When was roadways invented

The oldest constructed roads discovered to date are in former Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq. These stone paved streets date back to about B. The location in the land of the Sumerian people offered fertile soil and, with irrigation, crops and livestock were raised successfully. The Sumerians used meticulous brick-making skills, forming identical mud bricks for building. After drying they would take them to the site of a temple and set them in place with bitumen.

Bitumen is the natural sticky black substance in asphalt. Centuries would pass before asphalt was used in Europe and America. Glastonbury, the Ancient Isle of Avalon in Somerset, England, was the site of an interesting discovery when timber roads were discovered in a swampy area. Strangely, a Scottish man named John Metcalfe, born in and blinded at age six, built many miles of roads and bridges in Yorkshire, England.

The roads were built in three layers: large stones, a mixture of road material, and a layer of gravel. In the early 19th century McAdam topped multi-layer roadbeds with a soil and crushed stone aggregate that was packed down with heavy rollers to compact it all together. The actual process of road building has changed dramatically over the past century, going from large groups of workers with picks and shovels to what we use today as enormous specialized machines.

Military requirements for long unobstructed stretches that could be used as emergency runways for aircraft paid a dividend for civilian drivers who could now cross countries at high speeds much more efficiently than a dirt road. Making these travels much safer and efficient for everyone.

A great deal of consideration is put into where roads should go in order to minimize disruptions and make them as direct as possible. While simultaneously keeping slopes reasonable in hilly areas for performance and safety reasons. Today we use the practice of rebuilding existing roads. This process always starts with machines pulling up milling or pulverizing the existing pavement. The grindings that are pulled up are either used as part of the new base or are put into trucks for reuse later as aggregate for new roads.

At some point in the foreseeable future, instead of adding more lanes to highways, we may actually be able to reduce them as we shift to vehicles that can see and hear far more than human drivers, enabling them to drive closer together while still avoiding collisions, thus requiring less roadway. We live in interesting times, indeed.

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