Trans-Eurasian belt Development (TEPR)

[Kellemora]

Yeppers!

[Icey]

I don't know why some folk laugh at places being old fashioned or "backward". They're probably better to live in than big cold cities where no one really gets to know anyone else, and when majestic old buildings're torn down in favour of some shopping mall or glass apartments, I think it's a real shame. The places then lose their character.

[pilvikki]

you mean like this:




one of the saddest pieces of finnish real estate I've seen; the whole town flattened and replaced with cement boxes.

no soul.

and note the K MARKET sign. it's a friggin' grocery store thinking itself fancy by having a foreign name. pathetic.

[Icey]

That's very much the sort of thing I had in mind Gary, and sometimes they're even worse - like huge "architecturally aesthetic" blocks, which in fact, as Prince Charles once remarked, are a "blot on the horizon". : (

[Kellemora]

Oh, I agree.

Even down here, I saw the log cabin my wife's mother was born in torn down for a parking lot, and the parking lot didn't even reach as far as where it was sitting.

Many historic buildings have come down to make way for something no where near as glamorous, or as well constructed. Where four old three story buildings once sat, they tore them down, and now a huge steel fabricated one story shed looking building sits there. A warehouse for the carpet company which faces another street.

Well, I'm off to bed, it's almost midnight.

TTUL
Gary

[Icey]

They call it progress Gary. Myself, I see many of these buildings as unnecessary eye-sores.

[Kellemora]

Some of the older buildings are not to hot either, if not maintained properly.

I'm sure you've seen long solid fences around things like junk and lumber yards made of vertical steel roofing panels.
One of these down here, although still the vertical steel, had an artist paint the entire thing so it looks like a 1950s business district. Looks much better.
However, our lumberyard went one better. They replaced the old ugly fence with long decorative style block wall, similar to the blocks used for WalMart stores. Has a shake mansard so appears it is a large building with a roof. To maintain this appearance, they also added the same walls at the ends, complete with windows and doors.
One driving by on the highway, if they didn't know it was hiding a lumberyard, would think it was the nicest backside of a shopping center they ever saw.

So, some folks do go through the extra effort to make their places appealing, instead of being an eyesore.
Then too, some of the new buildings I've seen in recent years are more of an eyesore than what they tore down.

TTUL
Gary

[pilvikki]

a burb to Stockholm:



ghastly as well.

[Icey]

Oh dear. Now to me, that looks horrible. Rows of blocks, all pretty much the same, but at least they've had the sense to leave trees and grassy areas within walking distance.

[Kellemora]

I thought Cookie Cutter building designs went out in the early 1950s?
We still see a few in apartment complexes, but at least they try to make the facade a little different on each.

The image Pil posted reminds me of our government housing projects.
Where 90% of our police force is summoned to on a daily bases.

[pilvikki]

those are from the 80s, I believe. in another Stockholm 70-80s burb they had to paint the buildings, because kids couldn't find there way home!

they chose muddy green, mustard yellow, burnt orange.

[Icey]

Like breeds like. Where you have a lot of people sited in homes which all look the same, and all cramped up, it's a breeding ground for unrest.

[Kellemora]

In older areas of our city back home, you would find miles of what we call 'row houses' where every one was identical.
Over the years, many had new facades or additions which changed their cookie cutter appearance.

Even in the late '60s and early '70s subdivisions, only a few home styles were available, but most builders did not allow the same design home on either side of a similar home, or across the street from each other. They may have only had five floor plans, but each floor plan had five or six different fronts you could select from.

Moving ahead to the '90s, several homes were built in subdivisions, all from the same two floor plans, but the fronts were all identical, just flipped left or right. It wasn't too long after they were built, the owners made changes to improve how their house looked, so the cookie cutter look faded away fairly quickly.

I think on my website I have, or did have, before and after pictures of my last house before moving south. It no longer resembled any other house in our subdivision. Even there, they had like ten different designs and no like kind design could be in the same block.

We had an apartment complex back home for younger folks, so there were a lot of children in the area.
The same problem mentioned about the younger kids getting lost was overcome by them placing an animal design on the end of each building. They also placed the zoo animals in alphabetical order so when kids talked about which building they lived in, they knew Elephant was left of Hippo and Giraffe, and Zebra was the last building down at the end.
The buildings with laundry facilities were named after birds. So Flamingo was the building with laundry and storage between Elephant and Hippo.

I once lived in an apartment complex where all of the streets were named after birds. Needless to say, it was unofficially called Birdland to be derogatory. Fortunately, I lived on the totally renovated end of the complex, where normal homes were on our same street, so even though Birdland referred to the entire complex, our end was not treated so harshly and called Eagles Roost.

