ROADS AND ROAD-MAKING. 551 



eioners of one of our large counties, only two or three years ago, in making the specifications 

 for a road only twenty feet wide, required that the road should &quot; crown &quot; in the center no less 

 than eighteen inches, or one and one-half in ten, and no amount of reasoning could lead them 

 to reduce this enormous convexity. Is it not time for the law to step in and define what the 

 transverse profile of a road ought to be for a given width? 



Let us see the results of this serious error. The convexity is so great that the center of 

 the road is the only place where a carriage stands upright. The travel, therefore, clings to 

 the middle of the road, wearing one path for the horse, and two ruts for the wheels, thus 

 wearing the road down very unevenly. 



The water, therefore, invariably stands on the middle of the road, while it is constantly 

 washing away the sides. A road ought to be formed so as to induce travel over all parts of 

 it. But with this great convexity, whenever a carriage is compelled to turn to the sides, it 

 causes great additional wear on account of sliding down the sides, while by this sliding 

 tendency, being at right angles to the line of draught, the labor of the horse and the wear of 

 wheels is very greatly increased. The evil of too great convexity is manifold, and a vastly 

 better form is that of two inclined planes meeting at the center, with the angle of junction at 

 the top slightly rounded by a curve. Of course the exact inclination will depend much on 

 the character of the surface, and the width of the road. A very rough and bad surface will 

 require a greater incline than a hard smooth face, but no road should ever be allowed to be 

 so rough as to require a transverse inclination greater than one in twenty, which, for a road 

 bed twenty feet wide, would make the center six inches higher than the sides. 



With broken stone or a hard unyielding surface, a proper medium of one in twenty-four 

 is adopted, or half an inch to a foot. Telford, the most successful and noted road-builder of 

 England, adopted one in thirty, or six inches curve in a road thirty feet wide, and MacAdam 

 fixed one upon one in thirty-six, and sometimes as slight as one in sixty, or only three inches 

 crown- in a thirty-feet road. 



The transverse slope should increase with the longitudinal inclination, and should always 

 a little exceed it in order to prevent water from running down the length of the road to gully 

 it out, but it must be apparent that no practicable amount of crowning or convexity would serve 

 to carry the water from the slightest rut, not even if it were only an inch deep. And hence 

 MacAdam testified before a committee of Parliament, saying: &quot;I consider a road should 

 be as flat as possible with regard to allowing the water to run off it at all. I have generally 

 made roads three inches higher in the center than at the sides, when they are eighteen feet 

 wide.&quot; Now, a dirt or even a gravel road may require a little greater inclination than the 

 solid surface of broken stone, but if the road is so neglected as to have a soft or loamy sur 

 face, no amount of convexity will shed the water, and a very convex surface will invariably 

 hold the more water. 



It should be constantly borne in mind that any convexity at all is a necessary evil, and 

 that the less that it can be made, and accomplish its object, the better for the travel. 



Removing Obstructions from Roads. Analogous to the previously-mentioned 

 fault is the practice, often seen on a wide road and through a village street, of dumping 

 down along the center of the highway a kind of winrow of material, whether loam or 

 gravel, eight or ten feet wide and from six inches to a foot thick, and sometimes more in 

 the middle, designed to form a crown to the road. If you ask what that is for, you will be 

 likely to be told, that it will all flatten down in a few months, and that it is the best way to 

 drain the water off. You will observe that it drives the teams off to one side, often com 

 pelling them to cut up the grass along the gutters. It requires no argument to show that 

 this is all wrong, both in principle and in fact, for this mass of stuff acts more like a sponge 

 than like a duck s back, and you can never expect to make a permanently good road by leav 

 ing the surface in that way. 



