I think the inventor played with Legos well past childhood.
They recently re-bricked our burg's downtown pedestrian mall. Brick by brick, each one laid by hand. Took fucking forever, but it looks nice.
The brick street nearest my house has two pairs of giant dips from where the school buses have to stop for the stop sign. The brick has lasted, but the dirt underneath has been moving sideways for a couple of generations.
They're currently de-bricking the main commercial street in downtown New Brunswick. Both the street and the sidewalks were made of bricks, and the sidewalks would get very slippery when it rained. I don't know what the problem was with the street bricks, exactly, but they certainly didn't seem to withstand the amount of traffic they got very well. Now it's asphalt for the street and concrete for the sidewalks, with a little strip of brick connecting the street trees.
with a little strip of brick connecting the street trees.
Brazilian paving?
And... another skilled trade bites the dust and 100,000 experienced road builders have to retrain as help line operators and data input clerks.
10: laying bricks on the road is not a "skilled trade" by any sane definition of the phrase.
12. Yes it is. It requires the same skill level as laying bricks on a wall, always assuming you care whether your road is level, the bricks don't break or come out under pressure of heavy traffic, and that the edges to other surfaces are secure and weatherproof.
Don't be a bloody snob.
I'm not being a snob, but every trade involves some degree of skill and if you use that as the definition then the phrase "skilled trade" becomes meaningless. I've built walls, and roads, and both of them required a bit of skill, but it wasn't one that took a long time to acquire, and I think calling it a skilled trade implies it's in the same bracket as machine tool operating or plumbing, which really do take a while to get good at. I don't think that any job that you can learn to do in a day should be described as a skilled trade.
Plus, look at the link. It doesn't require the same degree of skill as building a wall - for a start, there's no mortar used. It literally is just laying bricks.
Video of the magic machine that laid bricks.
I have a good friend who's a mason. Different jobs require different degrees of skill. Brick laying, especially brick laying without mortar, is among the lowest skill levels of that sort of work. The guys operating that machine or laying bricks directly onto the ground, however, can do so a lot faster and more efficiently that you or I can.
As to the roadway itself, the lack of mortar and the ever expanding market in urban salvage do give me pause regarding its long-term sustainability.
I just can't help thinking of the (possibly apocryphal) story that Haussmann repaved the streets of Paris with flagstones, because cobbles were too convenient for rioters to rip up and throw at mounted troops.
