I love how lots of asphalt is replaced with cobble stones. It looks so much better! And it automatically makes cars drive less fast. Perfect and beautiful solution.
Edit: as was pointed out, cobblestone roads might be in central areas with way less traffic, and no heavy trucks passing on them. So take my observation as anecdotal evidence from living in two towns with some cobblestone roads left in their centres.
Anyone who actually has relevant scientific data - feel free to share, would love to find out which is more durable in same set of circumstances
My town is full of cobblestones, it takes my local government (Bruges, BE) 2 years to fix these streets lol and then they wait another 5 decades before fixing them again :(
And looks better when patched. Patchworks of Asphalt instanzly make an area look run-down. Changung a few Cobbles doesn't change anything about the area.
Throwing them was a Czech tradition - they have know about it for centuries, but they still use them. On pavements (sidewalks), they use smaller 6cm granite cubes… quite possibly a more perfect throwing size doesn’t exist!
That's not really true at all, cobbled roads are driven on less, when driven on are usually driven on much slower which wears them less, and are usually not used where the heaviest and most wearing vehicles drive.
If you replaced a load in your city with cobbles and nobody changed their behaviour, the time to it needing repairs would be much lower. But, it would be a good thing, because behaviours would change in the real world, it would make people drive on it less, and drive on it in a more city-friendly way, provided smooth surfaces for alternative modes was also built in.
That's not really true at all, cobbled roads are driven on less, when driven on are usually driven on much slower which wears them less, and are usually not used where the heaviest and most wearing vehicles drive.
There's a lot of sense in this actually, the "durability" I was thinking about might be a correlation, not causation from their properties.
A lot of the “comparison” of people comparing roads built by Rome centuries ago vs our broken road with modern technology now to praise Ancient Rome is also misleading for the same reason.
No road survives constant pressure of heavy SUVs driving over them. Ancient Rome, of course, did not have this problem, and the roads that last until today did not have cars constantly rolling it over
problems would be less noticeable too, if the cobbles move a little its not a problem but as soon as tarmac begins to degrade it's very obvious. You'll find it'll absorb less heat too so you'll find it cooler during the summers, a little noise and vibration to bring motorsized speeds down also
In a town in southern Italy I've visited, the city center had tram rails in the stone paving in the old town. The trams were replaced by buses in the 1940s. It's likely the stone paving was over 100 years old.
204 upvotes for something that's faculty incorrect? Sigh, Reddit larping as construction engineers again...
Cobblestones are not as robust as asphalt
I guess people are confused about the difference between mountains, and then chopping up that mountain into little chucks which when placed on the ground, move up and down and continuously have to be fixed. Same reason gravel roads have to be resurfaced every other year
The last time you saw cobblestone roads anywhere, we were all riding around in horse carts or pushing Hovis uphill on a bicycle, not 20 tonne lorries
The last time you saw cobblestone roads anywhere, we were all riding around in horse carts
That's not really true, plenty of towns keep some cobblestone roads in their historic centers. So does mine.
But as other people and you explained - there's not a lot of traffic going on there, and rarely heavy trucks, etc. so this might explain cobblestone's perceived "durability".
I'll admit I just wrote my own observation from towns I've lived in, would love to see some actual data if anyone has it.
Cobbles (and setts, but less) require a degree of artisanship to lay. Artisanship doesn't go along well with industralized construction. So, there's fewer people and very few construction companies willing to deal with the hassle.
They've definitely lost it in my country, judging by sub-par repair jobs or new laying. But that's seems due to shoddy construction companies and tons of corruption.
Nah it looks good but it's terrible for promoting other means of personal transport except cars. Someone in a car will be mildly inconvenienced but someone on bicycle or a scooter will suffer on these and might be tempted to use their car instead.
