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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40597216

与当代系统相比，罗马基础设施，特别是道路网络，由于规模、密度、使用频率、恶劣天气条件和对可维护性的关注等因素的增加，面临着独特的挑战。与某些假设相反，罗马人并没有奴役他们遇到的每一个人。然而，在特定时期，大城市人口要么被消灭，要么被奴役。这导致大量奴隶进入意大利从事劳动密集型任务，尽管并未涉及所有接触。虽然现代世界优先考虑经济增长而不是环境问题，但古罗马使用的建筑方法为工程解决方案提供了宝贵的见解，以提高耐用性和抵御极端载荷和条件的能力。尽管技术取得了进步，但考虑到重型车辆交通所施加的压力，仅使用鹅卵石等石头设计道路可能会导致舒适度问题和寿命问题。

Pretty cool.

My parents grew up in small villages that are adjacent to one of these ancient roads (via Tiburtina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Tiburtina) and the road basically still exists as a modern road.

I remember driving near Pescara with my parents in the 1990s--they had not been back to Italy in 35+ years and they were trying to find their way back to their home towns.

We stopped the car on the side of a main road and asked a woman who was walking, "Dov'e' la Tiburtina?" (where is the Tiburtina?).

The woman responded... "QUEST'E' la Tiburtina!" (This is the Tiburtina).

Newer but similar thing with Old Spanish Trail through the southern US (and similar historic trails).

So many roads named after something or named some nostalgic but generic thing, that no one realizes when they are actually driving on the modernized version of the real thing.

Among other things, it seems most expect there to be a route 66 style or (american) rail-row insitu abandoned artifact of these roads (which do sometimes exist in stretches of realignment) but don't realize that un-abandoned places generally aren't going to abandon their roads.

ETA: Old Spanish Trail went from the Atlantic coast of Florida to the Pacific along the Gulf Coast then continued west. But the places with continuous use to today from Texas east are now more often excluded from 'Old Spanish Trail' maps.

The only dead straight main road out of London runs very close to my house. It was the Roman military road out London and ran for a couple of hundred miles. In Saxon times it was called Watling Street.

Ha, funny - we visited London for a week last autumn and stayed in Kilburn near the old Paddington cemetery, and every time we took the bus into the city I found it strange how straight that road was.

I knew someone at school who got a summer job identifying lost native trails. The government wanted to resurrect them as modern trails. The result: basically every trail would have been down the middle of a divided highway or along a railway track. It turns out that native people's then didn't like walking up and down hills anymore than cars and trains do today. The project was axed.

If you want to cause controversy and stir up some trouble in the ancient history community there's nothing like the topic of Roman roads. I didn't realize it until reading up on the subject. There seems to be two camps the "ancient aliens" type who argue Roman roads were built and lasted 2,000 years vs the roads were continually repaired over 2,000 years just like any other road.

I've been always fascinated by subway maps. The best ones are usually made manually and require update from contractors on every infrastructure extension. Were there any efforts to make autogenerated styled subway maps? Not like stylization of OSM data, but real schemes that show the whole system without sensory overload?

>We've used that a while ago to render a few pretty images with our graph visualization library, but runtime is prohibitive

I wonder if anyone's tried running it with the Tokyo transit system.

Side note: Mini Metro is an incredible game, and the studio is still updating it with new content a decade after release! I highly recomend everyone here checking it out if they haven't already.

(Not affiliated, just a fan)

There’s also an option to email the mapmaker to receive a pdf. I’m going to ask for one in hopes that it’ll blow up nicely. I think it’d make interesting wall art.

Naissus represent! I love this. Testament to Harry Beck's circuit board mapping approach - so easy to read. With Roman roads being far more 'straight' than London tube lines, it's even more suitable.

There's a series on Amazon Prime where a Brit actually travels the main Roman Roads in England, revisiting the history while he goes.

They actually demonstrate how they got the roads so straight.

How can it take 2 months on foot, yet only 1 month per horse, when a horse can only travel between 25-35 miles a day, which is not twice as far as a human can travel in a day, but about equal?

