Yes, many Roman roads that survive today have endured some pretty extreme abuse over the years. So to give you a better example I’m going to be talking about streets within Pompeii, since their 79CE status is well preserved for us to analyze. These streets obviously cannot speak for all streets, but are a pretty good representation of city streets of the early Roman Empire. They were built to be water proof (no underground sewer systems so the streets transported storm and waste water throughout the city), and did so by wedging large lava stones together in irregular polygonal shapes. The pavement stones have very little space between them and in general their surfaces are flat. A newly paved Pompeian street would have been rather smooth.

However, in reality, they are riddled with deep rutting which seriously scar the surfaces. Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad, famously remarked:

I wish I knew the name of the last one that held office in Pompeii so that I could give him a blast. I speak with feeling on this subject, because I caught my foot in one of those ruts, and the sadness that came over me when I saw the first poor skeleton, with ashes and lava sticking to it, was tempered by the reflection that may be that party was the Street Commissioner.

Ancient carts did not have soft rubber tires that we use to today—instead they had iron wheels. These wheels were fairly abrasive to the pavement stones and often created deep ruts after extensive use of the roads. These types of ruts are found in many ancient cities and can even be spotted on the via Appia. Most of Pompeii’s streets have some sign of rut wear. In a few areas, these ruts are unbelievably deep, with some cutting over 20 centimeters into the pavement stones. There is evidence of these iron tires wearing down curb stones, guard stones, and other street features as well. These ruts have been fairly well studied and been the basis (and source of heated debate) for city wide traffic analyses. If you are interested in knowing more, I’d highly recommend work by Eric Poehler.

But while rutting may initially seem damaging, that was not always the case. There has been some speculation that ruts in other cities were deliberately cut into the pavement stones to help guide carts away from hitting stepping stones (elevated crosswalks), or other street features.

That being said, Pompeii’s ruts were more of a problem than an aide and the people of Pompeii were trying to remove them. When uncovering Region IV of Pompeii, excavators discovered that a street next to the House of the Faun was in the process of being re-paved. More noticeably now, via della Fortuna, a major east/west road, has direct evidence of re-paving where deep ruts on one pavement stone suddenly vanish from its neighbor. The street alternates in sections of deep rutting and no rutting. You can see areas of repaving in some of the pictures here. In a couple of the deeply rutted sections, there is evidence that the Pompeians filled the ruts with a filler of random trash (broken terracotta, broken marble, pebbles, etc.) and a binding agent. Ancient street maintenance was an on-going endeavor, just like today.

Simply put: the streets in Pompeii were built to be smooth. However, extensive use of carts with abrasive tires damaged the smooth surfaces by creating ruts. The Pompeians tried to repave and fix the damage.

 

Some sources:

Chevallier, Raymond.1976. Roman Roads. Berkley: university of California.

Kaiser, Alan. 2011. Roman Urban Street Networks. Routledge Studies in Archaeology 2. New York: Routledge.

Poehler, Eric E. 2009. “The Organization of Pompeii’s System of Traffic: An Analysis of the Evidence and Its Impact on the Infrastructure, Economic and Urbanism of the Ancient City.” Charlottesville: University of Virginia.

Tsujimura, Sumiyo. 1990. “Ruts in Pompeii- The Traffic System in the Roman City.” Opuscula Pompeiana 1: 58–90.