Why are roads covered in tarmac, not cement?

Juliet Phillips

Actually, some roads are made of concrete. How many varies from place to place, from about one road in 20 to nearly half. There were 172 miles of concrete trunk roads in 2019 in the UK. You can usually tell because they are much noisier than tarmac. Concrete roads are slightly cheaper to maintain than tarmac, but driving on them feels much worse. You hear regular bumps because of how road builders lay them in sections that don’t quite fit together perfectly. In the US, concrete roads sound better because road builders grind them to smooth them out.