Why are manholes typically on the road and why are there sometimes 2 or 3 very close together?
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Manholes correspond to something under the road – sewer or storm drain, or underground electrical wires, or cable, or telephone.
Those things are often in the road because it’s the easiest place to access to run wires. The alternative is having them on private property, which means you need legal agreements to access them for maintenance purposes.
In urban areas much of the needed infrastructure for daily living (water supply, sewage, drainage, electrical connection, telephone wiring, cable wiring, etc) may be built under ground. Access points are placed strategically throughout each system to provide public works ways of accessing these underground systems for repairs or maintenance without having to dig them up necessarily. And since roads are generally on publicly owned land, many of these access points are manholes built into roads and covered with steel disks that are heavy and sturdy enough to bear the weight of the vehicles driving over them. In areas where topography, and population density make useful public real estate scarce, you might find several access points for several different systems in the same general area.
They’re in the roads because they are pubic rights of way to run pipes, storm drains, cabled, etc. to provide direct access to all properties and without going through private property. There may be different ones close together for different systems. One might provide access to storm drains, another to underground cables for telephone/internet, electrical wires, etc.
Sometimes manholes were placed outside of the road, but the road was made bigger, so the manholes are now in the road. Like if there was originally a two lane road, then the road was made into a four or five lane.
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