Of course, a whole lot of the older European cities are built where they are, because Romans set up a fortress two thousand years ago.
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Yeah, but the Romans only built their forts where they did because they were on Ley Lines 
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In connection with which, it’s worth reading Alfred Watkins’ “The Old Straight Track” (1920). His contention is that ley lines, far from being magical, were intensely practical cross-country routes; and that the Romans made use of these existing routes, which they brought up to their required standard.
How far this applies to roads outside Great Britain is a question. It doesn’t seem too unlikely to me that it should.
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Certainly, I assume that people outside of Britain had their own versions of the Old Straight Tracks.
The USA has built lots of roads so that lots of people can drive lots of cars to lots of suburban homes and lots of strip malls.
Is this a public good?
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So they weren’t ruts, they were ‘rails’! Even cooler imho.
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There are other issues. In the UK the 6-foot Brunel gauge was probably a lot safer than the Stephenson gauge: the wheels are further apart, so the train tended to stay in the track, and not go over the track next door. But the Brunel gauge required longer sleepers and a wider bed, so it was more expensive to lay. There are narrower gauge railways in South Africa because wood was expensive on the high veldt, but there was lots of room and the railway lines were very long and straight, so you could stick them further apart.
The mining trucks that Stephenson knew are a similar gauge to Roman lead mining trucks used in the North of England. They ran in ruts which have lasted. There was no need for the mines to have compatible trucks as their rails never joined, but people tended to look at the nearest working example and copy it. So the link with the Romans is pretty tenuous but not entirely fantastic.
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I wonder if a suitable comparison with regions that never fell under enough imperial influence to get the Roman infrastructure would do?
Might fall prey to the “never fell under imperial influence because it was a hostile environment” problem in a similar manner; but might work.
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Interesting to label roads intended by an imperial power to ease the conquer and plunder of indigenous people as “public good infrastructure”. The Romans weren’t building these things out of the goodness of their own hearts.
The British spent plenty of money in India and the Middle East (not their own of course, but neither was the Romans). I bet you’ll see lots of development in the areas they choose for their administrative centres.
I guess colonialism is OK when it’s convenient to some other argument.
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One book on the subject would seem to be this one
on the other hand, not seeing a whole lot of point to “local” feudalism.
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Just looking at that little light map … haven’t read the article yet …, those Germanii, Suebians, Gothones and Saxones seem to have done pretty good in the last few thousand years. And those Viking Rus guys way beyond the pale up there in Moscow too.
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Except that “Roman war chariot” is one of those oxymoron things.
I’m going to call (a small amount) of BS on this “study”. I don’t doubt anything they found, but the Romans likely built roads between places that already had good conditions and largish populations. Cities at the deltas of rivers (Paris, London, etc.) and that were naturally fertile irrigation areas. Discovering that there are larger populations and more nighttime light in places that are friendly to human populations (and consequently the roads that link those centers) isn’t exactly a shocker.
To prove this, they would need to compare it to places that didn’t have roads at all in the same times of development, which is almost impossible. I don’t know, seems like they are cherry picking results to me.
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From now on, I want to be known as Loretta!
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Damn, Belgium, Netherlands and Germany, what’s up with all that light pollution? You, too, Egypt, it seems weird that we can see the Nile in a night photo because you stuck a bajillion lights along it.
So why is Carlisle, which was a small pre-roman Carvetii village, a city now, while the pre-roman major settlement at Clifton Dykes is currently a cluster of about 10 houses? Also Pons Aelius was not built on a site of a known settlement, it is called Newcastle Upon Tyne today.
It looks like a lot of (relatively) major settlements along Stanegate didn’t really exist before the Romans came. Several didn’t exist until after the Romans left, and probably wouldn’t have been built if there wasn’t an existing road there.
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They compared it to areas which didn’t have roads designed for wheeled vehicles, just camel tracks instead.
It’s also worth noting that the Roman’s ideas of where had “good conditions” is different from modern times. London is notable mainly in that it has kept it’s status, but some of the provincial capitals that were of a similar stature two thousand years ago are not anywhere near as large or as important as London is now (eg Cirencester, which is a nice enough town, but not really comparable to Londinium). So a sleepy Coteswold town can have as many Roman roads as London or York.
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Well, I said it was the short version. 
The first time I encountered the chariots-to-rockets tale I wrote a refutation that was much longer and had citation references to scholarly works and first person histories, but over time the explanation’s been worn down to a nub.
The South had at least three common rail gauges at the time of the US Slaveholder’s Rebellion, and individual enterprises used a few less common ones on both sides for mining and similar private industrial uses. However, the North had already created a standard which was mostly implemented. Both sides followed a policy of systematically destroying enemy rails (look up “Sherman’s hairpins”). The Rebellion was mostly fought on Southern soil, thus the current rail gauge is based on the surviving (i.e. Northern) standard gauge. Had outcomes been reversed, the Northern rails would have been destroyed instead, perhaps leading to the dominance of the 5’ Southern gauge which was being used by Georgia’s Western & Atlantic rail.
Sure, but having the roads is provably a social good, exactly because of those geographically determined assets (like ports, fords, arable land, trading centers, &etc.) becoming more accessible, particularly for transport of perishable goods.
I didn’t realize broad gauge had gotten that broad! 7’ would be terrible for tunnels but great for carriage stability and passenger comfort.
I hereby declare you the winner of this thread.
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Thanks for highlighting this bit, I was thinking about criticizing them along these lines, but it’s good to see they considered it. I do still think that bringing in a classicist or archaeologist would have been a nice way to round things out, though.
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Oh, there’s definitely a lot more that could be done (and hopefully it will be).
This strikes me as a resource that’s simply far too fun not to be used a lot:
(It’s a digital atlas of the Roman empire from the University of Lund).
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