Horses would often be swapped out at stations when a wealthy person would have to travel very quickly across a long distance. Maybe this is an average since the speed with which horsemen could travel would depend on the rate at which they exchanged their horses.

In an extreme example from the year 9 BC, the future emperor Tiberius traveled on the Roman Roads 330 miles (531 km) between northern Italy and modern day Mainz, Germany in 36 hours without sleep. He was rushing to the deathbed of his older brother Drusus after the latter suffered mortal injuries in a freak horse accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drususstein

haha hadn't thought about that, although the Roman Roads could be considered to be a safe highways as opposed to the dangerous paths in Germania.

If one of the main characters in The Fast and the Furious gets hurt in a street race, would not his teammates race to him as fast as they could?

It took 4 years after the addition of mountain bikes for a cyclist to beat the horse at the Llanwyrtd Wells event.

Also, AFAIK, the Romans did not have bicycles.

ps. I raced this event twice in the early 1980s when they had a mountain bike division, and still have scars on my right arm from one of them.

About 30km/18 miles per day is a common value used in Europe. On a single day you can easily do twice that if you don't carry too much and are used to walking long distances, but it would be difficult to sustain. Also the number allows for time to set up camp (and tear it down in the morning), prepare meals, etc.

Saying that 60km "can be easily done" is quite a stretch. After 30-40km, even on flat, most people wouldn't do it easily at all.

And I walk about 10km daily in one session and often do 30+km hikes.

When I was a boy scout (so 16 -18 yo) we were walking as a team 50-70 km per day and could sustain that for 2-3 days. More perhaps, but there was nowhere to go any further. We were wearing 20 kg in rather uncomfortable backpacks.

On forced marches we could keep 7-8 km/h speed. And sometime we have practiced legionary walk which is alternating 200 steps jogging and 700 steps walking.

One of the badges was for walking 100 km in a day and lot of my friends got it.

But back then we were generally walking a lot, day by day, every year.

Good shoes and good motivation.

I am not doing this anymore.

When I was in elementary school, we would do charity walks every year to raise money for the poor. They were 20 miles.

It took us all day, but if a bunch of kids between fourth and eighth grades and their nun teachers can do it, I'm surprised how many adults on this web site think it's too far.

> I'm surprised how many adults on this web site think it's too far.

Kids these days are often a lot fitter than adults. I know people who think a 10 minute walk is too far.

Did you do it with a suitcase of stuff for a week- or month-long stay in another city, and contingencies like extra water, food, stove etc if you get laid over in a remote area without facilties? Did you do it rain or shine, on paved roads or muddy rutted-out dirt roads?

Well I did 30km with ~1500m height gained three-four times a week for a while. If I pushed I maybe could do 60km, but that would be no fun. Tops was 40 km on trails and 2500m gained, but that was extreme.

You need enough water, good shoes and nice weather for that. Or a flatter terrain.

On flats, 20km takes ~3.2 hours and yes you can walk 60 or 80 in a day and not drop dead at the end of it if you take care.

I'm sure the author would have more details on the ambiguity. Are the walkers marching soldiers? Is the rider a courier who changes to fresh horses at waystations? It's not clear :)

My thought is that one didn't simply travel alone on horseback, but with a group and baggage, and I wouldn't expect servants to be mounted. The animals help with the baggage. You also would want a group since there are highwaymen and freebooters on the road.

I seem to recall oxen speed being about 12 miles per day.

I don't know if "Genava" is the same as modern day Geneva CH, but if it is, then how is can it be correct to show Vienna to the west of it? I get that a subway map abstracts the physical layout, but surely this is a mistake in the topology??

This is really neat! Thanks for sharing. I wonder if there's an analogue for these routes and the roadway system there? I imagine so. I thought it was interesting how short Via Appia was. Learning Latin growing up, I imagined that to be much longer.

The Roman Empire was very advanced for the time, and it left such a huge imprint on the civilization even centuries, and thousands of years after it.

The organization was a different scale.

