A fascinating ma started doing the rounds yesterday which took a unique view on roads.
Using OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, I was able to see how bendy or straight the roads are all over the world. One theory I had was that Europe, where current roads are based on older roads that predate cars, would have more bends and curves than the USA, where current roads were (in many places) only put in in the last 150 → 100 years, and probably put in directly and dead straight.
It looks at the percentage of roads in an area that are straight. The man who made the map – Rory McCann did so by dividing the length of the road by the straight line distance between it’s end points. There’s a little more about the methods he used plus the potential flaws here.
As you can see below the areas with the most straight roads tend to be the Mid-West USA and the Canadian prairies. In Europe the Netherlands seems to have the straightest roads – perhaps because of the flatness although no where near the level of those North American areas.
In New Zealand it’s no surprise to see the areas around Canterbury and Invercargill come out the straightest.
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I wonder if you could map straightness in roads against straightness in Political views? In the US at least, it looks as though Straight Roads and Red-neck republicans overlap quite well….
It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Most of the redder areas of the US have progressive traditions as well as conservative ones. It just tends to be a more pragmatic type of progressivism – think “prairie populism” or Milwaukee’s “sewer socialism”. Up in Canada, the very linear province of Alberta just elected a social-democratic government in spite of its reputation as the “Texas of Canada”. Manitoba, the other big patch of red, has been run by the provincial social-democratic party continuously since 1999.
This is further blurred by the First Past the Post voting system Canada still uses. The fact a particular tendency is the government today may bear little relationship to the tendency most voters follow. For example, the federal government in Canada is currently the Conservative Party….but their majority was based on 39% of the total vote with the other 61% being split between the Bloc Quebecois, the Liberal Party, the New Democratic party (NDP) and Greens…who, collectively, are all to the centre-left. So despite 61% of voters voting to the centre-left – across 4 parties – , the Conservatives won because their support wasn’t fragmented.
Under MMP or some other PR system, the Canadian government would almost certainly be a centre-left coalition or ‘working majority’ of several parties with a huge margin. …though it is hard to predict how voters will actually vote if they know they have other effective choices.
So trying to correlate roading tendencies with elected political outcomes becomes virtually impossible thanks to the First Past the Post’s often gross distortions of what voters actually intended.
There is one road in Utah which is dead straight for 100km. It is the interstate that exits Nevada northeast of Elko and goes through the flats. If politics were as straight forward as this road, I’d love to know how that came to be.
His theory about older European roads is interesting. The grand-daddy of master road builders were the Romans and 2000 years ago they were known for building roads very straight all across Europe regardless of the terrain; today many modern roads are still based on their alignments. I even noticed the same approach in modern-day Italy; they had autostrada motorways that went in a straight line with tunnels through mountains and viaducts across the adjacent gullies.
Modern road design guides (such as AUSTROADS) actually encourage the inclusions of corners even if there is no geographical constraints. This is to assist in keeping drivers alert, and has proven to be quite noticeably when looking accident frequency studies. Just thought this might be interesting for the non-traffic engineering readers
I think NZroad builders took this onboard and then took it too far. The amount of corners on the Waikato Expressway over fairly flat terrain astonishes me. Same goes with the Northern motorway from Albany to Puhoi. Sure there are some straights but they have made both roads more of a zigzag shape rather than the odd corner but mostly straight line. For example the planned Puhoi to Warkworth extension will only save something like 1.5km distance over the (not straight) existing route! Really if they are to build this is should materially make a difference and save 3km+ distance. Our roads aren’t massive interstate networks where people drive for 8 hours fairly regularly so no need to deliberately add in corners for the sake of it.
I suggest that topography may have more to do with the results than year of construction.
Yes topography and just as important geology in the area.
guy must have never been to Australia, or the method used is flawed. between perth an adelaide there’sonly 1 straight rd. same for NT and all the outback really. i drove all the way around it, not many corners really.
The plains in the middle of the US have a grid of straight E–W and N–S roads one mile apart for hundreds of km. You can clearly see that pattern on satellite images: https://www.google.co.nz/maps/@45.1626635,-96.9330448,192057m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
North East Uzbekistan – most straight place in the world?
in terms of roading, or of religious views…. ? I’ve never been there (nor to the Outback in Oz).
Arguably, the map is wrong, surely, considering that we learned for years that the Romans built straight line roads, and yet Italy still shows up as a bunch of squiggles. And Australia, as you say, should be glowing bright red with 0% curved roads in its centre….
It’s not just the mile-square grids across the mid-west – around San Francisco is also an orthogonal grid. Compare that with Wellington, where the roads adapt a lot more to the topography. Could it be to do with the era when the cadastral survey and roading went in? New Zealand was settled in Victorian times when both neo-classical and the more organic neo-gothic were acceptable. America was done at least a century earlier – Georgian times, the Age of Enlightenment, worship of classical Greek and Roman antecedents.
Wellington’s original plan was topography-ignoring grids, hence streets such as Dixon St, straight as a die, part of which is too steep for vehicles.