Land and Transportation

Tim DeChant:

The transportation-centric layout of ribbon farms in North America traces its roots back to medieval times. When France was trying to stabilize its colonial foothold in the New World back in the 17^th century, Cardinal Richelieu (an adviser to the king and powerhouse in French politics) hatched a plan. To encourage more intensive settlement, he parceled the land similarly to the way it was divided in France: in long, thin strips oriented perpendicularly to a transportation route – which in Nouvelle France was primarily the St. Lawrence River.
Much of arable North America, however, was not allocated in ribbon farms. The Public Land Survey System carved up large portions of the United States into one square mile sections, each of which were subdivided to create farms and aggregated to form townships. Canada adopted a similar system, the Dominion Land Survey, for its prairie states.
So when the U.S. started with square farms, the process and the results were the exact opposite from ribbon farms: We plotted the farms first and then pondered the logistics. It’s therefore no surprise that Americans feel transportation should come to us instead of the other way around. We pick a place to live and then figure out how to get where we need to go. If no way exists, we build it: roads, arterials, highways, interstates … and so on.
And it’s this quirk of geography – the shape of a typical American farm – that I believe influenced the development of the entire nation.
Here’s how: Roads snaked out to farms where they were needed, which is to say nearly everywhere. Farmsteads, and later suburban houses, were more or less evenly distributed across the landscape rather than concentrated alongside existing roadsides. In regions dominated by ribbon farms, transportation was clearly the foundation. But in much of the rest of North America, parcels were delineated first; transportation routes followed.
The fact that the farm, not the transportation, came first is important. It was a geographic case of the tail wagging the dog.
Flexible and distributed transportation networks are really the only solution compatible with this way of thinking. Trains, which rely on a strong central network, never had a chance. We were destined for the automobile all the way back in 1787, when we first decided to carve up the countryside into tidy squares.

The Public Land Survey System fascinates me.  This is a pretty interesting take on one unintended consequence of the grid system.  One of the hard parts for Ohio to deal with in the future will be the upkeep of our farm-to-market roads.  At least in our part of the state, almost all of the roads are paved.  I anticipate some of those roads will go back to gravel in the future because the cost won't be affordable for infrequently traveled roads (I've seen our future, and it's Indiana). 

Another transportation-linked area of interest for me is how some railroads got built to run to certain developers' towns to help spur the towns' growth.  We have an abandoned railroad in our county that ran all over the place to hit a couple of places that now qualify as crossroads.  It wasn't an efficient route by any stretch, but it goes a little more toward what he's talking about above, with transportation ahead of where we decide to live.