Road and Path Maintenance and Regulation

Road Improvement Manual (RIM) was a book describing how roads and paths were to be built and maintained, first published in 1951 and then semi-regularly updated, by the Kien-k'ang Council Roadwork Division. It is the first manual of its kind to be published in Themiclesia, giving general guidance to the construction and maintenance of roads.

The first editions of the Regulation targeted only the road surface itself, but since the 1977 updated it has incorporated underground facilities as well. Since its publication, it has been served as source material for similar manuals published by other civic authorities in Themiclesia.

Background

Kien-k'ang history has resulted in a largely unplanned network of both regulated and unregulated roads that served a city pushing 6 million denizens in 1950. Some roads were laid down by royal decree that are considered to remain in force; others were built under contracts between the civic authority and investors or speculators; still others formed organically, sometimes simply from the "negative space" between private, walled-off areas and other times to provide access to a public or private facility. The maintenance work of this network was hitherto done mostly by individual application to the Kien-k'ang Council, though the central government or private individuals were responsible for the maintenance of specific roads.

With the advent of motor vehicles en masse by 1925, the regulation and maintenance of roads for motor vehicles was acknowledged an eventual necessity, but the outbreak of the Pan-Septentrion War in 1932 caused the City to put the idea on the back burner, instead focusing on civil defence. After the war, the importation of cars was under an enormous, 100% excise as a luxury good, but this tax disappeared in 1952, and cheap foreign cars flooded the city almost overnight.

The arrival of cheap cars elevated novice drivers-cum-commuters to predominance in the driver demographic, over experienced drivers who drove limousines, taxis, or trucks for a living. Amongst the problems immediately emerging were those of driving vehicles into impassable streets, crashing into arcades, and falling into open drains; traffic accidents increased by 232% between 1950 and 1955. The City first blamed the fact that many drivers were novices or from out-of-town, but eventually citizens demanded the government provide a better environment for cars, a demand that underlay the 1957 Road Improvement Programme (RIP) by the Road Improvement Board (RIB).

The Road Improvement Manual (RIM) was therefore intended as a general guide describing the type of road network that the city intended to create via road creation and maintenance.

Road classification

Because the road network was unplanned, many roads had constrictions somewhere along its length so that vehicles could find the road impassable only after entering it, and a convenient exit may not be nearby. To remedy this situation, many citizens posted signs showing the street width at its narrowest point, and such practice was apparently ancient. The RIM stipulated that the City should eventually designate all streets as passable or impassable to vehicles, and especially "no road narrower than 2.8 m shall be deemed passable to vehicles".

The major issue at stake in the early 50s, however, was the issue of priority. The law at the time provided that, unless a road was designated for vehicular running, the right of way is given to pedestrians above vehicles. However, there were only a few roads that were designated for vehicular running

Road and property numbering

While most medieval roads that connected two specific places or those built as malls usually had names, such was not the case for many organic alleys.