Last week the city paved a short street that has been dirt since 1910.
Most city construction projects are pointless or destructive, obeying EPA or ADA grants. Building flood generators to avoid a few PPT of phosphate in a lake, or installing disabled ramps on all corners whether the block has a sidewalk or not.
This little project showed smart custom-made engineering. The block didn’t have curbs, so I expected they’d install curbs in order to install standardized driveway cuts and standardized disabled ramps. Nope, they just extended and blended asphalt ‘tributaries’ into each of the dirt driveways. It looks nice and organic, even artistic, but I had to stop and think about the reason.
The yards and drives were slightly below the level of the street, so a curb would have created a little wall in front of each yard, and the standard driveway cuts would end one foot above the driveways. All the yards would have to be regraded to match the curb, and the existing driveways would have an up-then-down hump.
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As with the dentist and doctor, I’m getting a sense that everyone is trying a little harder to be PERSONAL and CUSTOMIZED after three years of mandatory automatic robotic NAZI HELL. Could be that I’m just more willing to be tolerant and charitable …. but then I’m part of everyone, so the observation still stands.
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A month later, the city is working on the shoulders now. I thought at first they were going to make a curb after all, but instead they’ve dug shallow drainage ditches, less than a foot deep, and lined them with gravel. On the side away from the street they’ve drawn white circles with the word SEED inside, showing where to plant grass.
This technique is almost universal in Oklahoma, but I’ve never seen it here. For instance, here’s a street in Pawnee, typical of most small towns:
Same blended driveways, same ditches.
Polistra's Mill 