Roman Roads (2017)

Sometimes I wonder if we've regressed in terms of attention to quality.

In a way we have, yes! In our modern society we optimize for profit. Always, everywhere. The reasons our roads won't last thousands of years is precisely that it would be less profitable.

Bad roads are safer. We design our roads to be driven much faster than anyone should. Potholes and rough areas slow us down

Rome had the advantage of access to essentially unlimited forced labor in order to build and maintain their infrastructure. Modern engineering is absolutely superior to Roman engineering, but we do have to contend with budget constraints, at least in part because we're not using slavery to build our roads.

Drive a semi over those cobblestones daily for a year and we'll see how they are doing.

Potholes are not regression. They are a good cost effect response. We can build roads that won't have potholes, but at vastly more cost, it is better in the long run to build roads as we do and then fix potholes every year.

Cobblestones also get potholes and the like when subject to heavy car traffic.

There is survivor bias to consider: we don't see any ancient roads that didn't survive, if it became overgrown from neglect or damaged by erosion or water or whatever.

Wait till you see Canadian roads.. But the real reason is construction mafia, to keep their work going, if they made it high quality they are out of government maintenance contracts in the coming years.

The network scale, network density, frequency of use, and loading conditions are all like, orders of magnitude higher. Plus as other commenters have mentioned, weather conditions tend to be more extreme than the Mediterranean, and additionally, designing for serviceability can have significant advantages.

Cars are the problem.

And just FYI roman roads were maintained. We dont have documentation on this from the early imperial period. But from the Byzantine period we know that there were local people responsible for maintenance.

And we also know that even during Byzantine times many roads were reverting to nature. Road maintence was a real problem.

Watch a video on roman road construction methods. It seems they prided themselves on building for the long term. Retrieval augmented generation from incomplete archive: The foundation of the road consists of 3’ of gravel covered with 2’ of sand forming an extremely stable base. I seem to also recall that builders got paid half upon completion and half if the construction was still in good condition fifty years later. (Though this is probably apocryphal for the obvious reasons)

They used to pour molten iron in holes in their cobblestone roads.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pompeii-fixed-poth...

Somebody mentioned semis already, but also, I bet Roman engineers would give up immediately if they saw a snowplow.

I've done some research on this.

For one thing, cobblestone roads wouldn't last so long under the weight and shear forces of modern vehicles. Y'know when Wile E. Coyote skids to a stop so hard that the road under him wrinkles up like a rug? A loaded semi truck braking hard can actually make asphalt do that, just as an example of the kind of forces involved.

For another, cobbles that are even a little bit wet become slippery deathtraps at even moderate driving speeds. Even when they're dry, highway speeds are going to be very uncomfortably bumpy. Hard on people and hardware both.

Basically, a good driving road requires a surface that is extremely smooth but also somewhat tacky, and that really limits what other properties it can have. You can't build something like that out of durable stone.

With baggage, a typical human can only travel about 12-17 miles a day (half that of a horse)

Horses would often be swapped out at stations when a wealthy person would have to travel very quickly across a long distance. Maybe this is an average since the speed with which horsemen could travel would depend on the rate at which they exchanged their horses.

In an extreme example from the year 9 BC, the future emperor Tiberius traveled on the Roman Roads 330 miles (531 km) between northern Italy and modern day Mainz, Germany in 36 hours without sleep. He was rushing to the deathbed of his older brother Drusus after the latter suffered mortal injuries in a freak horse accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drususstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

A man on a bike beats a horse over almost all distances, especially long distances. The only interesting competitive distance might be a flying 400m.

Related: https://orbis.stanford.edu/

My thought is that one didn't simply travel alone on horseback, but with a group and baggage, and I wouldn't expect servants to be mounted. The animals help with the baggage. You also would want a group since there are highwaymen and freebooters on the road.

I seem to recall oxen speed being about 12 miles per day.

Relay horses

I'm sure the author would have more details on the ambiguity. Are the walkers marching soldiers? Is the rider a courier who changes to fresh horses at waystations? It's not clear :)

The only dead straight main road out of London runs very close to my house. It was the Roman military road out London and ran for a couple of hundred miles. In Saxon times it was called Watling Street.

Newer but similar thing with Old Spanish Trail through the southern US (and similar historic trails).

So many roads named after something or named some nostalgic but generic thing, that no one realizes when they are actually driving on the modernized version of the real thing.

