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Works fine for me. Maybe you're geoblocked?

edit: screengrab that shows the color difference: https://wormhole.app/a7Alp9#AQrGDBYIigvXaN7Wx1uJJA

LOL. We could all be Greek! I have 2, 50lb bags of Western Miracle Type S Lime that I moved across the country to a new house and don't have a current use for. It made really awesome pavers with the gazebo excavation dirt on the previous project.

Would painting lime work on city streets, interstate freeways, and parking lots, though? I hadn't thought of that. I'm not going to look it up but an enormous number of house roofs here are pure white from some sort of white/plastic/rubber concoction.

To be even more of a pedant, because asphalt is a subset concrete, any comparison between asphalt and concrete is automatically implied as a comparison between asphalt and non-asphalt concrete, and to specify would be redundant.

It's just like when saying "man vs animal", everyone knows that man is a type of animal, but it's implied that it's "man vs non-man animal".

Possibly. But I noticed offhand in the DFW, Texas area there many local streets - sometimes flat ground-level parking lots - paved entirely in concrete, not just highways. Apparently for them the up front investment in "normal" (portland?) concrete is more economical.

> You need a pretty thick slab with rebar in it if you want to build a road surface from it, due to how weak cement concrete is under tension.

A lot of states use JPCP now for highways that doesn’t require rebar.

> As for why roads are normally made out of “normal” concrete, it’s very expensive to build roads like that.

> Pavements are cheaper to build out of concrete because they only carry the weight of pedestrians, not lots of rolling vehicles.

> You need a pretty thick slab with rebar in it if you want to build a road surface from it, due to how weak cement concrete is under tension.

Maybe. OTOH the bays of bus-stops tend to be made of the rebared thick slabs in a town with higher traffic I happen to know. Since about a decade at least. Before that there were always ruts in the asphalt, so deep they needed to be fixed again and again. Not so with the rebared slabs.

The cost would be a lot lower given sufficient advance planning to stop digging it up and patching it so often. Different parts of local government often don't coordinate enough with each other, so a brand new road gets put in, and then dug up and patched 1-2 months later. Asphalt is easier and thus cheaper to patch, and the result looks...well, as bad as asphalt always does, rather than the obvious patch spots/lines on concrete.

Ideally, put in concrete roads that include conduits.

1. Thank you for the thoughtful reply

2. Of all things, y'all really grow alfalfa out there?

This effectively bans trees in many neighborhoods with smaller lots.

Is the lack of green cover really problem? Seems like the lack of green cover would be natural for that area.

People did prefer living in colder areas before AC.

The arrival of AC meant there was suddenly a lot of very cheap land around cities that are extremely unpleasant without AC. This resulted in migration and a housing boom which drives up the economy attracting more people.

Suburbia requires land and desert land is very cheap when market-priced, so long as the true costs of drinking and lawn grass watering for the land are externalized. Unfortunately, that leaves the region exposed to the Colorado watershed collapse and associated “which metropolis gets the axe” politics:

America’s desert metropolis Is on the short list to lose water (6 hours ago) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/us/arizona-canals-colorad...

(I suspect the interstate highway system also contributed to migrations, but haven’t done the research.)

Large silver and turquoise mines, basically.

Cheap land

Not only is it difficult to grow them, but our monsoon storms regularly knock down tall trees, due to powerful "microburst" wind gusts.

The trees really never develop a proper root system. The trees look impressive enough above-ground, but the roots are shallow and weak, and once a proper wind gust hits them, they're yesterday's news.

My apartment complex is surrounded by eucalyptus, olive trees, oleander, ficus, some palms, and other deciduous trees, and in fact it used to be named after the lush treescape, but every time one dies, they are replacing them with desert xeriscape. I predict in enough years, we will no longer have a lawn or any trees at all, and many individual properties are following that same trajectory.

Nevertheless, most cities here pursue an urban greening effect, although they are prudently selecting native species at this time. So, our sidewalks are more likely to be lined with yucca, ironwood, and palo verde, among other things.