Is a road with big chip safer than a smoother road?
No, not at all. What makes a road safe is how much grip (skid resistance) vehicle tyres have on the road. This is a combination of how big the chips are in terms of whether they stick out of the bitumen, and how the surface of the chip looks. Some of the chips are very, very small, like the relatively soft volcanic andacites. But even though the chip is small it has a high skid resistance. Transit keeps monitoring skid resistance and uses the standards that are used in the United Kingdom. There’s no simple rule that ‘big chips give you better grip’. What does matter is the way the road is built. If you keep building a road out of big chips on top of big chips on top of big chips, layer after layer, every 10 to 12 years, then eventually you will probably get a pudding of black bitumen with big stones in it.
