why do roads have little curves and not just a straight line?
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Depends a lot on the area you’re in… there are towns (mainly “newer” towns, from a big picture standpoint) that have roads set up on a very straight grid.
But outside of those, many roads follow the same path of the carriage and horse trails before them… Most of those meandered for various reasons, following creeks/rivers, game trails, property lines, or natural geographic/topographic features. As time progressed, the “roads” may have gotten more and more modernized, but stayed in the same locations
Usually that’s because they’re built around existing terrain, buildings, and so on. It’s not like Sim City where you just plow down the mountains in your way.
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As someone living in Australia, where we have the longest straight road in the world, I know the answer to this!
Usually, it’s natural pathways etc etc.
But! For long roads that would otherwise be straight, curves are artificially added for safety. Straight roads are a hazard due to driver inattentiveness, boredom, sleep etc. The longest straight road (on the way across the Nullarbor plains) was created during the war, mainly for military supplies. It is one of the most crash-prone areas in the journey across the Nullarbor, because due to its straightness, drivers are unable to maintain attentiveness to the road.
Therefore, point is, long roads that could be straight, have curves placed in arbitrarily, to reduce crashes and increase safety.
Some of these points have already been mentioned, but for completeness:
1. Straight roads are boring to drive, drivers become inattentive and more crashes occur,
2. Roads need to avoid structures and landscapes that would be expensive to remove or replace, such as significant landmarks, built up areas, sensitive ecological landscapes, mountains if possible, high profile landowners who will cause problems if your road goes through their land, and the list goes on,
3. It’s cheaper to build a curvy road that balances the high areas that need cuttings and the low areas that need filling in, so that the material you dig out of the cuttings goes to the nearest embankment and cut down on hills and valleys to some extent,
4. You need to approach obstacles on the right alignment, so the cheapest bridge structures cross rivers at right angles at the narrowest point, so you generally need to add curves to the road to get it to line up to rivers and valleys at an ideal angle,
5. Putting a road straight up a mountain doesn’t makes sense, to cut down on the steep gradient you have to follow the mountain’s contours to curve around the edges to some extent
Basically it’s cheaper and more efficient to build curvy roads than straight ones.
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