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times they are passable for none but lightly-loaded and slow-moving ve- 
hicles. From the middle of May until the middle of July the roads are in 
excellent condition. A dirt road during these months is a splendid road; 
a gravel road is equally good. From the middle of July until the middle 
of October they are covered with dust, sometimes two or three inches 
in depth. Then come the fall rains, and the dusty roads absorb water like 
a sponge preparatory to December frosts. Then follow three months of 
good roads with frozen surface over the imprisoned water that is well 
content to wait, knowing that in March it will have ample opportunity 
to make trouble. And with the first of March the roads begin to thaw 
and break up, to be followed by two months of bad roads. ) 
Of the 60,000 miles of roads in Indiana, 52,000 are unrideable for 
bicycles at nearly all seasons of the year, and the remaining 8,000 are 
rideable only during about four or five months in the early summer and 
late in the fall or winter. 
There are seven good reasons why our roads are bad: 
1. Because of lack of drainage, more especially of the surface water; 
failure to remove the surface water to the side ditches promptly permits 
it to saturate and soften even the hardest of road materials. The road 
surface should at all times be kept shaped like a roof to shed water, and 
to this end it is necessary always to keep ruts and chuckholes filled, and 
the surface smoothly and uniformly crowned. The first step in the main- 
taining of a road in good condition is to eradicate the ruts. And any plan 
or device that will prevent the forming of ruts will aid in providing good 
roads. Wide tires help to attain this end; a more clever device is the long 
doubletree, with the whiffletrees so attached that each horse must travel 
directly in the wheel track. The horses refuse to travel in the rut, and 
choosing the smoothest path, the wheels are drawn out of the rut, thus 
helping to roll it down instead of cutting it deeper. 
2. Another reason why our roads are bad is because repairs are too 
long delayed. On road surfaces, more perhaps than upon any other kind 
of engineering structures, the repairs should be made promptly; an ounce 
of prevention is worth many pounds of cure. 
3. <A third reason for bad roads is because too much of the work on 
repairs is done at one time, on the principle, doubtless, that if a small 
dose is good, a large dose will be better. 
Our gravel roads suffer most from this method of repairs. Late in the 
fall they are heaped ten or twelve inches deep with gravel and then al- 
