Having just driven from Massachusetts far into the Midwest I think one barrier to understanding here is that compared to Europe everything in the US is just more spread out, which likely makes an American’s gut estimation of population density and average traffic way off for rural Provence or Sussex. Car culture also developed differently and at a different pace in Europe, and very few places in Europe have developed, after the introduction of the combustion engine, with so much “free space” to work with.
Rural America still has random businesses spread out all over the place, you pass a town sign and nothing really changes, people have lived on acreages for ages, having a large plot of land but not farming. Rural Europe is much more likely to have businesses and people clustered. The decline in farming is creating some opportunity to spread out more, but it’s a relatively recent development.
So when I drive through rural Maine or Minnesota and see a lawn mower salesman I think to myself, however does he get enough business out here? And when an American drives on a narrow Provence road they might think “How do they get where they need to go every day?”, and the answer is often that they don’t need to go all that far, and if they do, most of the journey is likely to be on a bigger road.
You misaspprehend – I don’t want to do anything to the roads.
But I observe that the trend is for very narrow roads in the UK and Ireland, but roads wide enough for two-way traffic, in general, in the US and Canada. My question is why this should be.
People try to give reasons, but they’re not at all convincing – Of course people own land and it costs (or requires government right-of-way rulings) to widen the roads. But that happened on this side of the Atlantic. The UK and Ireland are smaller, but islands are smaller still, and many have wide roads. The roads started out as single-lane , and were that way for (jn some cases) thousands of years. But the roads started out as single-lane roads in the US and Canada, too. But they widened here, and not over there. Some roads in the US are narrow and twisty – tell me about it. Some places in Boston’s North End won’t accommodate fire engines or stretch limos. But in most of the US two-lane roads are the norm. I think in most places they’re mandated.
Road width seems to be culturally determined. My question is why this should be. It’s not at all obvious. If your answer is “Well, why SHOULD they be wider? They’re fine the way they are. We’ve always had it this way.” My response is “Why shouldn’t they be wider? There are practical advantages*. We’ve always had it this way.” When both sides say “It’s always been this way”, you’re dealing with a cultural difference, and it’s of interest to learn why.
*Fewer accidents from head-on collisions. Not having the nother of backing up to where the road is wider to pass.
As I mentioned above, this observation is flawed anyway. We have narrow lanes in much the same contexts as you have dirt tracks; rural areas, low traffic, serving very small populations or individual farms and country dwellings, where through traffic to larger destinations is served by larger and better roads.
But this assertion just isn’t the case. The majority of our road networks are perfectly good two-way traffic roads, just like yours. Tight single lane roads are not the standard, just a feature you find in some rural or ‘old town’ areas where they aren’t used enough to warrant the expense of widening them. They also tend not to be the only roads in those areas - you can normally avoid them completely should you choose to do so (and don’t blindly follow satnav if it wants to take you ‘as the crow flies’).
Because not everything is about the mighty car. You are completely ignoring factors such as local environment, conservation, economy, air pollution - not to mention cost as has been mentioned a zillion times - there’s a load of factors to consider when widening a road - ‘because it would be nicer or safer for car drivers’ is just one. If the needs of traffic are deemed more important than other factors, then we widen the road. If it’s not, then why do it?
Overlooking the excellent point that the trend isn’t precisely as you describe it, let’s stipulate that there do exist narrow roads in Europe that require an explanation. Clearly, there exist reasons that are sufficient for those with any degree of input into the issue. You have been given those reasons. But rather than responding with something like, “Well, I wouldn’t find those reasons sufficient but I guess the people who matter do, thanks for filling me in,” you appear to be responding with “I don’t agree with those reasons, therefore they can’t be the reasons, there must be other secret ones the validity of which will be determined by the fact that I personally find them convincing.”
Perhaps it would help if you could share some possible answers to your question that you would find convincing? So far, answers based on cost-benefit analysis, history, culture, policy, law, local interests and the environment have fallen short of whatever your threshold is. So what kind of answer would have you say, “OK, I get it now.”? And if there isn’t such an answer, then AlanPartridgeShrug.gif
I think you’re going to find the reason for the difference in the US rather than the UK. It’s not like the UK is currently building new single track roads with stone hedgerows on either side. And I think the reasons for not rebuilding all of the old ones have been adequately discussed. The question then is when and why did the US rebuild many of its remote, sparsely used single track roads and turn them into decently wide two-lane roads? If there was a road connecting two communities of around a hundred people that was used 20 or 30 times a day, why was the money spent enlarging that road? I can only guess, but I suspect a many of those road expansion initiatives took place as work projects during the Great Depression. Also, focusing on the UK versus the US, spending priorities and spending power were different. The UK had a greater emphasis on its passenger rail network than the US did during the first half of the 20th century. Corporate influence from the US automobile industry likely had an effect on government decisions to spend money on roads. Also, greater spending powers at regional levels in the US, such as state or county levels, could have led to increased spending on road-widening. And again, corporate influence, at this level from the construction companies, could have had a place in the decision making.
