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A Brief History Of Highway Design And Construction
Through large scale engineering projects it could now be argued that the world is a smaller place. It's just as convenient to get to the other side of the world as it is to get to the next town or city. Improvements in the way we travel and move about have led to boundaries coming down and places that would previously been hard to reach now being very accessible. The result is that the world really is your oyster!
Highway design and engineering has come a long way in the past century and today it is a sophisticated process that involves some of the most creative engineering minds in the world and some serious technology. The design and construction of roads and highways today involves lengthy processes where factors such as efficiency, safety and impact are given due care and attention before any construction even begins.
Road building has a rich history stretching back thousands of years. Some people believe that the first roads appeared around about 10,000 BC although it can also be argued that these were merely animal tracks that people followed out of convenience or necessity and were not actually constructed so cannot be considered as a proper road or highway.
There is good physical evidence, however, of man made roads dating back to about 4,000 BC. These constructions were rudimentary in nature but are the earliest example of man connecting two places using engineering with a view to travelling between two sites. The city of Ur in the Middle East and Glastonbury in England both have sites where the remains of constructed roads and walkways have been found.
These early examples of highway design used basic techniques and materials; often stone or timber and were basic in design and construction. Very often they covered very short areas or distances and didn't deviate from a straight line. There was never a concerted effort to build a series of roads at this time, there wasn't the need and in the ancient world transport by river was much faster and easier.
It wasn't until the rise of the Roman Empire that highway design moved into a whole new area. A concerted effort was made by the Romans to build a network across the whole of their empire in an attempt to connect each different region with all of the others. The wars and military campaigns that the Roman army waged across North Africa and Europe facilitated this massive engineering project, the first of its kind in the modern world.
Evidence of Roman highway design and construction can still be seen throughout what was once the Roman Empire. In Italy, Rumania and the United Kingdom there are still Roman roads that, although constructed thousands of years ago, can be used today. The fact that they are still usable and employ engineering techniques that are still employed today is testament to how good they were.
Although we would recognize the Roman roads for what they are it wasn't until the Arab Empire started road building that roads appeared which we would easily recognize as what we refer to as highways today. They used an elementary chemical process to produce tar which they then used to surface the roads they built. The petroleum that they could get from local oil fields was used to strengthen the roads around Baghdad and other towns and cities in Iraq.
Today highway construction is big business. There's more traffic to consider and more than ever the environmental consequences of road building are a factor in highway design. With pollution, noise, impact on wildlife and cost all factors that could determine the success of a project the latest computing technology is now employed during consultation and planning processes to determine whether a project is viable or not. Road building has come a long way since it's humble beginnings as a dusty track!
About the Author Dominic Donaldson is an expert in the engineering industry. Find out more about highway design and engineering.
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