The Calf Path

The Calf-Path

a poem
by Sam Walter Foss 1852 - 1911

One day through a primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,

And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,

And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ‘twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed – do not laugh –
The first migrations of that calf,

This forest path became a lane,
That bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Suffered by many a poor horse with his load

And thus a century and a half
They trod in the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;

And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;

And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed this zigzag calf about

And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.

They followed still his crooked way.
And lost one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,

And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;

But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf.
Ah, many things this tale might teach --
But then, I am not ordained to preach.

The calf path
in planning of any kind

The calf path is present in all our planning either in that we have to live with structures built by those before us, or that we are conditioned to do things along traditional lines, dont rock the boat, you cant go there, that will cost too much, etc

Every time we dont break from the calf path we entrench old obstacles deeper, and make it more impossible for those after us to do anything about

In this presentation old calf paths are questioned and challenged.

We see implementation of more traffic signals, more slow downs, an abundance of "traffic calming measures" and knee jerk road construction, ie reactionary to, not ahead of, our growth. We do not see that really bold plan that will lead us from stop start driving to continuous flow

Examples that show calf path construction and the effect on traffic flow are central / mill park around uitenhage road and lower mount road, where building construction took place around the wagon trails that forked out towards Bethelsdorp, Uitenhage and Grahamstown 150 years ago.

Anyone who drives in those areas would know the congestion that exists because of stop start driving, due to road layouts unsuited to high levels of traffic.

In our time, in the words of Sam Walter Foss,
each day a hundred thousand cars are led,
along roads trod by cows near two centuries dead

So what
can we do about it

Let us start by doing some "out of the box thinking". There are ways to break the bottlenecks and achieve continous flow. We can get more out of the roads we have at moderate cost. We do not have to build new freeways to make our transportation system more efficient, but we do have to adopt some new rules to keep traffic flowing. Here are some thoughts

An otherwise rectangular building is having a triangular closing end added to maximise space usage between the legs of a now disused fork from the Uitenhage Road. Such construction has entrenched old calf paths.

But one case like this building is not really the issue, the real issue is that continuous building construction is allowed to take place along old narrow routes, with no apparent concern that such routes are becomming constantly more over crowded

An artist for US FHWA shows a map of an old city being drawn back from an ideal layout that would have been more suitable for modern self drive traffic flow. Impossible of course, but let us be aware of how old and modern met and not exacerbate any old calf path planning if we have an opportunity to avoid it

Geometric_design2 european practices (US FHWA)

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The Calf Path

The Calf-Path

The calf path in planning of any kind

So what can we do about it

The calf path
in planning of any kind

So what
can we do about it