FACTORALY - E80 ROADS

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Getting from A to B requires a route, and if many people take the same route, that eventually becomes a road. Roads are integral to modern life, and this episode explains what they are and why they're brilliant - especially if, like Bruce, you enjoy driving Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello bruce good afternoon good evening good morning hello simon and and any of those aforementioned time zones, unto you, our dear listeners. How are you doing today? So, who are we? What are we doing here? What's it all about, Alfie? Okay, very quickly. I'm Bruce Fielding. I'm Simon Wells. We're voiceovers. Yes, we are.

We do a podcast. The podcast is called Factorally. It's all about facts. Ta-da. That was succinct. I enjoyed that. And today's podcast is all about... What's it all about, Simon? It's all about Rhodes today.

I love Rhodes. You know, it's one of the largest of the Dodecanese Islands in Greece? Yes, yes, you're right. And it's the capital. That's what we're doing today, right? Absolutely. Rhodes the island, yeah. We're going to sneak in a little bit about the uh the chef gary roads yes of course um i can't really think of any other

type of roads that we could be talking oh one of those gray things that you you drive on yes how about those let's do those instead okay there's more material there yeah there's a lot more so what about roads then do you like like roads? I love a road. Yes, I enjoy driving. I like going out into the countryside. I like exploring around this fair nation of ours. And roads are obviously quite a big part of that. Don't like them so much when they're full of traffic,

but you can't have everything. But no, I mean, as a carophile, I'm... Yes. Autophile? Autophile. Autophile. If that, as a carophile, I'm autophile. Autophile. If that's not a word, it is now. It is now. Then yes, I'm very much in favour of the road. Good.

Shall we start with the definition? What is a road exactly? It's somewhere that goes nowhere um it's uh it's a thing that leads to hell yep yep it does all those things all of those musical things yes but it also goes from a to b i guess yes it does c and d and e and beyond yes um it seems quite hard to actually get a clear definition on what a road is we all know what a road is but a road is not necessarily a road in the broadest sense a road is any path or trackway that leads from a place to a place yeah that's what i said but then that covers grassy paths yes motorways gravel tracks that covers a slight uh indentation in the soil which an awful lot of

people have traveled over the years so it encompasses a lot of things but we all know what it is really yes but a road can also i mean you know where animals go i mean i would call that a track rather than a road yes yes good point if we sort of look at the history of roads what is what is the first road or the oldest road there are those who suggest that animals created the first roadways in as much that they sort of you know go along the same paths they carve their way through the plains and all the rest of it and humans eventually sort of followed the same tracks because they were the shortest most convenient way to get from dwelling to water or from high ground to low ground or whatever there's a there's a theory um in america which i think has been debunked but i like the idea of it that the

highways that run east to west in america are based on the migration routes of bison oh really yeah fantastic and that these they sort of like well because they were packed down hard by all the bisons that are going backwards and forwards and they kind of remained like quite solid roads. Yes. That's not the Mother Road, though, because the Mother Road was Route 66. Oh, yes. So Route 66 was a road that went from Chicago to LA. As the song says.

As the song says. As the song says. More than 2,000 miles along the way. 2,448. Indeed. It doesn't fit quite so well, does it? Yes, well, it is technically more than 2,000 miles. It is. Yeah, he was right. There's very little of it left. Yeah.

Have you ever driven on it? I have driven on it. I've driven on a bit of the nasty new version, which is soulless and lifeless and bland. I've also driven on it? I have driven on it. I've driven on a bit of the nasty new version, which is soulless and lifeless and bland. I've also driven on the stretch of the original concrete that does still exist. I've driven on a bit of it near Barstow in California. It's called Route 66,

but it's basically a gravel track full of potholes. Yes, it hasn't fared that well over the years. No, you know, it was started in 1926 so you can't complain it's been there a long time and it's been abandoned for quite a long time as well but it did start a lot of the that kind of that road trip kind of feeling about there being sort of motels and and diners and things like that on the road. Yes. I seem to remember reading a book of someone sort of travelling along, not necessarily Route 66, but old American highways. And they ran through every single town.

