Interesting stuff. But going back to the question of geography, consider this: Dutch road builders have almost no need at all to deal with the vertical dimension thanks to the flatness of most of the terrain. They also enjoy a soft even silty soil, which must make road building easier. We, by contrast, live in a country where significant industrial development (hence need for roads) took place in hilly areas thanks to the availability of water power, minerals and coal and the history of British road building is littered with stories of epic bridges, cuttings, embankments, landslips, subsoils and peats, not to mention the need to build roads up and down hills where only pack horse trails existed. The most recent epic major road is the M62 over the Pennines where several metres of wet peat had to be removed at huge expense in order to find a solid footing. Imagine how much that motorway must have cost compared to the same distance in Holland.