Turn-by-turntables: How drivers got from A to B in the early 1900s (2020)
It&#x27;s hard to impress just now <i>modern</i> the notion of <i>widely-used and generally-accessible land travel</i> is.<p>As an illustration, I&#x27;ve linked a Google Ngram Viewer query here, which looks at the normalised trends of the terms road, street, boulevard, avenue, highway, freeway, tollway, expressway from 1700--2000.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;ngrams&#x2F;graph?content=(road*100),(highway*700),(freeway*9000),(tollway*600000),(expressway*25000),(avenue*1200),(boulevard*10000),(street*150)&amp;year_start=1700&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=15&amp;smoothing=9&amp;direct_url=t1;,(road * 100);,c0;.t1;,(highway * 700);,c0;.t1;,(freeway * 9000);,c0;.t1;,(tollway * 600000);,c0;.t1;,(expressway * 25000);,c0;.t1;,(avenue * 1200);,c0;.t1;,(boulevard * 10000);,c0;.t1;,(street * 150);,c0#t1;,(road * 100);,c0;.t1;,(highway * 700);,c0;.t1;,(freeway * 9000);,c0;.t1;,(tollway * 600000);,c0;.t1;,(expressway * 25000);,c0;.t1;,(avenue * 1200);,c0;.t1;,(boulevard * 10000);,c1;.t1;,(street * 150);,c0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;ngrams&#x2F;graph?content=(road*100%...</a><p>See below for an explanation of the form used and why.<p>The query isn&#x27;t meant to show how often one term is used versus another, but rather is weighted so that <i>each</i> term peaks at <i>roughly</i> the same maximum, so that the usage-over-time is apparent.<p>Terms that apply to <i>city-based transport</i> -- &quot;street&quot;, &quot;avenue&quot;, &quot;boulevard&quot;, etc., appear early.  Terms that apply to <i>long-distance automobile transport</i> largely emerge <i>after</i> 1940.  Until then, variously, cars didn&#x27;t exist, most people couldn&#x27;t afford one, and&#x2F;or there were few or no long-distance highways.<p>And the word &quot;road&quot; itself refers to riding (generally on horseback):  &quot;riding expedition, journey, hostile incursion&quot;:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;word&#x2F;road" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;word&#x2F;road</a><p>(A <i>street</i> is literally paved, an <i>avenue</i> provides access, and a <i>boulevard</i> is a bulwark.)<p>And the <i>conventions</i> we&#x27;re familiar with, from lane striping and traffic signage to destination and route markings <i>all had to be invented</i>.<p>Prior to cars and railroads, there was some surface transportation via coaches, but much long-distance travel (for the few who undertook it) was by water, by ocean, river, canal, or lake.  Adam Smith travelled from Scotland (Kilkarny, Edinborough, or Glasgow, I don&#x27;t recall which specifically) to London via coach or on horseack, <i>taking several weeks for the journey</i> in the 1750s.  That&#x27;s alluded to in <i>Wealth of Nations</i> here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_History_of_Inland_Transport_and_Communication_in_England&#x2F;Chapter_6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_History_of_Inland_Transport...</a><p>The UK&#x27;s Ordnance Survey maps were initiated in 1791, by the army, following uprisings in Scotland and Ireland.  The first published maps of Ireland didn&#x27;t exist until the 1820s.  James Burke covers this in his video series <i>Connections</i> and <i>The Day the  Universe Changed</i>.  Among other reasons for the lack of maps was <i>the lack of roads</i>.  Yes, local byways existed, but on small islands with no point more than 60 miles (100 km) from the sea, water transport was strongly preferred.<p>Rivers and canals dominated inland transport, especially for bulk goods.  China&#x27;s Grand Canal dates back over 2,000 years.  The convention of specifying cities by which river they are on (Frankfurt am Main, Stratford upon Avon, etc.) reflects the significance of water transport.  In the US, the first highways were rivers, prevalent on the East Coast.  New Orleans was a significant (and belated) battle of the War of 1812 <i>because it controlled all transportation from the interior of the country</i>.  The Erie Canal first provided a direct route from the inland to the East Coast (and luxuriously comfortable travel as compared to coach, wagon, or horseback) in the 1820s.  Herman Melville&#x27;s story of a travelling huckster, <i>The Confidence Man</i>, takes place aboard steamboats on the Mississippi River --- the ur interstate highway.<p>Train travel was the first marked change from this, and I suspect that the rise of &quot;road&quot; in the 1nd half of the 19th century largely refers to <i>rail</i> roads.  (Those who&#x27;ve read J.K. Galbraith&#x27;s <i>The Great Crash: 1929</i> will also note that &quot;airline&quot; first referred to long-distance express train routes.)  Earlier still, the first roads (and routes) were creted for mail delivery (&quot;post roads&quot;) and&#x2F;or purposes --- see the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, first undertaken in<p>For myself, I grew up with maps, and have never liked turn-by-turn directions.  I prefer seeing the route, including other landmarks and alternative tracks, with turn-by-turn as an <i>adjunct</i> to this.  If I can place myself on the map, I can place myself in space.  Following driving directions doesn&#x27;t offer this.<p>About the Ngram query:<p>The URL is ... ugly, but the meat of it is this set of weights (I&#x27;ve reordered it here so the local terms appear first):<p>- (road<i>100)<p>- (avenue</i>1200)<p>- (street<i>150)<p>- (boulevard</i>10000)<p>- (highway<i>700)<p>- (freeway</i>9000)<p>- (tollway<i>600000)<p>- (expressway</i>25000)<p>Or as one line that you can paste into the search dialogue:<p><pre><code>  (road*100),(highway*700),(freeway*9000),(tollway*600000),(expressway*25000),(avenue*1200),(boulevard*10000),(street*150)
</code></pre>
(I&#x27;ve also set the date range to 1700--2000 and a nine-year smoothing to even out the plots.)<p>The weights are eyeballed by me <i>so that each term has roughly the same peak.</i>  100 is the nominal weighting, so 10000 is  100x multiple.  They are only there to make the data look reasonable, don&#x27;t read too much into them.<p>Why use 100 as the baseline?  Because &quot;street&quot; needed a 1.5x muliplier, and the Ngram Viewer doesn&#x27;t take decimal fraction values.  100 gives sufficient granularity and keeps the numbers consistent.