You listen to the lyrics of Route 66 and it names all of the towns that it goes through. And you stop at each town and you go to a little local restaurant, you stay at a little local motel. Oh, this is a tour that you can do is it yes okay um but you sort of the current route 66 is yeah there's just this long continuous highway that goes around all of those towns it's kind of like the plot of the movie cars really um each of these little towns which you know survived purely on the basis of motorists stopping in yeah when the highways were built they didn't go there anymore and lots of these towns you know went out of business and became derelict well like a ghost

town after the after the gold rush yes exactly yeah wow you mentioned the romans yes shall we talk about the romans let's talk about the Romans. It's always either the Romans or the Greeks. So let's talk about the Romans. Well, we've talked about the Greeks, haven't we? Because we mentioned roads. Oh, yes. Nice.

That was fun. So let's talk about the Romans then. All roads lead to Rome. So they say, yes. I don't think that's strictly true. I think all roads lead away from Rome. Because the Roman road building system started in the capital of Rome

and they started building roads that led out to all of the other places that they occupied. So actually all roads led away from Rome. Well, they were kind of military roads, weren't they? They were sort of like for soldiers to save them from having to scrabble about the place. Yeah, yeah. I was surprised to read how structurally advanced Roman roads were.

Oh, yes. You know, they're proper things. They're paved. They had a process called metalling, which I had to look up in order to find out what it meant. It's nothing to do with metal, but they put the paving slabs in, and then they fill in the gaps with crushed rock, which is called metalling from the Latin word metallum, meaning quarry. Do you know, I've always wondered why they were called metal droids. I've never heard the term until now.

That's why. So it's the Latin metallum, meaning quarry. There you go. But they also dug down as well. So they put sand and gravel, and they put like sand and that's right gravel and they made them sort of cambered so that they didn't retain water yes so that they drained properly they had footpaths and bridleways on each side like we would have pavements yeah um and they were straight you know i seem to remember as a kid every time we went on holiday and we

we drove along a particularly long straight road dad would say it's probably roman yes they just made they they were very efficient they were great engineers they made the shortest route from here to there uh yeah i read i read there were 29 military highways right and 372 what they called great roads which was like roads off the military highways yeah yeah which amounted to about a quarter of a million miles of paved roads good grief the romans created and and obviously not just in italy but all of their all of the empire yeah absolutely wow i read that the first official roman road is called the Appian Way. Yes. In Latin, Via Appia.

Via Appia. Very good. Which was built in 312 BC by a fellow called Appius Claudius Caecus. Uh-huh. Which is why it was called the Appian Way, named after him. And this fellow was blind. He was a civil engineer in the Roman Empire. He was blind.

But somehow or other, he managed to create the world's first Roman road. Because a lot of the Roman roads were sort of public. They sort of used the public purse to create these Roman roads. Yeah, that's right. But there were a lot of the roads that went off the Roman roads that were private. Oh, really? So if you had a town or a village that you wanted to join up to the road system, your village would actually create a road to go to the road, to the main road. And similarly, if you had like a farm or something, you know, that you wanted people to come and visit and buy stuff or you needed to get stuff to market, you could build your own road that joined up to the Roman road. But it had to be to a certain standard right okay i'm sort of thinking of my own personal experience as a as a postman back in the day i've seen more than my fair share of little local residential side

roads and um you do get that every now and then you sort of get a cluster of houses you know at the end of nothing more than a dirt track and um it's often up to the residents to club together to pour a bit of tarmac on it so they can get to the next nearest road um and then they run out of money and they fall into disrepair and everyone complains about the potholes etc yeah i'm fascinated by the different systems people use to name roads. There's an estate in Staines-upon-Thames where I used to work. Every road was named after a different bird. You had Plover Avenue and Hawke's Way and that sort of thing.