[Icey]

This's the trouble where streets're really long and all look the same. I'm not surprised that children could get lost, so having zoo animals in alphabetical order seems like quite a good idea. We don't have many homes smack in the centre of cities, apart from a few blocks of flats (apartments). The rest're sited on the outskirts, and although some places look like warrens to me, the residents obviously know their own patches, but apart from the major places such as London and Birmingham, you can walk from one end of a city to another in a fairly short while. Not so in the US where these areas're far bigger and more difficult to navigate.

[Kellemora]

Road maps, not even the new GPS unit maps, give subdivision names. Prior to the early 1960s, I don't think a single subdivision even had a street bearing the same name as the subdivision. But after the 1960s, it was common to see the main entrance street carry the same name as the subdivision. This was helpful in more ways than one for deliveries.
Unlike the old Grid Based subdivisions, most new subdivisions had winding streets, loop streets, and many streets which ended in a cul-de-sac. You almost needed a road map to find your way around in a subdivision.

To compound the issue, as more subdivisions were built around and between other subdivisions, only a select few roads joined one subdivision with the next. They never tied the main subdivision roads together, to keep traffic down. So unless you knew your way through the maze of curving and winding streets, it was best to stick to the main roads outside the subdivisions.

Over time, four or five separate subdivisions may pool their resources to save costs. For example: Subdivision A may build a Clubhouse for gatherings. Subdivision B builds the Swimming Pool, and Subdivision C installs the Tennis Courts. This creates a Homeowners Association on top of the three existing Homeowners Associations for each subdivision, to handle the affairs of the shared resources. Given a little more time and yet another Association is added on top of the others, to jointly handle all the roads and such, until they decide to give their money to the city, and make all the private roads public roads under city maintenance. This has been a mistake every single time a group of subdivisions have done such. The cities make the subdivisions have all the roads perfect first, then when they take over, they come in and spend ALL the money they got for five years of maintenance costs in the first few months. They cover beautiful white concrete streets with a layer of water based tar and gravel mixture making it pitch black. At night it is so dark we need street lamps, but it takes years to get them installed. Nearly every white concrete driveway in the subdivision, now has black from the streets where the cars pull in and out of the driveways. Then the city never fixes anything after that!
You'll hear the exact same story from the people who live in subdivisions where the Association turned over their private streets to the City and made them public streets. A disaster every single time!

There, that should have brought this topic back to roads once again, hi hi...

TTUL
Gary

[Icey]

Lighting has to be fixed pretty quickly over here, because part of everyone's Council Tax pays for that sort of thing, and if an accident happened because of poor or no lighting, the Council'd be sued - and are - so when it's noticed that a light's out, or someone complains, the problem seems to be rectified in a reasonably short time (round here anyway).

Yes, back to roads. I still think that a bridge from Scotland to Russia, making a 12,000 mile trip ... takes some beating! It's ludicrous really, but it'd keep folk in work for a good while!

[Kellemora]

There were many hold-ups regarding our Interstate Highway System.
Although it was sorely needed, to work as planned, it had to go through many areas where at the time, a road made no sense. But the bigger picture proved the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, veering only slightly to catch more growing cities along it's path.
Times change so fast, most of them are now eight lanes divided, and four lanes divided between areas of congestion.
No matter how you look at it, it sure beats the two-lane highways we used to have to use, often passing right through the center of crowded cities.
Why the cargo transit down the center median never came into play when it should have, was all a matter of cost and an inability to control its usage the way they wanted to.
I still see it as happening some day anyhow. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but something has to be done until we have Transporters, hi hi...

[Icey]

Well we haven't got the room over here to widen roads by very much. The motorways have 3 lanes apiece, but dual carriageways only have 2 lanes either side, with the rest having just one lane each. These're sometimes increased for a short distance on approach to traffic lights or slip roads, allowing folk to branch off in other directions, but our system isn't very good at all. The roads were designed for a future increase in traffic, but not nearly enough. The planners don't seem to anticipate 5 years along the line, and you particularly notice this in hospital car parks. The places get taken very quickly, leaving others to drive round and round, hoping to find a space, so why can't these areas be extended where necessary, since they eventually do it anyway?

[Kellemora]

I hear ya Icey.
We have several towns where the Main Street was wide for the 1890s, but too narrow for 1920s traffic.
In some cases, they tear down a row of stores or houses to make the main drag wider, or they build a new road 1/2 mile away, or on the other side of the stores, by their back doors, hi hi...

I've been in towns where the distance from one store to across the street to another store was less than 50 feet, and a highway passed between them. It was not uncommon to find 100 foot wide storefronts, so it worked out fairly well if the traffic didn't get too bad.
I think it was in Utah when I was driving OTR, where several towns had streets more than double the width of anywhere else I delivered to back then. 250 to 500 feet between storefronts across from each other. Like strip malls with off-street parking at their front door. These were unusual to run across back then, but now are quite commonplace.

[Icey]

Wow, those're spaced out. Were there any predestrian crossing points on these wide roads?