5 ms·
Good question. That would be fairly (ok, wildly) impractical. Most of the roads are gravel, which means that maintenance would be a nightmare. Road graders a
by crikli 10y ago
Good question.
That would be fairly (ok, wildly) impractical.
Most of the roads are gravel, which means that maintenance would be a nightmare. Road graders aren't great at keeping the blade level on turns. So you'd get buildup/digout at every turn.
When it rained you'd get run-off and erasion. Which makes me think of drainage, wow, with the water making 120 degree turns roughly every half mile you'd get some serious washout on those occasions when we get 2" dumped on us in what feels like 10 minutes.
Zig-zagging across the country with a 24-row planter in tow would be a giant pain in the ass (you plan your route minimize the number of turns you're making). Would be a pain driving a combine fitted with a 12 row head. And at harvest the trucks taking grain to the elevator or silos would be doing the same zig-zagging.
It's not like the grain that's outside the obvious circle doesn't yield. It get irrigated via runoff as well as powerful sprinkler guns at the end of the pivot arm.
Credentials: grew up farming in central Nebraska, married into a 5th generation farming family. Thousands of acres, all centrally irrigated via pivot.
Edit: Didn't want opening tone to sound argumentative/condescending.
Edit 2: Just thought about power lines. They'd have to zig-zag too. Which means the pole on the zag would have lateral force vectors acting on it, so it would have to be reinforced/anchored. When the afore-mentioned washouts happened, down goes pole and powerline.
- jamesrom 10y agoYour points are totally valid. But you wouldn't need to make sharp 120 turns. You could just have very slight waves with a frequency of 1 mile. http://i.imgur.com/vJq0Q3i.png http://i.imgur.com/vJq0Q3i.png Of course, driving on roads like these would be annoying.
- Ma8ee 10y agoBut it would help you not fall asleep while driving.
- amelius 10y agoIf you would pack the circles slightly less densely, then you could have straight roads. Also, if the circles are sufficiently large, I don't think it would be annoying to drive these slightly wiggly roads.
- jamesrom 10y agoPacking the circles such that you get a straight road would negate the need to pack them hexagonally.
- zeveb 10y ago> Of course, driving on roads like these would be annoying. ITYM awesome. Those roads are normally 30 mph, so at with 1 mile fields one would change course every two minutes I wonder if it might help protect against highway hypnosis to have a course adjustment every mile or so.
- abduhl 10y agoKansas, and likely other mid-Western states that I don't know about, have historically added "artificial" curves on their highways to increase safety by stimulating drivers and reducing boredom.
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y agoLiving on a gravel road, I drive them every day. If ever there was a cure for highway hypnosis, it would be driving on gravel...
- ktRolster 10y agoMaybe because the land in the US was mostly divided up by 1900? There wasn't any particular reason to divide lots that way a hundred years ago?
- adventured 10y agoThe farm land owners - which tend to have very large plots of land - could still choose to divide their own farms that way today if it were optimal. I think it's as simple as the straight-line grids provide a good enough solution (the 85% scenario), with a few attributes that are superior in terms of ease of maintenance, surveying and land ownership division. In the very near future those grids will gain another advantage: they'll be far easier to outline when it comes to robotic-heavy farming. The wavy, more tightly packed hex alignment would be far messier.
- zeveb 10y agoOn the plus side, mightn't it help prevent erosion not to have tens-of-miles-long straight lines? It's never felt natural to look out across the American West and see a North-South/East-West grid obliterating the natural shape of the land.