There's an estate in Shepparton where I used to live. Every road was named after a wife of the builders and architects who created the estate so barbara close glenn avenue um lois drive etc wow i just think that's charming in fulham there's there's there are alphabet streets that go up the west side and there's basically there they're all these lovely victorian houses and the streets are named from b to n okay and literally as you you can you know where you are in along the road yeah and you know how far it is to the road that you're getting to ah brilliant isn't there an alphabet city in new york as well is there avenue avenue a and

well they yeah well they just they just name the the roads on after letters don't they yeah unless i'm just thinking of the musical Avenue Q. Yeah. The Roman roads in this country, at least, you know, sort of were the basis for a lot of our current road systems. Watling Street. Yes, Watling Street, Stain Street, things like that. So the Romans built roads to each of the other cities that they occupied going from Londinium to wherever. Yes.

They got built up upon year after year, century after century. And if you sort of look at the main roads that go in and out of London, they are pretty much set upon the routes that the Romans laid down. So, you know, the A1 goes up to Scotland, the A2 goes east to Kent, the A3 goes south to Portsmouth, etc., etc. You know, we're still sort of using that old Roman system because there was nothing wrong with it. No, exactly. And it's the fastest way to get from A to B, as we know,

is a straight line. Yes, indeed. And the Roman roads were pretty straight. They were pretty straight. As were the French. There's the Route Napoleon. Okay. Actually, the Route Napoleon is actually quite twisty.

It's a fantastic road in the south of France. Really? And if you like driving, it's a brilliant road. But what Napoleon did is he created all these roads that had plane trees down each side so that when he was marching soldiers down these roads, they were in the shade. Because he had trees both sides, so that whichever time of day it was, they were in the shade.

That's brilliant. That's, roughly speaking, the unofficially accepted definition of an avenue. Is it? Yeah. So I had a quick look into why do we have road, street, lane, avenue, etc. Yeah. So I had a quick look into why do we have road, street, lane, avenue, etc. Yeah. And it's roughly determined on the size and the purpose and the layout of that byway.

So a road is just any road. A street is usually specifically in an urban area, lined with houses and businesses. Yeah. An avenue is usually a wider road and frequently lined with trees you've obviously got a cul-de-sac which is a no-through road cul-de-sac meaning bottom of the bag yeah which i love a close is obviously again another no-through road apparently we're pronouncing it wrong i've always wondered why a close is a close yes it's actually comes from closed oh because it doesn't have an open end so we should be saying a close rather

than close interesting there are no roads in in london did you did you know that i've been to london i've seen quite a few of them i say london i mean the city of london okay so technically there are no roads in the city of london why they're all streets and avenues and closes oh And it wasn't, because the word road wasn't used until the 16th century. Oh, really? And the City of London is pre-16th century. Yes.

So none of the thoroughfares were actually roads. Oh, I see. And it wasn't until 1994 when they redrew the boundaries of the city that there was Goswell Road actually went into the City of London. That waswell Road, actually went into the City of London.

That was the only road that goes into the City of London. So if I zoom in on a map of the City of London, the square mile, the central bit, I won't find the word road. Correct. How interesting. Didn't know that. There you go.

That's what this podcast is all about. Yes, we're even teaching each other things. So you said the word road wasn't used until the 1500s. Shakespeare was one of the first people to use the word road. I can't remember which play, but he used it in one of his plays in the knowledge that it would be a fairly unfamiliar, newfangled word. People would have used way or byway or path or track or whatever. Apparently, the word road comes from an old English word, raid, which is connected to ride.

Okay. Riding your horse. So a road was a ride way. It was the way you rode your horse. Street is a Germanic word, apparently from the latin strata which just means a paved way avenue comes from french avenir meaning to approach or to arrive yeah they all they all sort of make sense they do you talked about being being a postman and going up lots of side streets yeah it was actually the royal mail who were the impetus for most of London roads to step up their game.

