I’m not saying that they should go out now and widen all their roads – that would be ridiculously expensive. What I’m asking is why they’re so narrow in the first place.
I think there’s a very interesting question here – why is it that American ( and Canadian, and several other country’s) roads wide enough for easy two-way traffic while many UK and Irish roads aren’t. I don’t sat all buy the explanation that “our countries are smaller, and so it’s harder to get the land.” If that were the case, then you’d inevitably have narrow roads on all islands. But US roads on islands are comfortably two lanes wide. It’s also true in other island I’ve been to, like Aruba (which is seriously small). And that’s Dutch. Puerto Rican roads are pretty wide, too.*
It goes beyond the roads. People built similarly narrow roads on private estates in Ireland (I’ve been to some that are now museums), where the only people they had to negotiate with about space was themselves. Even more bizarre, to me, are the gates in their surrounding walls, which are barely one car width across. Why? Even if the gate is historic and old, one car width is bvarely one carriage width. Why make it so narrow you can barely fit your vehicle through?
My question is – why did the roads in the US (and Canada, etc.) “grow up” as two-lanes, while they “grew u[” as essentially single lane in the UK and Ireland. I’m not talking about places where the road is hedged in by stone walls and hedgerows and the like – there are plenty of places where there’s a huge amount of land that a widened road could have been built on.
I’m sure that in the 18th and 19th centuries a lot of roads were one lane, because more wasn’t needed – if you had two vehicles coming in opposite directions, one could easily move over to the side. But with increasing use of horse-drawn and then motor vehicles the advantage of wider roads became clearer, and on our side of the Atlantic they went wider while on the other they retained narrow roads. There’s some cultural reason there, and now I’m curious.
Although I don’t think that constraints due to size forced narrow roads, as I say above, I do think that the availability of wide open spaces (not only free from towns, walls, and the like, but also freedom from hills, rills, valleys, etc. and the presence of large flat open spaces) DID contribute to street patterns, in America, at least (I’m not familiar with elsewhere). Where I grew up in the East, streets are often narrow, but invariably twisted and turning and not crossing at right angles, because they follow the shape of the land. But when you get to the states of the Plains - Lincoln and Omaha Nebraska, for instance, the streets become wide and straight and cross each other at right angles. This system reached a sort of pinnacle in Salt Lake City, where not only are the streets extremely wide (Brigham Young was said to have boasted that you could turn a carriage around in a street. Several years ago they were able to put in light rail through SLC without any serious disruption because they had plenty of room to put it right there in the existing street.) And the streets are numbered 100 house numbers tio the block and all streets numbered, a system that extends beyond Salt Lake Ciyty to several surrounding towns without changing the numbers.
Of course, they were starting with a blank slate, and could do what they wanted. But it was having all that flat open space that let them easily put in those regular, straight roads. American counties follow much the same pattern – small and irregular in the east, but forming regular squares in nice order when you get to the western plains. (But then they got into mountains and deserts that messed up the pattern. But look at the regular tesselation of Iowa and Nebraska and large parts of Texas):
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