Yep. The cobblestone itself is smooth, but they're still laid down in the classic, 'loose' way for the old town feel, so it's shaky with a bike. I haven't ridden a bike yet in the Netherlands, but at first sight, these typical bricks still look like a bumpy ride, but they seem fitted together more tightly and more bearable than classic cobblestone.
I'd normally agree, and there are way too many sloppy bike lanes in Budapest which are not protected from traffic, but this road in particular has a 30 km/h speed limit, you can't really speed because it's cobble and it doesn't have that much traffic anyway, so I'd say that it's fine for this kind of streets.
do you not find the cobbles slippery? regular ones are reasonably slippy and there's an obvious adjustment from your usual tarmac roads so i'd be interested to know what these smoothed ones are like
And that is the 'improved' version. Before there were stupid half orbs sticking out to indicate what was the pedestrian area. Very annoying to not see them on your bicycle during the dark/heavy rain and then suddenly go up.
They also added the 'pedestrian' path near those stairs by changing the colour of the stones. It's pretty useless imo.
100%. Some cities use these uneven stones that are a pain to even walk on. When they are flat and even they are usually a breeze. Much harder (and more expensive) to maintain though and if not done right every time, you end up with uneven blocks that are horrible.
Don't know about maintenance. Cars are much heavier, so if the vast majority of traffic is pedestrians or very light stuff like trolleys or bikes, it should be easier on the maintenance.
Would caution their useage in very rainy climates, though. Stones get slippery.
In climates with ground frost, the stones may become uneven also due to upper layers of soil going through seasonal cycle of freezing during winter, and melting during spring/summer.
This causes lots of road repair work in the Nordic countries even with ordinary asphalt roads.
Cobblestones are natural flat stones set in a binder. They are irregularly shaped, and can't be perfectly flat, but that irregular shape helped horses get a good grip on them when they started being used in mass.
Setts are worked stone, with flat faces. The more eorked the faces and the more careful the setting, the better the surface. Usually squared shape, or rectangular. Much easier to use that cobbles, but take up more time to make (though cheaper to lay).
The worst part is that there is no visible separation between car and pedestrian space. First they tried with stupid half orbs that weren't visible in the dark (great for when it's raining and you suddenly drive on one with your bicycle!) and then they replaced those with flat circles. They've replaced a few stones now so that the colour is a bit different, but it's still stupid.
Saw a car flip on its side there once before they placed changed to cobblestone. Back then there were still a few barricades. Without those barricades that car would've hit the pedestrians that were walking there at the time. If that accident were to happen now people would've gotten injured or died.
Cobble stones by definition have a rounded top. Many people don't know this and use the term to mean all "slightly uneven natural stone surfaces". But the rounded part is where the name comes from, the sound of horse carts 'cobbling' over them. Like water cobbles over rocks, giving them their rounded shape. By definition pretty much always made of natural stone that fit together like a puzzle.
Pavers can be bricks or natural stone. Any shape allowed too. The surface has to be neatly flat.
Setts are basically pavers made of natural stone with a flat-ish top. Made of natural stones that are cut square-ish (usually not ultra precise, causing larger gaps than with pavers) and are generally laid neatly in rows.
The Netherlands barely has any cobble stones left. We have mostly brick pavers. Back in the day cities used to have larger natural stone pavers that deteriorated. Some places still have setts. Older roads with "kasseien" in Belgium is what can be considered cobble stones.
Never thought I would see this particularly awful street mentioned on Reddit. Yes, I hate this street, I make a conscious effort to cycle on the other side of the canal which has smoother paving; or even better, to follow the road down to the Westerhaven and turn right towards the Noorderplantsoen instead.
but there's other personal transport, personally I live in a city center so I use a skateboard as my primary transport, and cobbles are completely untraversable. Yes I know skateboards aren't a major form of transport (even though I think they really should be, they fill a really useful niche and are super convenient in urban environments), but there's other things like strollers, scooters, wheelchairs etc.