Teams of men from the post office inspected every road from end to end. And if it wasn't in good enough nick for the Royal Mail, they just refused to deliver mail there until it was improved. Yeah, that sounds like something we'd do. Yeah, that would have a huge effect on you know coaching into a loose business if the male coaches didn't come and then bar staff and housekeepers and so basically the royal mail had massive control over over the road which was generally sort of owned by the coach companies mostly yes yes i suppose at the time when the mail and the stage coach and all the rest of it were as one yes that makes sense yes so why do we drive on the correct side of the road and the rest of the world doesn't

apart from japan obviously um it depends who you ask i've seen a few different alternatives um my favorite which i think we mentioned in our previous episode on cars so let's not dwell too long see previous episode on cars indeed um was all to do with the fact that the french aristocracy used to ride on the left side of the road almost like a dual carriageway going backwards and forwards on the left yeah and the peasants completely separate on the right the french revolution came along and said no no none of this everyone is going to drive on the right just that's the way it's going to be napoleon then enforced that ruling on everywhere that he owned so all of europe drives on the right yeah um the only reason we drive on the left is because we wanted to do the opposite of what france did well see i heard that we drove on the left because of jousting

okay but that but i've only heard this recently so i haven't checked it right because it looks like if you're if you're holding your lance in your right hand yes um you're better off being on the left hand side of the what's it called the tilt tilt yes wouldn't it be no because doesn't your lance go across the tilt diagonally don't you don't you ride on the right with your lance in your right hand pointing towards the guy on the left okay so whoever told me this about jousting is obviously wrong there is however a road in in the uk where you do drive on the right. I bet you know what it is.

Oh, I know this one. Is it the entrance to the Savoy Hotel in London? It is! Yes! Back of the net. It's so that carriages can set people down nicely. That's right, yes. Oh, I finally got one of Bruce's quizzes.

This is the moment where I'm afraid I'm going to get quite geeky, if I'm not already. The UK road numbering system has fascinated me. Ever since I was a kid, my dad told me how the UK road numbering system works in a nutshell. And I don't know, it has just fascinated me ever since um the uk roads were only numbered only started to be numbered in 1913 um before then they were just named if you were on the road leading to portsmouth you were on the portsmouth road the great north road and the great west road exactly all of that um fulham palace road was the road that took you towards fulham palace etc yeah they're quite standard names but except most of the roads in the uk would be called london

road because they live from wherever they were exactly yes um there's a thing where again going back to my postal days um if you picture a long road that goes from a to B. At the A end, it's going to be called B Road. So that road in London that heads to Portsmouth is going to be called Portsmouth Road. When you get to Portsmouth, it's going to be called London Road because it heads back to London. So it changes its name depending on which end you're at.

Yes, exactly that, yeah. So it gets confusing. I used to live near, I used to live in Shepparton, where there was a road that led to Staines. So it was called Staines Road, Shepparton. You got to the other end, it became Shepparton Road, Staines. Halfway through, you hit Leylam. And it became Shepparton Road, Leylam, and Staines Road, Leylam. And it's just messy, messy, messy, messy messy um in 1913 they started to number them not because it would be more convenient purely because they wanted to know which roads they were talking about in um taxation purposes to to raise money to repair them right but then the idea sort of caught on and uh by the 1920s all of the roads were being renumbered according to this particular system set up by a civil engineer called Henry Mayberry, who worked for the road board. And he came up with this numbering system where all the main roads in England would begin with the letter A, all the minor roads would begin with B, and then they would have numbers. So you would know you were driving on the A34 or whatever. And again, if we go back to that image

of the main Roman routes in and out of London, they're based on that. So the A1 goes north to Scotland, the A2 goes east to Kent, the A3 goes south to Portsmouth, the A4 goes west and north a bit to Bath, the A5 goes up to Wales. Sort of like a clock, you know, you can picture going around London in a clockwise manner and that's how you get the numbers. But the thing that I found most fascinating that my dad told me, the A10 isn't really the A10. The A10 doesn't come after the A9. It's more like the A1.0. Because the A10 comes immediately after the A1. Yes. So it's the first road after the A 1.0 because the a10 comes immediately after the a1 yes so it's the first road after the a1 clockwise 1.1 a1.2 yes yes exactly that so the a20 is the first road clockwise after the a2 the a30 is the first road clockwise after the a3 so it's not a decimal number it's more like a a point 3.0 yeah yeah and

