Highways and bypasses

Do you have to be an ethnologist to have an eye for the subtleties of daily life and for the subtle and small impact that social change has on daily life and on the way we live? It was the French ethnologist Marc Augé, for instance, who wrote that the names of metro stations in Paris reflect the time that these stations were built. I know that there is a Floppy Disk Road in a nearby Dutch town, and also in this case the name gives an indication about when the road was built. Floppy disks were magnetic disks for storing computer data and programs. They were developed in the 1960s and the production stopped in 2011. Once you know this, you can make a guess about when this road probably was built.
Augé is especially known for having developed the concept of non-place (non-lieu, in French), which I discussed in another blog (see here). He has drawn my attention also to a seemingly obvious phenomenon, which nevertheless had a very deep impact on society: the construction of ring roads and bypasses – bypasses, for short – around towns and villages. I grew up in a provincial capital with about 30,000 inhabitants and I can still remember that in those days all through traffic had to pass through the narrow streets in the centre. However, with the spectacularly growing numbers of cars and trucks in the 1960s this became a practically impossible situation. The solution was that the traffic was diverted around the city by building ring roads and bypasses. It goes without saying that this situation was not typical for the town where I grew up. Nearly all cities, towns and villages had the same problem, and the result is that nowadays main roads do not lead from town to town, from village to village and from village to town, but that they avoid populated areas and pass around them.
This reasonable and necessary change in the construction of road patterns was not without consequences for the now avoided cities, towns and villages. Roads that go through built-up areas, “penetrate the intimacy of daily life”, as Augé says it. Before bypasses were built, they crossed city centres, where people come together for all kinds of reasons, and they passed through residential areas where people live (who therefore screened themselves off from the often too curious eyes of passers-by). But travelling longer distances was then not as normal as it is today and as is possible today with the modern means of transport, like faster cars. Transport was slow and main roads had always been built through the towns and to the towns and villages, because you had to be there; because you wanted to go there to the market; because it was the administrative centre of your region; because your family and business relations lived there; etc. In case you didn’t need to be there, because your destination was farther away, you still had to go through the towns and villages, since there were no other roads. The traffic was not that heavy that it was necessary to build bypasses. In this way, passers-by learned about the local customs and about what was locally interesting. And many people enjoyed stopping at the local markets, taking a rest in a local café or spend the night in the city, for travelling was a slow affair anyway, and often you had to split up your travel into several stages.
This changed with the development of modern and faster means of transport and with the increasing number of people on the move. On the one hand, it became impossible to lead all traffic through built-up areas if not to speak of city centres any longer; on the other hand, people also became more in a hurry; they had no time to slow down and didn’t want to stop in intermediate places. Therefore, gradually, the main roads that went through those places were replaced by bypasses and highways that avoided them. The new main roads now passed the towns and villages; they passed around the towns and literally they became passages. Even more, modern highways often don’t connect places as such but begin and end somewhere near an important city or otherwise on the city’s edge. Intermediate places and the beginning and end of modern highways are connected with the highways by feeder roads, approach roads and exits. As a result, towns and villages which are passed by the highways are no longer meaningful market towns, historic towns, places worth stopping there on your trip etc., but they have become nothing but names on road signs from the viewpoint of the car drivers, even in case a highway happens to pass through a certain town. This is not only so for small towns and villages, but even so for metropolises. I have often been geographically in Paris, for the autoroute from the Netherlands to the south of France passes through the outskirts of Paris. Then you can even see the Eiffel Tower. Nevertheless, I have seldom really been there, for usually I didn’t turn off, and Paris was nothing more than a place to be passed for me, an insignificant town like any other place where I didn’t stop.
Because today main roads avoid intermediate places, their local markets, their local festivities, their historical buildings, etc. tend to be forgotten. Often only local people and people from the region still know them. They have kept a meaning only for local residents. Therefore, local authorities and tourist agencies place billboards along the highways with texts like: “Visit us, we are very interesting.” It is an attempt to rescue their towns or villages from oblivion. But most car drivers don’t stop; they don’t take the exits that lead to the temptations mentioned on the billboards. Once important and meaningful places have turned into quiet and forgotten local oddities.

Sources: Marc Augé, Un ethnologue dans le métro and Non-Lieux (here esp. pp. 122 ff.).