Abstract
IN a paper on “Transport in France” presented by F. J. Wymer to the Institute of Transport on October 19, it is said that the image which generally lingers longest in the mind of an Englishman who has motored through France is a section of ‘route nationale’ stretching ahead of his car into the far distance, with poplar trees passing the eye on each side like the pales of a fence. The same type of road was to be found 1,700 years ago in Great Britain from Dover to London and York, from Southampton to London and Chester, and many other roads, as the system in France is, like our own, undoubtedly descended from that of the Roman Empire. In contrasting the present roads in Great Britain with those in France, it has to be remembered that no hostile force of any appreciable dimensions has landed upon the shores of Britain for nearly a thousand years ; our defences have been upon the sea and so the roads were built with this end in view. Hence the roadways of England tended mainly to be local links from village to village and so in a meandering way passed through a maximum number of towns and villages. In France they were designed on a plan connecting by the most direct routes the capital with the military centres. Having such different road systems, it is interesting to note that both France and England seem to be following similar tendencies in developing their systems unlike other great European countries. In France, after the Great War it was decided, instead of concentrating upon a few selected routes, to improve the standard of the whole system just as is being done in Great Britain. In France, the roads are being modernized by widening, by the elimination of level crossings, by the redesigning of road junctions and the provision of modern surfacing.
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The Roads of France. Nature 140, 1056 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/1401056a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1401056a0