then the three digit road numbers follow exactly the same pattern so the a301 is the first road after the a30 so did they know this when they were building stonehenge uh when they were going for the 3.03 i don't know for certain that the builders of Stonehenge knew this, but that is why the A303 is called the A303, because it's the third road after the A30, which is in turn the first road after the A3. Wow. This concept just blew my mind at a very young age,

and I still love it. Yeah, it now makes complete sense. It does, sort of right um then motorways came along by and large the motorways in england just copied the name of the nearest main road so the m1 is near the a1 the m25 goes around the a25 the m4 is parallel to the a4 except the m1 wasn't the first motorway no it wasn't what was the first motorway the first motorway was the m6 to birmingham the preston bypass all right okay so the preston bypass was eight miles of motorway and that was the very first motorway in the uk

right and that was called the m6 because it was quite close to the A6. Yes. Not because it was the sixth M to come along. No, exactly. Yes. Did you know that the M6 toll is made out of Pulp Fiction? Nope. That needs explaining. What's Quentin Tarantino got to do with this? So to make the surface on the M6, they actually decided that there would be a better way of making a more solid, stable road surface because it was on a slightly dodgy bit of ground. And Mills and Boone donated about two and a half million books, which were pulped up and mixed with the asphalt.

So if you feel romantic as you're driving along the M6 toll, now you know why. That's brilliant. Of course, the people who do roads probably better than most of us are the Americans because they rely so heavily on their cars. Yes, of course. And they're obviously, because they're very long and they're across sort of fairly featureless areas of geographical vegetation, they don't have to curve. Well, no, that makes sense. But occasionally, when you're driving through North Dakota or Montana, you'll see a stop sign on this absolutely straight road, and there'll be a slight right turn. Okay.

And that's to account for the curvature of the earth i beg your pardon so because they're so long and so straight and the earth curves they actually have to slightly turn right every so often just to keep going in a straight line that's amazing how would the flat earthers explain that? Well, I know. But I mean, you know, there are some very long roads in America. There's the Pan American Highway. Yes, OK, I've heard of that. So that goes from Alaska all the way to Argentina. Oh, my goodness.

Yeah. That's 25,000 miles long. Whoa. That's a long road. That's a long old road. Crikey. But they make highways out of the most slippery stuff in that they make highways out of concrete a lot of the time so when it rains oh they they get very slippery yes why they have so many sort of pileups yes but when it comes to town planning they they do have a reasonably straightforward system don't they the grid

system grids yeah yeah yeah well again you know where you are don't you yes exactly yes i can't remember which way around it is but i think in in new york uh all of the avenues run east to west and all of the streets run north to south or possibly vice versa so if you you know if you meet someone on the corner of Fifth Street and Elm Avenue, or something like that, you know precisely where you are. It's quite a good way to mark the thing out. Yes. Except the city blocks in America, which I thought were fairly small,

they are massive. Yes. So if somebody says, I'll meet you on so-and-so and something-something, that's a lot of space to cover. You take a quick stroll down Broadway and you're there all afternoon. Broadway goes diagonally. Oh, it does. You're right. So that's another tricky one.

Huh. I saw the term Stravenue to describe the diagonal roads in New York because they're not quite a street. They're not quite an avenue. They're not quite an avenue. They're extravenues. That's very good. It's nice, isn't it? I like that. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side, surely.

How did the chicken cross the road? By walking, surely. Well, there are lots of different ways to cross roads aren't there okay yes there are traffic lights there are bridges there are um tunnels there are all sorts of ways that pedestrian that the pedestrian road interface yes is is quite um it's quite varied you get zebra crossings you get pelican crossings tou zebra crossings, you get pelican crossings. Toucan crossings. Pelicia beacons. All sorts.

But I like the way that we use animals, like the zebra pelican and the toucan. Yes. It's odd, isn't it? Zebra crossings are interesting. The first one was in Slough. In Slough? In 1951. What a wonderful accolade for Slough to have. Yeah, I mean,

the reason they call it a zebra crossing is fairly obvious because they have their black and white stripes. Yes, of course. There's a rumour that James Callaghan,

who I think was Prime Minister. He was. In 1948, he visited the Transport and Road Research Lab and he said it looked like a zebra. I mean, he's not entirely wrong, I suppose.

