Old Urbanist: A History of Street Standards

kenyatta:

One of the interesting things to learn is that the first regulations for very wide streets long predated the automobile, and were in fact a reaction of debatable justifiability to conditions in the mid-19th century English industrial city rather than the spatial needs of the car (those regulations in turn drawing inspiration from the Baroque city planning of the previous two centuries, the aesthetic vision of which was super-human scale designed to awe and impress regardless of cost or utility, often as an expression of the political power of emerging centralized nation-states).

Another point is that the economic wastefulness of the required street standards during the modern suburban expansion was well-known and in fact strongly opposed by the homebuilders of the time, and that it was the crucial linkage of the standards to FHA mortgage qualifications, along with copycat municipal planning standards, that essentially mandated the construction of this costly, inefficient, overscaled and unsafe (due to speeding) form.

Fascinating look at how city streets came to be as wide as they are.