Not only does the US have wide 2-lane roads, we also have very wide 4-lane roads even in rural areas with relatively low traffic use. A strong point about safety can be made for 2-lane roads being at least wide enough for 2 marked lanes which allow cars to pass without having to move to one side, but I don’t think a proportional safety benefit comes from these rural roads being 4-lane instead of 2-lane. Certainly safety is an aspect, but I suspect the bigger motivating force is the convenience of fast travel. The additional benefit of them being 4-lane over 2-lane seems more that the speed limit can be high and there’s no slowdown from slower cars. And as I mentioned before, there is an economic benefit from easy travel since people in the community can expand their sphere of influence. In addition, the area will get more economic benefit from drivers who pass through the area.
As an example, I drove through west Texas to get from my home city to college. If you’re not familiar with that area, it’s basically a featureless flat land with scattered farms, oil fields and ranches. Because the direct roads were mostly 2-lane roads, I instead took a longer route over interstate highways to avoid the hassle of driving on smaller roads with lower speed limits and having to pass cars. This meant I didn’t stop and spend any money in those small towns along those rural roads. But since that time, Texas has expanded many of those roads to be 4-lanes and sometimes with a median, so travel is now quick and easy. I now go the more direct route which passes through many small towns, at which I now stop for gas and food. It also means my travel time went from 12 hours to 10 hours since I can take the direct route. But even with 4-lanes, the current traffic is still low enough that those roads could have stayed 2-lanes.
My hometown was the college-place of the infamous Lyle Alzado, steroid user and NFL superstar. There is a story of how a college prank had taken a cow up into the library and the cow was now reluctant to leave due to the well-known fact that cows can’t go down stairs due to their knees and center of gravity. So Mr. Alzado was called in and just dragged the cow against its will down the stairs and out to the quad. Now as to the veracity, no idea but fun story and more flattering than the one about his ripping out a radiator and throwing it out the window when he saw his girlfriend talking to another guy. But it ties back to the fact that people can pull stuck things very well.
So are you saying that the US has a car culture that supports wide roads and that that car culture goes back to the days when decisions needed to be made on widening single track roads?
It’s certainly possible, but to answer Cal Meacham’s question, do you think that the US had a greater car culture than the UK (actually now that I think about it, I mean Britain in the sense of the island of England, Wales and Scotland)? I think that’s likely and that i’s based on an automotive industry influence that was stronger in the US than it was in Britain. Do you agree, or do you have a different idea on why the US chose to pursue wider roads?
I’m not sure if I would pin it on car culture exactly. I know Europeans love their cars. I think a big part of the difference is that Americans are more driven by economic prosperity and efficiency then Europeans. If it can be economically justified to expand a road in America, the road will be expanded unless there is some extraordinary circumstance. While I can understand wanting to preserve hedges or limiting traffic, those kinds of concerns would just be minor impediments to road improvement in America. The reasons mentioned by Europeans to keep a road skinny aren’t things that are valued as much by Americans, so they wouldn’t stop the road from being expanded.
And I’m sure one of the reasons is that there a huge amount of landmass in America for road expansion. Taking a small strip of land from a ranch with thousands of acres isn’t going to be a huge loss of usable land to the rancher. So with rural road development originally going mostly through large farms and government land, there would be no impediment to making the first roads wide enough for 2 full vehicles.
As an example of the philosophical differences that might explain why Europeans tolerate narrow streets that Americans wouldn’t tolerate, consider this episode of the Planet Money podcast (link is to a transcript but you can listen as well). It’s about why auto safety standards in the US and Europe are different. One example is whether the car should protect the driver and passengers or a hypothetical pedestrian in front of the car. American safety standards prioritize the safety of the driver and passengers, while in Europe, the safety of a pedestrian is prioritized. For that reason, the hood has to be different. There are a bunch of differences like this that mean cars have to customized for each market, and which increase costs.
I’m sure that’s part of it, but also what has been largely ignored in this thread is the phenomenon of the bypass. In the UK, if roads (typically through a town) are considered inadequate for the traffic, a bypass road is typically proposed; sometimes this will entail upgrading an existing road that happens to bypass the area already; other times, a brand new road is built over farmland or countryside.
The side effect of this though is that the original (inadequate) road is preserved in its current state - or is sometimes downgraded and actually made less passable to traffic by traffic calming measures such as narrowings, chicanes, humps, etc
1 - Could be that there was a federal grant program. Cities and counties really want to see federal grant money spread around. If a county sees other counties getting money that they’re not, they get discontented and start to complain. Then they start writing grant applications for marginally supported projects and collecting support letters. It’s possible to get thrown a bone because your county hasn’t gotten any funding for the last twenty years.
2 - If they make their project small enough, they could get funded just because the program had a few million dollars left that year, after the solid projects were funded, and no other project small enough to fund with the remainder. Spend it or lose it.
3 - Safety-related federal grant programs usually require a project application to meet a certain cost/benefit ratio. If local drivers are bad, you can rack up collisions even if there isn’t much traffic.
4 - Actual pork barrel projects. Look what I brought to our fair county! Re-elect me!
