Well, that’s a fairly simple question to answer. These roads are hundreds and often thousands of years old. They were built to reach the odd farmhouse or hamlet, LONG before cars or before more than a minority of people could afford horse drawn carts. I remember being taught that you can often gauge the age of a road by the height of the banks either side - one metre roughly equals 1,000 years. Country lanes have often started as mere footpaths which widened with increased traffic, but not beyond the width of one cart. These roads weren’t built by local government, they frequently just ‘happened’ because that’s where people wanted to walk or ride.
I think the point I’m making is that places like the UK and Ireland didn’t develop under any sense of organised central planning. They grew organically - so narrow, twisting roads and higgedly piggly villages is our legacy. And we don’t particularly want to sweep that all away under concrete and tarmac.
One other factor that I don’t think has been mentioned is the concept of ‘green belt’ - basically, many rural areas are protected from development in order to maintain our natural, sustainable resources and the ability to grow food. This makes it very hard to get planning permission to get anything built on previously undeveloped land, where it borders developed areas - roads included.
That’s not an answer. As I said in my post above – American roads started out the same way. Theyt were paths, and later they were somewhat widened to accommodate carts and the like. I’m sure most of them weren’t made wide enough for two modern cars to pass. But at some point, the roads in the US WERE made wide enough for two carts to pass, and later for two automobiles. But in the UK and Ireland, for the most part, they weren’t.
You can’t explain it by saying that “they started out small”. All of them did. The question is why the roads in the UK/Ireland didn’t widen out later with the coming of the automobile as it did in the US, and Canada, and many of the other places I’ve been.
San Vito is essentially correct. Countries that were fairly late to intensive settlement and modern patterns of land ownership, like the USA and Australia placed much more emphasis on clearly separating private and public lands like roads when they first formally subdivided the land. In Austalia the default road reserve width is one chain [=66 feet or ~20 metres] which allows for the actual road to meander a little bit but also has enough room for shoulders, drainage structures and such. This width of road gets built into the initial pattern of land subdivision to separate the private lots.
Countries where land subdivision took place very BC [before cars] were more likely to either allow rights of way across private land or to keep trackways to the minimum width possible.
Properly formed two lanes+ wide roads were an early 19th century phenomenon, usually funded by local toll trusts or entrepreneurs. They had to raise capital to buy land on the right alignment for fast travel from A to B, which often was not where the local roads or users needed to go.
Well most of them did - you’re ignoring the vast swathes of developed towns and cities, interconnected by 1000s of miles of two, four and six lane highways. So some rural roads are single track, that doesn’t make them the default! They’re a challenge for us city dwellers too - because we don’t come across them too often. If you’re a tourist, you probably see them more often in a trip that we would in a year, because the undeveloped countryside isn’t where most of us hang out.
Do European roads have a Right of Way that extends past the edge of the pavement like in the US? In the US, roads typically have a significant ROW that extends well beyond the pavement to include the shoulder, drainage, utility lines, etc. If Europe has something similar, then it seems like the pavement could be easily extended into the ROW without having to acquire new land. For example, this road seems like it should have available space to be expanded:
The road systems in the US and Canada are fairly recent, so change is part of what made them what they are. The rural lanes in the UK and Ireland have been the way they are for thousands of years.
But the roads I originally mentioned were in Provence, France, which are bordered by flat fields. The roads are about 1.5 cars wide and there’s nothing physical to prevent them from being widened. The picture I linked above is from Provence, and it’s clear there’s nothing on either side that would stop the road from being widened.
But even in the picture you linked, it’s just bushes on the side. Bushes can be cut down and replanted. In the US, bushes would not really be an impediment to widening the road.
Protected hedgerows*, land ownership, cost, destruction of greenbelt - for a road that’s used by a tractor and a few cars a day? Look, we have MANY roads which have been widened over the years - heck, the Roman road ‘Watling Street’ is now mostly a busy four-lane dual carriageway. But our landscape is riddled with roads of all widths and amounts of usages - we can’t widen them all.
*The hedge in those pictures is possibly 1000 years old, and is integral to protecting flora and fauna. We try not to rip them out if we can help it. We’ve made those mistakes in the past.