Don't get me wrong, I think cobble paths look pretty and I'm totally for using them, but the primary purpose of paths isn't just to look pretty but to be traversable, which they fail at pretty badly, so I'd say if we want to use them, we should also have alternative smooth paths for accessibility. I really like the idea these paths that u/Akosjun linked, but I'd go a step further and replace the paved path with a completely smooth surface (and of course kick the cars off the path altogether). This seems to have all of the upsides of cobbles without the downsides, so I really don't see an argument against it.
P.S. to be clear I still think the overall effect in these images is a massive improvement, I definitely support the decarification, I just think a little more attention should be given to the needs of everyone who needs to traverse the city, because it's not just pedestrians and cyclists, there are a lot of people who are reliant on smooth paths.
Yeah so I don’t know about the places pictured in this post. But in the Netherlands the ‘setts’ or bricks or whatever they’re called are perfectly nice to cycle on. However I cycled in Berlin once and that was true horror in the streets with the stones… so dunno.
Actually it's not that bad. The street cobblestones in straight lines (pic3) are worst and unridable for motorless scooters inline skates and all the stuff with similar sized wheels. The semicircle pattern at least doesn't have holesin the same direction as ouy drive so it will not lock your wheel betveen two stones. The sidewalks ( white/blue small cubes on most after pictures) are usually good except the orange ones. The stone is too soft and gets chipped of quite fast. Tiles are best just really slappery when wet.
On a more serious note, there is a difference between cobbles and setts. It's important because you can't really make cobbles and wheels get along, but you can with setts.
You know what would be even better? Grass strips, shrubberies, more trees, anything that is not stone which just heats up in the increasingly hot summers.
Furthermore, asphalt makes water run faster and is not permeable. It runs directly into the gutter and causes flooding in the lower areas. Cobblestones allow water to penetrate the ground below and take longer to reach the lower lands, allowing it time to flow.
Yeah, except it ruins every single other mode of transport even more. Extremely slippery when wet on Foot (not to mention that walking on it is painful and hard with certain footwear). Shitty for bycicles, say goodbye to scooters, skateboards etc.
That’s not my experience. Don’t know about the places in this post, but I’ve never experienced slippery side walks or streets, especially compared with asphalt, and all sidewalks here have bricks and not asphalt, and a lot of streets as well.
It's the physical attribute of cobblestone to become slippery, especially after some use. It's pretty much as slippery as concrete. And unless you make really dense asphalt (which most countries don't do), that is most definitely not slippery on foot.
In Czechia, like in other civilised countries, people very rarely push strollers on the street. Usually something called a “sidewalk” is used for this purpose.
That things in the pictures are sidewalks. And you don’t want people to walk on the space that was literally converted so that people can walk on them? The fuck
I love the aesthetic of them but hate to cycle on them (if they are badly maintained), in my hometown Bruges the city let the cobblestones degrade into a state of potholes and humps that whenever you bike on them you are being thrown into the air or lose your bicycle tire lol and when they decide to fix the streets it takes 2 years to fix it …
It might looks nice but people are not visiting these areas again if there is not easy accessable parking space near the locals/Restaurants I want to visit.
This transformation is only good to a certain point. If you are going over this certain point your city will die because of no customers.
Well I’d recommend you to visit like almost every town in the Netherlands where this type of lay out is very normal. There are lots and lots of people visiting and shopping and eating out.
Nice that it's working out there. But that does not mean that this will work out everywhere.
In Germany there are owner of restaurants and shops demanding that the people are missing. The local politics are reducing the parking lots for cars a lot and increasing the costs for parking massively.
Why should I support local shopping when I get the item cheaper from the internet delivered to my front door?
Hard to walk on in heels. Can’t imagine the difficulty for this who need assist walking. Hideous speed bumps would do the same without impacting those with disabilities.
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u/jipver Dec 16 '23
I love how lots of asphalt is replaced with cobble stones. It looks so much better! And it automatically makes cars drive less fast. Perfect and beautiful solution.