why do roads have little curves and not just a straight line?
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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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