I would guess that roads in the US would have all those same complications, but 2-way US roads would never be that narrow regardless of how low their utilization was. Some roads won’t have a shoulder, but pretty much every 2-way road is plenty wide for 2 side-by-side vehicles even if only 1 car a day drives on it.
I wonder if the real reason the European roads aren’t widened is because of differences in litigation. The US is much more litigious. When accidents happen, someone gets sued. But in Europe, the blame seems to fall much more on the driver, so insurance companies and state road organizations aren’t on the hook to pay out. Without these large organizations applying political pressure for road safety, it might not happen.
When accidents happen, a driver is certainly deemed to be at fault - driving is seen as a responsibility, not a right. But the insurance companies pay. And you can bet we have large organisations dedicated to road safety. It’s just not practical or desirable to wipe out large parts of our valuable landscape and heritage to the might of the car.
Lots of such country roads lined with hedges in the UK. Occasionally with ditches as well, just for added laughs. Some places also have sunken lanes, and widening those would be major earthmoving, just to improve access to some Little Potherington on the Wolds.(Uh, not a real name.)
In the first place, although there are certainly roads that are thousands of years old, like the Roman roads, the vast majority of them aren’t. Many roads are the result of relatively (in the “thousands of years” sense) recent, made because of changing settlements. Suburban roads sure as hell are recent
Even if roads are old, it’s only in the past couple of hundred years that they had to deal with two-way traffic because of increased population, industrialization, and more people having carts and automobiles. I know a lot of those driveway-narrow roads I drove on in Ireland weren’t all that old. Just narrow.
Just because a road may have been old, it doesn’t explain why the road wasn’t widened to accommodate two-way traffic when that increased traffic suggested it. Unless your explanation is “Extreme Conservatism” (“We can’t widen the road – we’ve never done it before!”)
Just for the record, some American roads are pretty old, too. Broadway predates Colonial times.
This thread is a microcosm of the real world, and in that sense, contains the answer you seek.
On the one hand we have (largely)British/Irish people offering rationale for why minor roads are, and should be left alone.
On the other hand we have (largely)American/Canadian people rejecting those explanations as insufficient or unsatifying at every turn.
On one side of the Altantic, we have roads that are left alone.
On the other side, you have roads that have been continually upgraded.
These pairs of facts (if indeed facts they be) are not unrelated. There is simply a different set of cultural value judgements being made - and since decisions on transport policies are also formed by people who have been born and raised within those frameworks of value judgments, there are different sets of decisions and policies.
Europe is chock full of full width roads as well as narrow ones. Where traffic required it and it wasn’t too costly, roads where upgraded and widened, and where it was a problem or high cost, they weren’t.
Some of those roads might now have high enough traffic to justify an upgrade, at least in the eyes of a visiting tourist, but not be high on the list of road projects in the area for any number of reasons depending on the road and the community.
You appear to want concrete, solid answers for what is actually a general, vague question.
It’s worth mentioning that narrow country roads get widened and straightened when rural areas become suburbanised. I live in an area which, during my lifetime, has been transformed from farmland to suburbs, and the road network has been upgraded to meet the change in use. So it’s not impossible for narrow roads to be widened if needed.
I suspect that this is the main reason. When a road project needs to acquire adjacent land from property owners, the attitude of the people seems like it will be different in the US versus Europe. In the US there will be just some minor grumbling about land value for suitable compensation, but the annexation will almost always go through. In Europe it seems there is a much more emotional attachment to the land and annexation will face a lot of resistance.
Even here in Oregon, which has only been a state for 160 years I can show you roads that go through flat fields and take numerous 90 degree turns–why? Because the landowners said no when asked if they would sell off part of their fields to put in or to widen the roads. Roads initially ran between fields and doglegs were the norm, then when they got turned into car capable roads and paved and widened it was dependent on the landowners to either sell off bits of their fields or no, and if the answer was “no” then the road is going to have to have a right angle bend in it. Extend this sort of conflict back a couple thousand years and you have narrow UK/European rural roads. It’s not rocket science.
I’m unclear why you struggle with this - it seems you want us to widen all roads, wherever they are, whatever the cost, whatever their use.
Fact is, busier roads get widened, small tracks in some rural areas don’t. Considerations are a complex mix between the needs of road users, local land owners, conservation, cost, environmental impact and on and on and on.
