The drives and walks should be direct. They should go where they appear to go, and should be practically the shortest distances between the points to be reached. Figure 66 illustrates some of the problems connected with walks to the front door. A common type of walk is a, and it is a nuisance. The time that one loses in going around the cameo-set in the center would be sufficient, if conserved, to lengthen a man’s life by several months or a year. Such a device has no merit in art or convenience. Walk b is better, but still is not ideal, inasmuch as it makes too much of a right-angled curve, and the pedestrian desires to cut across the corner. Such a walk, also, usually extends too far beyond the corner of the house to make it appear to be direct. It has the merit, however, of leaving the center of the lawn practically untouched. The curve in walk d is ordinarily unnecessary unless the ground is rolling. In small places, like this, it is better to have a straight walk directly from the sidewalk to the house. In fact, this is true in nearly all cases in which the lawn is not more than forty to seventy-five feet deep. Plan c is also inexcusable. A straight walk would answer every purpose better. Any walk that passes the house, and returns to it, e, is inexcusable unless it is necessary to make a very steep ascent. If most of the traveling is in one direction from the house, a walk like f may be the most direct and efficient. It is known as a direct curve, and is a compound of a concave and a convex curve.
It is essential that any service walk or drive, however long, should be continuous in direction and design from end to end. Figure 67 illustrates a long drive that contradicts this principle.
It is a series of meaningless curves. The reason for these curves is the fact that the drive was extended from time to time as new houses were added to the villa. The reader will easily perceive how all the kinks might be taken out of this drive and one direct and bold curve be substituted.
The question of drainage, curbing, and gutters.
Thorough drainage, natural or artificial, is essential to hard and permanent walks and drives. This point is too often neglected. On the draining and grading of residence streets a well-known landscape gardener, O.C. Simonds, writes as follows in “Park and Cemetery”:
“The surface drainage is something that interests us whenever it rains or when the snow melts. It has been customary to locate catch-basins for receiving the surface water at street intersections. This arrangement causes most of the surface water from both streets to run past the crossings, making it necessary to depress the pavement, so that one must step down and up in going from one side of a street to the other, or else a passageway for the water must be made through the crossing. It may be said that a step down to the pavement and up again to the sidewalk at the street intersections is of no consequence, but it is really more elegant and satisfactory to have the walk practically continuous (Fig. 68). With the catch-basin at the corner, the stoppage of the inlet, or a great fall of rain, sometimes covers the crossing with water, so one must either wade or go out of his way. With catch-basins placed in the center of the blocks, or, if the blocks are long, at some distance from the crossing, the intersections can be kept relatively high and dry. Roadways are generally made crowning in the center so that water runs to the sides, but frequently the fall lengthwise of the roadway is less than it should be. City engineers are usually inclined to make the grade along the length of a street as nearly level as possible. Authorities who have given the subject of roads considerable study recommend a fall lengthwise of not less than one foot in one hundred and twenty-five, nor more than six feet in one hundred. Such grades are not always feasible, but a certain amount of variation in level can usually be made in a residence street which will make it much more pleasing in appearance, and have certain practical advantages in keeping the street dry. The water is usually confined to the edge of the pavement by curbing, which may rise anywhere from four to fourteen inches above the surface. This causes all the water falling on the roadway to seek the catch-basin and be wasted, excepting for its use in flushing the sewer. If the curbing, which is really unnecessary in most cases, were omitted, much of the surface water would soak into the ground between the sidewalk and the pavement, doing much good to trees, shrubs, and grass. The roots of the trees naturally extend as far, or farther, than their branches, and for their good the ground under the pavement and sidewalk should be supplied with a certain amount of moisture.