Taking me nowhere: ruminating on roads
We have all now lived thorough the immense road repairs of spring, 1998. Many of us have even served time on Route 27, feeling physically small and existentially insignificant next to giant steamrollers. The rebuilding of the Shinnecock Canal bridge in Southampton town and the repaving of long sections of the Montauk Highway in East Hampton have bestowed on us vast swaths of smooth new asphalt.
Historically, cities have been judged by their public works. Alexander laid the foundations for many cities bearing his name as he conquered virtually all of the known world. Alexandria in Egypt is the one that is known to all of us now, but there were many Alexandrias with further identifications, with last names so to speak. Alexandria on this, Alexandria at that, from the Mediterranean to India. Before mass communication, it was one of the few ways to leave one’s mark on the world. A few centuries later, the Romans, more than any society, old or new, established their identity through buildings and public works, including roads, and gave us a remarkable legacy.
In our time, it seems to me a decidedly urban value to judge the status of a community by public works. And it is logical: there are so many more opportunities to express yourself through edifice in a city. The way we express our values in the Hamptons, by preserving farmland or wetlands for example, are just not as spectacular. But calculating from all the new roadwork, the state and the county are paying a great deal of attention to our towns and villages. They seem to want to give us a grandeur in our underpinnings that we never had before. I think that in the eyes of the bureaucrats we must have become important. Or perhaps they think it will help them get weekend reservations at the restaurants.
It seems to me that there was a period when nothing happened in civil construction. But I may be mistaken, one of those tricks of memory. I clearly remember however when our streets were simple. There were few curbs or sidewalks--just those in the center of the villages. There were no painted lines--except on the Montauk Highway. There were few road signs—the occasional speed limit warning, the very occasional direction sign. There were no reflectors.
It was only twenty or twenty five years ago when these things began to change, and I used to get exercised about it. I was quite outraged when road improvements were first undertaken, when the powers in infrastructure first put curbs on side streets and painted lines across our Main Streets. Perpendicular lines, for heaven’s sake. It was quite understandable to have a line through the center of the street to separate east and west traffic. But to have lines cross the street, to contain pedestrians—this I thought was insane. Though I knew these were measures to improve safety, I was quite put out when the authorities began what I thought was the suburbanization of our streets—the curbs, the signs, the painted lines, and worst of all, one way streets.
I’ve mellowed since then. In fact, in a puzzling and contrary way, I find it all a little attractive. I like the smooth broad road and the kabbala like patterning of the center yellow lines changing from double lines to line and dashes to single or double dashes. It appears as the encodement of our travel and our times. I find the white lines edging the highway elegant, art nouveauish swoops leading us off into the sideroads. (Of course if you were to really follow them you would be making very sharp turns off the road.) Perhaps it is all some giant labyrinth with a message for us.
The environmentalists tell us that more roads mean more people. Do better quality roads, I wonder, mean better quality people?