Remarks on the Present System of Road Making: With Observations, Deduced from Practice and Experience, With a View to a Revision of the Existing Laws, and the Introduction of Improvement in the Method of Making, Repairing, and Preserving Roads, and Defending the Road Funds from Misapplication. Seventh Edition, Carefully Revised, With an Appendix, and Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, June 1823, with Extracts from the EvidenceMcAdam, John Loudon
History
Remarks on the Present System of Road Making: With Observations, Deduced from Practice and Experience, With a View to a Revision of the Existing Laws, and the Introduction of Improvement in the Method of Making, Repairing, and Preserving Roads, and Defending the Road Funds from Misapplication. Seventh Edition, Carefully Revised, With an Appendix, and Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, June 1823, with Extracts from the Evidence
McAdam, John Loudon
Macadam roads; Roads -- Great Britain
Do you find your mode of management equally applicable where the
materials are bad as where they are good, and that the same
proportionable benefit arises?—I am afraid gentlemen suppose that I have
some particular mode of management, which is certainly not the case, nor
can by any means be the case; and in every road I have been obliged to
alter the mode of management, according to the situation of the roads,
and sometimes according to the finances. At Epsom in Surrey, the roads
have been put into a good repair, at an expense considerably under the
former annual expenditure, by which the trustees have been enabled to
lower their tolls on agricultural carriages. The road between Reading
and Twyford, in Berkshire, has been made solid and smooth since the
beginning of July last, by persons under my directions, at an expense,
including the surveyor’s salary, not exceeding fifteen pounds per week;
and their former expenditure, exclusive of the surveyor’s salary, was
twenty-two pounds per week. A great part of the road in the
neighbourhood of Bath, which was formed upon the plan laid down in my
report to the commissioners, and with the greatest success, is made with
freestone, which was always supposed impossible to make a good road of;
but it will make a good road. It certainly does not last so long as one
made of better materials; but it is equally good whilst it does last.
One of the roads out of Bristol towards Old Down has been made good,
where it was a received opinion, that from the nature of the materials
the road could not be made so; and the commissioners would not consent
to my beginning it until the road was threatened to be indicted. It was
put into my hands in October 1816, and at the Christmas following I was
able to report that it was one of the best roads in England for a
distance of eleven miles, at the expense of first outlay only of 600_l._
and it has continued so until the present.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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