This has probably happened to you at least once. It's raining. You're driving along when all of a sudden....SWOOOSH!!!!.....you hit a big pool of water in your lane, water goes flying everywhere including all over your windshield. You can't see a thing as your car pulls hard to the right, your heartbeat is through the roof as the windshield wipers struggle to clear the massive amounts of water. You don't know if you're hydroplaning or about to spin out of control so you don't want to slam on the brakes. Then you realize you're driving a moving vehicle blind as a bat so you do tap the brakes. Finally the water clears away so you can see, you're through the lake in the middle of the road, your heart comes back down from out of your throat and all is good again......until you come up on the next pool of water.
I am here to tell you right now that what I just described would not have happened had you been on a street that had ditches. Some dweeb long ago convinced the powers that be that ditches are the devil, and ever since motorists have had hell driving when it rains. Somebody thought they had a genius idea to eliminate the ditch and replace it with the underground storm drain sewer system you see just about everywhere any more. And every where you see a street that has this set up, you will also see standing water on the road EVERY TIME it rains. Guaranteed!!
I suppose the thinking was that "they" wanted to eliminate cars going off the road and into a ditch, or that the ditch was just an eyesore still having water in it several days after a rain. OK, yeah, that's a nice idea but unfortunately that's where the thinking stopped. When they build these roads to put these storm sewers in place, the first thing they do is lower the road. Next, they block the road in with a curb that runs along the right side of the road in each direction where every 50 yards or so is a drain. When it rains, the water collects at this curb and runs along it until it reaches a drain where it goes into the sewer buried underground. The problem is, if there's a significant amount of rain, the water collects faster than it can travel along the curb to the drain, and you now have a stream of water covering a portion of the road. It doesn't take much from this point to have the entire lane covered by a pool of water.
Now you've got people slamming into this water on the road, losing control and having accidents, or trying to avoid it at the last second and causing an accident by swerving into another lane, or you have major traffic jams because everybody is forced to bottleneck into one lane or the entire road is covered with water and people are trying to inch their way through it, provided the water is not up to their hoods. Some morons will still try, but that's another story.
This does not happen on a road with ditches because on a road with ditches there is no curb keeping the water from clearing the road. The water doesn't collect, it rolls freely off the road into the ditch, no slowdowns, no standing water, no impassable streets, none of that silly nonsense.
Now I suppose if it rains hard enough and long enough, it will flood anywhere. Maybe, but I lived in a neighborhood for 17 years that had ditches and I do not recall the street I lived on ever having standing water on it. EVER! Rain for days, hurricanes, it didn't matter. The ditches would get full and our yards would sometimes fill up with water, but there was never any water on the street.
New neighborhoods these days are not only being built with the storm drain/curb disaster, but a lot have the added problem of sloped yards. So not only does the water roll to the curb off the street, but the water from the yard rolls down to the street as well and these drains just can't handle it fast enough. Now you can't get in nor out of your neighborhood without a Jetski because the streets are now rivers. The storm drain sewer replacing ditches idea was a complete fail. Obviously the brain child of some typical brain dead bureaucrat who had a financial stake in it somehow. That's the only reason I can think of as to why such a stupid plan would take over the world. And because of it, traffic is a nightmare any time it rains because roads are covered with water.
I have seen evidence however, of somebody putting just a little more thought into it. There's still not quite a ditch, certainly not a deep ditch, but there is a lower than the road portion of grass where a ditch would run. Underneath, the storm sewer has been put in place but there is no curb blocking the water and the drains are actually where the ditch would be. The water is allowed to roll off the road unobstructed, and into the grass on the side of the road, and into the drains which drop into the sewer below. No water collects on the road.
A great example of this if you're in the Houston area is Louetta road, west of I-45. I was driving down this road during a recent heavy rain event. This road, Louetta, has both types of drainage systems. At highway 249, Louetta has the curb/sewer set up, and water was all over the road and traffic was at a standstill trying to get through it. The further east you travel, towards I-45, it switches to the NO curb/drain in the ditch type set up and there was absolutely NO standing pools of water on the road from that point on and traffic moved along nicely considering it was pouring down rain. So somebody finally got some sense about this and at least made it where it does work.
Still though, the curbed storm sewers continue to be put in anywhere there's a new neighborhood being built or where a road is being redone, and the flooding continues to get worse, along with the traffic, and people can't understand why a completely brand new road floods every time it rains. Well, it's because somebody took away the ditch. That's where the water is supposed to be....with no ditch, the water is on the road. Genius!
Head, proctologist....you get the picture.
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