Fun fact: Some of the most famous battles in England in the middle ages, such as battle of Hasting, were basically 5k - 9k soldiers in each side. That's just one and a half Roman legion.

Rome, could field 12 legions at a time, and the scale was insane. I can see why the Roman Empire remained such a symbol of civilization for a thousand of years after its fall.

To be fair England was a complete backwater in Roman times, just like much of Europe away from the Mediterranean. IIRC by the 1000s Germany, France and Britain had already well surpassed their Roman population peaks, Italy on the other hand took another 500 years or so.

That's really well done! I have no comment on the accuracy but it really highlights just how the Romans integrated new areas into the central empire through transportation (goods, ideas, and armies).

I will also call out the road in Africa called "Caeserea lol"

Many of the roads in Europe between cities are former roman roads. Sometimes you can even see ancient small bridges along the bigger highways. The romans cut out entire mountains to guide roads through. Amazing work.

Very schematic from region I live around - Geneva and Aosta are not that far on the map and seem close neighbours, but highest part of alps lies in between, passes can be brutal and far apart (>=2500m high, ie St Bernard pass from where famous dogs come from, can end up snowed anytime all year round and especially 2000 years ago, at least 6 months/year unpassable for carriages and dangerous for anything else).

From the HN guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Sometimes I wonder if we've regressed in terms of attention to quality. Here in the US, I see lots of potholes on the streets and sidewalks. Meanwhile, the ancient cobblestone roads are still functional to this day.

For sure, but unfair comparison. Leave an asphalt road unattended for 10 years and it's cracked and overgrown, barely better than a dirtroad. A cobblestone at least will be salvageable, just will need a good weed wacking. Baseline quality is just higher.

They're pointing out the ridiculousness of the original comparison.

But you made the same bad comparison as the original one since only the asphalt road can bear the loads of modern traffic.

Potholes are not regression. They are a good cost effect response. We can build roads that won't have potholes, but at vastly more cost, it is better in the long run to build roads as we do and then fix potholes every year.

Cobblestones also get potholes and the like when subject to heavy car traffic.

The neighbors on my block share a gravel alleyway, which develops enormous potholes over time. The city does not maintain it, so we all chip in every couple of years to have it re-graded. One of our neighbors, who happens to own a few expensive sports cars, wants us to have the alley paved with asphalt instead: but it will take twenty years of regrading before the project would break even.

Rome had the advantage of access to essentially unlimited forced labor in order to build and maintain their infrastructure. Modern engineering is absolutely superior to Roman engineering, but we do have to contend with budget constraints, at least in part because we're not using slavery to build our roads.

The network scale, network density, frequency of use, and loading conditions are all like, orders of magnitude higher. Plus as other commenters have mentioned, weather conditions tend to be more extreme than the Mediterranean, and additionally, designing for serviceability can have significant advantages.

> Sometimes I wonder if we've regressed in terms of attention to quality.

In a way we have, yes! In our modern society we optimize for profit. Always, everywhere. The reasons our roads won't last thousands of years is precisely that it would be less profitable.

The Roman roads wouldn’t be pleasant to drive on at all. Also the Romans certainly must have been more obsessed by profit than us? They state was built on subjugation and enslavement of basically all the people they came into contact with.

> The Roman roads wouldn’t be pleasant to drive on at all.

Sure, but that was not my point.

> Also the Romans certainly must have been more obsessed by profit than us?

I don't know, I wouldn't say "certainly". I am not really sure how one can be more obsessed by profit than us. We literally care more about profit (GNI) than our survival (climate change, energy crisis, biodiversity crisis).

> They state was built on subjugation and enslavement of basically all the people they came into contact with.

You don't really know how Rome worked, do you? Because they had slaves does not mean they enslaved "all the people they came into contact with". The Roman society is actually super interesting when you look into it.

> Sure, but that was not my point

So it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison because they serve very different purposes?

> We literally care more about profit (GNI) than our survival (climate change, energy crisis, biodiversity crisis).

