No, don't use textures! I've been fiddling around with roads on terrain in blender before, and it's a pain with textures, because aligning them to the road is quite a lot of work. polygons is the way to go, you just have to be careful that you don't get z-buffer "flickering" problems when the polygons are too close to the road.
~"I never let school interfere with my education"~ -Mark Twain