Among other things, it seems most expect there to be a route 66 style or (american) rail-row insitu abandoned artifact of these roads (which do sometimes exist in stretches of realignment) but don't realize that un-abandoned places generally aren't going to abandon their roads.

ETA: Old Spanish Trail went from the Atlantic coast of Florida to the Pacific along the Gulf Coast then continued west. But the places with continuous use to today from Texas east are now more often excluded from 'Old Spanish Trail' maps.

via Aemilia, now Emilia, is alive and well all the way from Milano to Rimini. It changes name a few times, mostly with additions (e.g. "Emilia Levante" to the East of Bologna, "Emilia Ponente" to the West, etc), but it's still the same road going through a billion towns and cities...

I knew someone at school who got a summer job identifying lost native trails. The government wanted to resurrect them as modern trails. The result: basically every trail would have been down the middle of a divided highway or along a railway track. It turns out that native people's then didn't like walking up and down hills anymore than cars and trains do today. The project was axed.

Never thought I would read about Pescara on HN! What a small world! :)

I actually refer to his list of 20 simple, distinct colors (https://sashamaps.net/docs/resources/20-colors/) which he came up with for this map, pretty frequently. It's a nice palette.

Their other maps are sick too. Is there a term for these types of visualizations, where some data is visualized in a "non-standard" way in the context of the data?

Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://www.openculture.com/2024/06/the-roads-of-ancient-rom.... Thanks!

There’s also an option to email the mapmaker to receive a pdf. I’m going to ask for one in hopes that it’ll blow up nicely. I think it’d make interesting wall art.

Some examples of automatic layout in this style:

- M. Nöllenburg: Automated Drawings of Metro Maps, 2005. We've used that a while ago to render a few pretty images with our graph visualization library, but runtime is prohibitive (along with the requirement of a fast ILP solver).

- LOOM: https://github.com/ad-freiburg/loom and https://loom.cs.uni-freiburg.de/global

I know of https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-pretties... because it was on hn

Not that you asked, but here's a great video about the history of this style of map: https://youtu.be/cTLCfl01zuE

Omnes viae Romam ducunt

Hinc illuc pervenire non potes.

Have you read Deleuze? from your comment here I think you would enjoy his thoughts on empires and what he called “war machines” and “the state apparatus.”

Here’s a good comment on it:

The TL:DR is: for D&G 'war machines' are the specific constitution, form and alignment of a state that refuses to be a state (a nomad state). It is the tools by which a state refuses to be a state.

The state as we think of it relies upon centralization, stability and continuity--war machines are by definition nomadic, shifting locations, and leaders, decentralizing, redefining what is and isn't a periphery etc.

At the same time, both are effective at commandeering power and directing it towards a goal: even if the state claims a monopoly on being able to do this.

It is the difference between a Medieval city state and the Mongol horde, or a pirate ship, or if you prefer a contemporary example, between a modern state, and terrorist groups, marginal groups, autonomous zone festivals like "Burning man", anarchist collectives, homeless camps, etc which operate within it and on the periphery of it, while neglecting or actively disrupting the state's hegemony.

War machines can and often are coopted by state power, but they are still separate from it and disruptive to it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/832eri/comm...

To be fair England was a complete backwater in Roman times, just like much of Europe away from the Mediterranean. IIRC by the 1000s Germany, France and Britain had already well surpassed their Roman population peaks, Italy on the other hand took another 500 years or so.

The Roman Empire was very advanced for the time, and it left such a huge imprint on the civilization even centuries, and thousands of years after it.

Some even say.. the empire never ended.

I believe the Vienna on the map is, today, Vienne, a French Commune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienne,_Is%C3%A8re

The current city of Vienna was Vindobana in Roman times. The Gaul Vienna on this map is now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienne,_Is%C3%A8re

The ego! It should have been called Via Scipio Africanus Motherforker

That would presumably be the city of Caesarea in Mauretania[0] which was the capital of that province. According to the Wikipedia article for the modern town at that site[1], it was also called Iol in ancient times.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesarea_in_Mauretania

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherchell

Is it this?

Britain's Ancient Tracks with Tony Robinson https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6165532/

I think this should explain it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40602519 (TLDR: its not Vienna)

The subway map is great for seeing the shape of the network, but this one is better at showing the geographical constraints that shaped the network.

This is mentioned in the „Creative liberties taken“ section. It’s not a complete map.

it's there. Aelia Capitolina.

Well, you know, a subway would pass under the mountains ;)