Done right, crews pack it down with machinery and then put an oil / water mixture over the top.

Idaho often just lays loose gravel over the tar and expects car traffic to pack it in. Cheap road maintenance to save on the rolling and the oil mixture, but you get horrible roads with tons of loose gravel forever. Plus the chip seal often doesn’t really get compacted evenly and you wind up with a really patchy chip seal application and lots of wasted gravel off the side of the road.

As a cyclist, it is very obvious when chip seal work is cheap and subpar.

None of that has anything to do with the tragedy though.