Corduroy roads can also be built as a foundation for other surfacing. If the logs are buried in wet, acidic, anaerobic soils such as peat or muskeg they decay very slowly. A few corduroy road foundations that date back to the early 20th century still exist in the United States. One example is the Alaska Highway between Burwash Landing and Koidern, Yukon, which was rebuilt in 1943, less than a year after the original route was graded on thin soil and vegetation over permafrost, by using corduroy, then building gravel road over top. During the 1980s, the gravel was itself covered with a chip-seal. During the late 1990s, this corduroy-underlain road began to be replaced with modern road construction, including rerouting of the entire highway.
In a slang application, "Corduroy Road" can also apply to a road in ill repair, having many holes, discernible ruts, or surface swellings and one on which travel is unpleasant, or capable of harming the vehicles travelling on it.
Corduroy roads were used extensively in the American Civil War in Sherman's March through the Carolinas and in World War II by both German and Soviet forces on the Eastern Front. In the Pacific Northwest corduroy roads built of huge logs and without the sand covering were the mainstay of local logging practices and were known as skid roads. Two of these, respectively on the outskirts of the milltowns of Seattle and Vancouver, which had become concentrations of bars and working man's slum, were the origin of the more widespread meaning of "skid road" and its derivative skid row, referring to a poor area.