Red brick streets.

[Walden]

Growing up in rural and small town Oklahoma, I saw, rode on, walked on, or drove on, quite a few brick streets. There are lots of them in towns and cities across America, but in many cases they have been blacktopped over.

Here's an article from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/200 ... oads_x.htm

[Doug_Tipple]

We have several brick streets in my neighborhood and also in downtown Lafayette. The article says that the brick streets tend to slow traffic down. I'll agree with that. Brick streets are flat when you lay them, but they don't stay that way for long. A few winter's freezing and thawing and you have bumps and dips everywhere. I know where the dips are, so I'm already slowed down in preparation. I think that brick streets are beautiful, but I would rather drive on a smooth asphalt street, especially with a bicycle.

[SteveShaw]

What about this then - I lived in a cobbled street like this in the north of England (but nowhere near as posh!) until I was 10. This one's in Holmfirth in Yorkshire, about three miles from where my sister lives. It's the little town that was the location for the sitcom "Last of the Summer Wine."

Steve

[emmline]

I was all set to mention how Annapolis had been uncovering streets in the past decade or so--and there it is, right in the first photo.

[Mitch]

Cobbled streets is a sign of peace and prosperity. At other times the cobbles find other uses.

[djm]

I'm not so sure it has to be all that bad. Certainly the weight of large trucks can cause problems, but there are so mnay people with brick laneways that new methods for packing the bricks have shown that, with a proper base, bricks don't necessarily mean the raods are going to get all humpy any time soon. Aesthetically, I would go with the bricks any day.

djm

[Lambchop]

Bricks are great! They're a lot better than asphalt because they don't melt.

I drive to and from work on a several-mile-long, tree-shaded, 4-lane, sinuous brick avenue. I can go another route, but I'd rather spend my commute, which is admittedly not very long, somewhere nice.

St. Petersburg has another unusual street type . . . pink concrete. One entire neighborhood of lovely old homes at the southernmost tip is entirely paved in it.

[DCrom]

There's a whole section of US 395 ("North" - actually north-west - from Reno, Nevada to Susanville, California) that has red asphalt because it was paved using red volcanic cinders. It made quite an impression on me the first time I drove it, over 30 years back.

Brick - or cobblestone - streets aren't too common in California. But we have our own oddities. I understand that back in the early days, when paving roads was still an item hotly debated (driven as much by bicyclists as cars), the state allocated the money to pave a few miles as an expirement. So the grant money was used to pave every OTHER mile on the selected roads. A mile of good pavement, a mile of rutted dirt, a mile of good pavement . . . They soon allocated funds to pave the rest.

[fel bautista]

brick streets-Pave, as the French call them-make for some of the best bicycle racing in the world-Paris Roubaix. It beats you up, but there is some wierd zen thing when you ride hard over those kind of surfaces, you feel elated...

my $0.02

I found some close by in Claremont, CA-my cycling buddies think I'm nuts

[Jack]

I've been on one recently, but I can't remember where.

[Charlene]

There are a few streets in Spokane that still have the original brick paving from the early 1900s. And a few more places where the blacktop has broken up and you can see the bricks. The brick streets are smoother than the paved streets which are full of potholes.

[Daniel_Bingamon]

It would be nice if our road was brick, maybe it would slow down the speeders.

Oxford Ohio, home of Miami University has brick roads.

[Congratulations]

I live in Charleston, SC, so there are a few cobbled streets around. But mostly they've done the crosswalks around here in bricks. It's very interesting to drive over.

There's also a lot of "wharfs" around that are sort of cobbled with very large, round stones. I don't think you're supposed to drive on them. At least, I would be hesitant to.

[SteveShaw]

Bricks are great! They're a lot better than asphalt because they don't melt.

Not a frequent problem in north-west England . Though, mysteriously, when I was a little boy playing in the cobbled street outside my house, I'd notice that on hot days a thick, black tarry goo would ooze up from below the cobbles, and if you got any of it on your clothes or hands you'd get shouted at.

Steve

[Flyingcursor]

Kalamazoo still has many brick roads. None of them yellow. When they turned the downtown outdoor mall into a driving street they put down brick.