outback towns are going to be too remote to be worth destroying if we're talking a war type cataclysm and they're too spread out for major spread of disease, earthquake, meteor strike, fire or flooding to damage all of them beyond rebuilding. It needs to be a catastrophe of apocalyptic scale to smash all those spreadout towns to a point where they cannot do something to help themselves.
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