He could have said penguin. That's quite right. And then we have these flashing orange sort of globes on the top where there are zebras. Yes, they're called Belisha beacons. Yeah, after a chap who was the Minister of Transport in 1934, a man called Leslie Hoare Belisha, H-O-R-E hyphen Belicia. Oh, what a name. Isn't that a great name? Thank goodness we didn't call them Hoare beacons. Well, yes, yes.

One of the things about roads is that a lot can happen on a road. Sure. Because you tend to be starting from someplace and finishing somewhere else. Yes. So they tend to get used an awful lot in the plots of fiction. Yes, of course. And in books and in songs. Yes.

And in films. I mean, if you think about the number of road trip films that there are. Yes, there are a lot. It's absolutely huge. Mostly American. Yes. I mean, everything from like Thelma and Louise to Duel and a brother were out there,

the Darjeeling Limited. Oh, the Green Book. But I think the reason is because it's like you're stuck in a very small space with people that you may or may not know really. If you know them really well, that's great. If you don't know them really well, that's also great. Yes. And it's just an environment that's available for exposition. And for quite a long time as well. The great American road trip movie wouldn't work if it were in England because you'd be in the car for half an hour and then you'd arrive. But there are so many movies and books and songs where someone has a transformative experience whilst on their two-week road trip.

Or even 24 hours away from Tulsa. Tulsa, yes, exactly. There's always a hero riding their motorbike intosa. Tulsa. Yes, exactly. There's always a hero riding their motorbike into the sunset. Yes. Things like that. There's always something exciting that happens when you stop at a cheap roadside motel or yeah, very popular. So, Simon, it's usually at this point in the podcast that I ask you about records,

but I'm going to give you a record first. Oh, goody, go on then. OK, what's the most expensive road in the world? I don't know. It was $125,000. That doesn't seem very expensive. Per inch. That seems quite expensive.

This is a road in Abu Dhabi. It was 100 miles long, or it still is 100 miles long, and it cost $8 billion. Goodness me. Which works out to $125,000 an inch. Was it paved with gold? I don't think so. Wow. What facts do you have for us?

I've got, you mentioned that particularly long road in America. Yes. So that's the longest route. It's not one single road. It's a whole load of roads that you can drive along in a particular route. According to Guinness, the longest continuous road, single road, is Australia's Highway 1, which goes around the whole country and has a length of 9024 miles i've driven on that have you yeah oh it's actually a very pretty i went to the bit that

was by the sea it was very pretty okay lovely uh the world's widest road has the the best name of a road i've ever heard uh the monumental axis in brazil which measures 250 meters wide i don't know why 250 meters wide yeah that's a wide road it is a wide road it doesn't specifically say how many lanes there are it doesn't say why it needs to be that wide but that wide it is so presumably quite a high capacity for traffic india holds several consecutive records for the fastest constructed road they just seem to build roads really quickly um do they build them faster than that thing on thunderbirds no not as fast as that i'll put a link in the in the show notes to the road laying machine in Thunderbirds, which is quite something.

Definitely not as fast as that. But a few years ago in India, in New Delhi, they constructed a two and a half kilometre road in just 24 hours. Wow. Followed a year later by a 112 kilometre road, which they put down in just under five days. And you think about, you know, how long the smallest amount of roadworks take in this country. That's quite impressive. We need to get some of those guys over here. Yes. I think that's me done.

Yes, I think I've completed my road trip of knowledge. Thank you so much for listening to us. We absolutely appreciate you, especially this far into it. I mean, you know, for this, you've been listening for this long. Yes, well done. And if you have indeed enjoyed this and all other episodes that you've listened to, please go ahead and give us a like, give us a lovely, shiny five star review. uh please feel free to share this podcast with your equally nerdy chums i'm sure they'd love to have a listen we've got friend if you've got friends who like roads this is a perfectly good podcast for them to listen to

absolutely absolutely well thank you for coming along please join us again for another fun-filled episode of Factorily. Goodbye. Au revoir.