A wooden trackway in Somerset can be dated to a single winter
The Sweet Track, a timber causeway across English wetland, was built in the winter of 3807 BC or the spring after. Tree rings in its wood let archaeologists pin the date that precisely. It was long called the oldest road in the world, until a trackway about 6,000 years old turned up at Plumstead in London in 2009.
Whether the first paths simply followed animal trails is disputed, since many animals do not keep to fixed routes, though some ancient ways such as the Icknield Way may mark a line that people and animals both found natural. Log roads near Glastonbury date to about 4000 BC. The oldest known paved road was laid in Egypt between 2600 and 2200 BC.
Empires built networks. Around 500 BC Darius I began the Persian system that included the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa, with routes reaching Bactria and India. From about 312 BC Rome laid straight stone roads for its armies, eventually 29 major routes radiating from the capital and about 78,000 kilometres of paving. In the 8th century, Baghdad's streets were surfaced with tar distilled from local petroleum.
Britain went backwards for a while. A 1555 law handed road upkeep to parishes, and quality fell. Turnpike trusts, starting around 1706, collected tolls to pay for better roads; at their height about 1,100 trusts managed some 36,800 kilometres. Protests known as the Rebecca Riots, between 1839 and 1844, fed into a Royal Commission and the system's end just as railways arrived. The first controlled-access motorway came in Italy in 1924, when Piero Puricelli's Autostrada dei Laghi linked Milan with Lakes Como and Maggiore, with one lane each way and no interchanges.
What counts as a road is a legal puzzle. The 1968 Vienna Convention treats it as the whole surface of any way open to public traffic, while international statistics exclude dedicated cycle lanes. New Zealand law is broad enough to cover beaches, river beds, wharves and even privately owned car parks the public can reach. In England and Wales the definition can take in footpaths, bridleways and private driveways.
Source: Road
