The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

Again, a road of diverse use must strike a compromise in its formula between the various needs subserved. If the great bulk of its use is to provide for rapid military advance by marches, you must sacrifice to shortness some of the easier gradients which would be demanded for traffic mainly civilian, yet if of three main users even the least important is incapable of more than a given gradient, your formula can never exceed that gradient, and so forth. So we have even in this simplest and most primary of all analyses of the Road considerable elements of complexity appearing.

As the study progresses an indefinite series of further complexities arises, and one soon reaches that crux in the theory of the Road which has led to so much discussion and which some still call unsolved: whether the formula of the Road is best left to the unconscious or half-conscious action of experiment, which in time should lead to an exact minimum of expense in energy, or whether it is best to arrive at it by a fully conscious, exact, and (as we say to-day) “scientific” examination of all the conditions and a deliberate and immediate conclusion upon them.

Should the road grow or should it be planned? The discussion is not idle. The clash of opinion upon it is at the root of the contrast between national systems, and a right answer will make all the difference between success and failure in our approach to a new road system such as is now upon us.

ii

I maintain that of the two theories the second is just: that a gradual experimental growth in its roads, a method coincident with local caprice, burdens with imperfect communication the society adopting it; that conscious design is essential to efficiency. And this [I propose to illustrate by a single example]. Take two points A and B, such that a line joining them must lead across a marsh, a river, and a range of hills. Let some primitive wanderer make his way from A to B, knowing, when he is at A, the direction of B by, let us say, a distant peak overtopping the range between. That primitive wanderer would first of all skirt about the marsh and, finding its narrowest place at C, would set to work and make his causeway there. Having crossed it, he would come to the river. He must either swim or ford it. Supposing him to prefer, through the necessity of a pack or what not, to ford it, he casts about for a ford. He finds one at D, and perhaps he also, if he takes time to look about him, finds another deeper one at E and another at F, but as his causeway is near D he takes that ford.

Sketch I.

Then he has to make for the hills. We will suppose that the peak directing him from beyond B is still visible. He takes his new direction from it and looks towards the base of the hills at G. There, in the direct line to the peak, the contours are so steep that the trouble of getting up would more than counterbalance the shortness of the cut. He casts about for a better chance, and at last finds a gradient just worth his while at H. He climbs up that; but though the gradient is easy on the A side at H on the far side it is very difficult, so he turns along the ridge to K, where he finds an easier down gradient: a spur leads him on by its gentle slope, and from the bottom of the spur he makes straight for B, which is now right in front of him and plain sailing.

Now, look at that track as established by our primitive wanderer and see how lengthy and inconvenient it is, how ill fulfilling the object of the traveller compared with what would have been established by even a moderately intelligent and cursory survey of the ground as a whole and the making of a plan. To begin with, it would have paid our traveller to take a little more trouble in crossing the rather wider gap in the marsh at L and the rather deeper ford at F, because he would have gained very much in time and space with comparatively slight extra effort had he surveyed the whole ground and thought things out. He was only led on to the ford at D because it was suggested by the crossing of the marsh at C. The first opportunity made the second. But to continue the plan: F is nearly opposite the easier up gradients of the hills, but, having surveyed that bad steep on the far side, he slightly modifies his road, crossing the ridge at M behind a summit which hid this way from the first traveller. Then he goes down the practicable, though steep, slope at N, and so reaches B. The first road produced haphazard by successive chances gives the lengthy and roundabout trajectory A—C, D, H, K—B. The second, with very little extra labour, gives him the far shorter and better trajectory A—L, F, M, N—B.

We see from this elementary example how the thinking out of the theory of the Road is of advantage in practice. It may be urged that the discovery of advantages as time goes on gradually improves the Road, and in this way half-conscious development will always give you the best road in the long run without studying its theory. But history is against that view. Europe is full of roads thus established haphazard, confirming themselves by use and by expenditure, and for centuries neglecting opportunities which would have been present to the eye of the most cursory and moderately intelligent survey.