How do they decide the way mountain roads twist and turn?
In: 200
I have an on-topic reason for posting a link to another sub. Open r/DesirePath and you’ll see images of natural walking paths across lawns, through foliage, and so on. It’s the literal origin of the term ‘the beaten path’.
Now imagine you’re an expeditioner (I forget if this is the correct term) looking for a way through a mountain 500 years ago. The first thing you may look for is a desire path from animals always going the same way through an area. If a specific route is easier, it naturally leads to more traffic.
One of these paths ends up taking you a pretty circuitous route through a mountain, but despite being circuitous, it pretty well beaten so a lot of animals use this path. So you and your party do too. With horses.
When you get back, you tell your friends that you found a route through the Rockies and here’s a map. Now you have a lot of people going this same route, beating it even more. Perhaps even wagons. Or elephants, for Hannibal in the Alps.
Anyway, your route get’s so well known that it’s been colloquially named after you, Mr. John I-70. And now, because there’s so much traffic, someone should really pave it, but due to budget cuts, it’s simpler to just leave the potholes in and what was I talking about again?
(Just read that last paragraph as “Basically, the more known a path is and the more traffic that uses it, the more ‘upgraded’ it eventually becomes until some government formally recognizes it and decides to start maintaining it as a road.”)
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