By the way, most one-lane roads can’t just be “expanded”. That one lane wasn’t designed for the traffic you’ll get with a 2-lane road. So you need to tear out the old road and put in a new 2-lane road with a deeper foundation. That’s roughly $2 million per mile, more or less.
I do thank people for giving their reasons, but they’re not convincing to me, and I’ve given my reasons why not.
Who are “the people who matter”?
The suggestion that the roads in the US are wider because of a US make-work project that has been given isn’t convincing because I’ve seen photos and movies of US roads prior to the 1930s. They aren’t wider because of an FDR-era WPA project.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find information on road width ordinances. Cewrtainly rules today in the US mandate a width on the roads, but finding historical references on the widths earlier in the century or last century would take a lot of digging. Online articles about road construction history don’t give any information on this. I suspect that such road construction ordinances in the US required a minimum width, but that still wouldn’t answer the question, which is why such a rulke would have been required in the first place.
The first serious roads in the US used the 1 chain [= 66 feet = 20 metres] reservation width. Through the 19th century, as land was subdivided into parcels for sale, provision was made to allow for roads of that width built into the overall grid layout. This is land that was never (usually) sold, so the first answer to the question is there was in-built allowance for wider roads designed into the landscape during the 19th century.
The second part of the answer is, as has been hinted at, an element of pork-barrelling that distributed funding for road improvements, which could all be spent on the actual roadway, since the 1 chain road reserve meant there was plenty of room for widening and money was not needed to buy land off the farmers on either side. Road improvement was always a tangible and clearly visible sign of your taxes coming back even in remote poorly settled rural areas, which may never have justified other public works like schools. The date when this happens will vary across the country, but likely starting in the late 19th century. In 1900 4% of US roads were paved, and by 2008 this had risen to 67%, so not all US roads fit your model either.
The third issue is movement of freight. This costs a lot, and Britain and parts of Europe developed extensive integrated systems of freight movement from farmland via canals and railways from the late 18th century which remained very cost-effective compared to the cost of upgrading a medieval road system which, as has been said repeatedly and ignored, meant acquisition of enormous amounts of private property. The US didn’t have that luxury of a pre-existing freight system, and as a broad-scale agricultural production nation needed a more robust road freight network as soon as it began selling land. Dollars invested in road building were seen as being directly recouped in better freight performance, so it attracted state and evenually federal aid $.
There’s a fourth issue as well, which relates to the best design for a motor vehicle road. At some point it becomes more economical to have a 2 lane road than a single lane because the wear and tear happens on the edges, and the wider road keeps traffic closer to the centre, meaning less repair is required. Considerations like this are a lesser-order issue but can predispose counties and states that are looking to make road savings opt for a higher-cost, lower long-term maintenance solution, which leads to widening and paving.
I’ll leave it there. I hope you find this convincing.
That might go part way to explaining why we drive so many different models from the US. Aside from Ford, the US car brands have very low penetration into the European market, and even with the Ford, the models we have in Europe are quite different from those in the US.
Funfact. I was in Bayeux, Normandy a couple of weeks ago, and they have a bypass around the town that was built by the British Army after the Normandy invasion in WWII as driving through the centre of town wasn’t practical for an army of tanks etc. It was the first such thing built in France, and to this day is called ‘Le Bypass’.
The people who matter are those who make the decisions and those who have to live with them. Notwithstanding that you might spend a handful of weeks out of your multi-decade lifespan driving a handful of these roads, I think it’s both obvious and fair that you’re not really in that group. So when you say that “of course” the reasons for keeping these roads as is should be convincing to you, I’m not sure there’s any “of course” about it.
I think there’s a confusion here about what you need to be convinced of.
The extant narrow roads in Europe are that way because of some set of reasons. Those reasons are sufficient to convince those who make the decisions and those who have to live with them. It doesn’t matter if you, personally, agree that they are sufficient reasons to keep the narrow roads. All that you need to be convinced by is that those are in fact the reasons and they are sufficient for those involved. If your criteria for accepting that X might be a reason is that X has to convince you rather than that X could plausibly convince someone with a different background and perspective then given that you are starting from the point that there shouldn’t be narrow roads when manifestly there are you are going to continue to be baffled at their existence.
For example, I’m aware that in America gasoline is hardly taxed at all compared to the UK. I disagree with that decision. BUT! if you were to explain to me why taxes are so low, I won’t tell you that those reasons don’t make sense, I will say “Ah, that explains the US decision not to put high taxes on fuel” even if I still don’t agree with them.
Not mentioned anywhere here is the fact that in Europe and especially the UK you really do not need to drive far for most errands etc.
Largely we just do not drive as far as Americans, and often the very long commutes are done by rail.
If you have to travel down single track roads in UK you are likely to only be going a few miles at most. Longer journeys will inevitably be along two way roads, and beyond that it could be anything from dual lanes to motorways.
Those tiny little lanes do not connect any substantial settlements or services - they are mostly just one level up from local farm roads and there is almost always a faster alternative - even if a couple of miles longer. The single lanes are only used by seriously local stuff where speed is not important but distance is - such as farm vehicles, cyclists, local services such as post and small deliveries.