So a bit like the Romans who weren’t particularly concerned about severe deforestation, soil erosion and related issues in addition to the extinction of multiple species (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holznot#Peak_wood just a hypothesis but it probably has some basis).

> does not mean they enslaved "all the people they came into contact with

They pretty much did. Especially during the late Republican period. Well not literally “all” but the populations of large/huge cities like Corinth, Carthage and others were exterminated/enslaved and millions of slave were imported into Italy to work and die in extremely gruesome conditions (depending on the estimates the numbers were comparable to the entire Atlantic slave trade)

> You don't really know how Rome worked, do you?

What makes you say that?

That’s like me replying to your claim:

> We literally care more about profit (GNI) than our survival

By asking “You don’t really know how does the modern world work, do you?”. Both of our claims were quite hyperbolical..

> So it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison because they serve very different purposes?

My point was that we could make extra-solid roads. But that would be more difficult and hence more costly. I did not mean that there is a conspiracy; it's just a system. I did not even say it's worse; it's different.

> So a bit like the Romans

You're turning it around. You said "the Romans were certainly more [...]" and I said "hmm I can't imagine being more [...] than us". So yeah, maybe they didn't give a shit, and we don't give a shit. Which is compatible with what I said (but not with what you said, which is that it was "certainly not similar").

> They pretty much did.

So you mean that from the start population of Rome to the empire around the Mediterranean Sea, they systematically enslaved everyone they encountered? So like 99.999% of the population were slaves, and the only non-slaves were the descendants of the people of the original Rome?

> What makes you say that?

The fact that you think that they enslaved "all the people they came into contact with". Romanization was more elaborate than just enslaving everybody.

> Both of our claims were quite hyperbolical..

I mean mine. Our society optimizes for the GNI, at the very real risk of causing global instability, famines, mass extinction, etc before the end of our lives. For a ton of people, it means their very survival.

> You don't really know how Rome worked, do you? Because they had slaves does not mean they enslaved "all the people they came into contact with". The Roman society is actually super interesting when you look into it

They certainly enslaved a hell of a lot of them. Like everyone else, they had good points and bad points but they were pretty far from a meritocratic democracy as we would think of the terms today.

I've done some research on this.

For one thing, cobblestone roads wouldn't last so long under the weight and shear forces of modern vehicles. Y'know when Wile E. Coyote skids to a stop so hard that the road under him wrinkles up like a rug? A loaded semi truck braking hard can actually make asphalt do that, just as an example of the kind of forces involved.

For another, cobbles that are even a little bit wet become slippery deathtraps at even moderate driving speeds. Even when they're dry, highway speeds are going to be very uncomfortably bumpy. Hard on people and hardware both.

Basically, a good driving road requires a surface that is extremely smooth but also somewhat tacky, and that really limits what other properties it can have. You can't build something like that out of durable stone.

Cars are the problem.

And just FYI roman roads were maintained. We dont have documentation on this from the early imperial period. But from the Byzantine period we know that there were local people responsible for maintenance.

And we also know that even during Byzantine times many roads were reverting to nature. Road maintence was a real problem.

Wait till you see Canadian roads.. But the real reason is construction mafia, to keep their work going, if they made it high quality they are out of government maintenance contracts in the coming years.

There are a few studies, with arguable relevancy that discovered that roads that are safe but look dangerous are safer than merely safe roads.

None of that has any relation at all with potholes. Potholes are dangerous and may not be even noticeable at a distance.

Controlled-access freeways (interstates, motorways, autobahns) have much lower accident rates per mile than other roads with lower speed limits and more distractions.

Of course, the two broad categories of road largely serve different purposes, so one can't go around replacing side streets with freeways, either.

Watch a video on roman road construction methods. It seems they prided themselves on building for the long term. Retrieval augmented generation from incomplete archive: The foundation of the road consists of 3’ of gravel covered with 2’ of sand forming an extremely stable base. I seem to also recall that builders got paid half upon completion and half if the construction was still in good condition fifty years later. (Though this is probably apocryphal for the obvious reasons)

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