When I wasn’t watching a bit of Tour de France, or playing backyard badminton, I was hammock-bound this weekend (I was clearly out of town, as my Brooklyn apartment has neither yard nor hammock) with Mary Beard’s wonderful book The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. Beard, a Cambridge classicist who also blogs, leaves no layer of pumice unturned as she probes the “ordinary life” of the lost town. Not surprisingly, there’s a bit about streets, and the still ongoing tension between the externalities of wheeled traffic and the other functions of urban spaces.

The streets of Pompeei could be closed to wheeled transport by simple devices: by large stone bollards fixed in the roadway, by the placing of fountains or other obstructions across the traffic path, or by steps or other changes of level that were impassable to carts. Every one of these was used to ensure that, at least in its final phases, the Pompeian Forum was a pedestrian area. We should put out our minds any fanciful reconstruction of the central piazza criss-crossed by chariots and carts. Each entry point to the Forum was blocked to wheeled traffic…

Pompeian traffic was then reduced or, in modern terms, ‘calmed’ by the creation of cul-de-sacs, and other kinds of road block. But there remains the more general problem of narrow streets and what would happen if two carts should met in those many roads which were wide enough only for one. Needless to say, reversing a cart drawn by a pair of mules, down a road impeded by stepping stones, would have been an impossible feat. So how did the ancient Pompeians avoid repeated stand-offs, between carts meeting head-to-head? How did they prevent a narrow street being reduce to an impasse?

Well, I don’t want to give the whole thing away — read the book!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 8:18 am and is filed under Traffic Culture, Traffic Engineering, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.