By single track road I mean a road which is only wide enough for one vehicle in total. You can drive both directions, and it has passing places for giving way to vehicles coming the other way. [Something like this](https://www.westend61.de/images/0000437708pw/uk-scotland-achfary-single-track-road-in-highlands-ELF001315.jpg).
I live near a popular tourist route which has some single track roads nearby. American tourists usually think I mean a single carriageway or a one-way road.
How common are single track roads in the US? Do you have a different name for them which people are likely to understand?
40 comments
They are not common, but you may find them in rural areas or near historical bridges.
Even most rural roads will be *just* wide enough for two regular size vehicles to pass.
However bridges on such roads are usually only built with one lane. There will be signs leading up to that say “one lane bridge”.
“One lane road”? You’ll see them in the country sometimes. Usually with a big orange sign that says “one lane road ahead”.
Not common. In my experience, most single lane roads I’ve seen are dirt / gravel roads
Those are not common here. The closest we have that is pretty common, especially in rural areas, is a “two track.”
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/rural-two-track-dirt-road-gm478100524-67559515
These are not maintained roads like a single track often is. They exist only to the extent they are used.
I don’t know of any in the US. That said, there are rural roads in the US that have single lane bridges – need to wait for oncoming traffic to pass before driving across.
An equivalent would be forest service roads which are generally not paved, but gravel or just dirt. They’re not “popular”, they’re very lightly traveled roads.
I grew up in rural Ohio and there were some one-lane bridges but not full roads which were one-lane.
Two-way roads that are paved are almost always wide enough for two cars to pass.
Unpaved, unmaintained roads are very often not.
I’ve never seen one that is paved, however dirt or gravel roads that are only wide enough for one vehicle aren’t uncommon in rural areas.
I have seen a few one lane bridges on paved side roads, but they are not common.
[There is one small bridge that goes over a creek in Noblesville](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0295181,-85.9947837,3a,75y,202.11h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sgpPM13g9W2G_C86-qScKJg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DgpPM13g9W2G_C86-qScKJg%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D202.11092%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) that connects a shopping center to a neighborhood. And that bridge is just a single lane wide. They have a stop light specifically for this bridge that times it so only one way of traffic goes at a time.
That’s the only one I’m aware of in the Indy area.
In parts of the Appalachians some of them mountain roads are only about a car width wide, but still not common. I took my wife across one and I thought she was going to have a heart attack.
I live in the sticks like a very rural area full of them. I just always called these roads backroads. Usually very little police on them.
While they do exist, they’re not common. Even the most rural, middle-of-nowhere roads will usually be just wide enough for 2 cars to pass.
They aren’t common, and many of them aren’t “real” roads. Access roads in parks or forests might be a single lane, for example, or a private road that reaches a couple houses.
More common are one lane bridges on minor roads.
People are saying “just wide enough for two cars.” One thing to remember is that in the US, that means a standard lane width of 3.7m (12ft). So, given that there’s two lanes, a road will typically never be less than 7.4m (24ft) wide, even in heavily rural areas.
Standard lane widths in Europe are 2.5 to 3.5m wide.
The US doesn’t have single track roads pretty much anywhere. I won’t say it’s zero, it’s a big country, but it’s so few that most Americans never encounter them, ever. Our boondocks backwater roads are usually wider than the A highways throughout rural UK.
Those are quite rare. The only ones I have been on here in New Jersey are usually old bridges like [this one](https://steemitimages.com/p/MvwLKy3SfvJwXFKCRMDAFrt961WUiBnRh3kfyZeUN?format=match&mode=fit&width=640)
Never seen one. County roads I grew up on are narrow enough someone’s gotta put tires in the dirt if you pass a full sized truck or an RV or something and are unmarked like that but they’re still two way with just enough room for cars to pass each other.
They’re not nearly as common as in Scotland, where it seems like they’re the tertiary road type after highways and main roads that go through town centers.
Having lived in the UK and travelled extensively across the US, the only paved single track road I can recall driving on was a few sections of the Piilani Highway that goes around the back side of the volcano on Maui. And that’s more like a road that’s ~12 feet wide in places where you just have to squeeze by the car coming the other way.
Not common but they exist. Signage usually reads single lane road.
They aren’t super common but you will find them in rural areas.
There a fair amount of logging roads like that in northern Maine logging roads will have sections with pullouts because big trucks can go by each other the way smaller vehicles could even without a pullout. Some dirt roads are maintained like the one you link but they are usually “just” wide enough for cars to pass opposite each other if they slow down and move over. That’s very common in some rural areas.
There’s even controlled logging roads some places where they schedule when you can go northbound or southbound because they manage the narrow flow for logging trucks.
You will also see “double track” roads. Where it basically two ruts in the dirt.
Single Lane roads exist, but they are not common.
What is common are two lane roads. Around here they are called “County Roads” or “Country Roads” as they are typically in rural areas and are maintained by counties not cities.
I really only see that for private driveways and logging roads (though they’re wider than normal roads). Maybe some trailhead access roads for hiking.
Very very uncommon, the only one I can remember going on was up the side of a mountain going to a campground near Taos NM.
Quite common in the mountains here in Washington. Usually called “Forest Service Roads” around here because the vast majority of them are in the National Forests.
Only time I’ve seen that was for a bridge, and it had a stop sign in front of it. Basically for one at a time, but it’s not common here.
Yeah, I’m from northern Arizona (so in the mountains, not the desert) and we have many roads like this. They were fun to drive on in my jeep as a teen. Hehe
A friend of mine lived on one of those for a while.
To get to him, you have to go off the highway for like an hour, then you turn into the sketchy narrow gravel road that goes through a forest. The passing places had trees separating your side from the other side. He moved there because the rent was cheap, but he moved away because he decided an internet connection was important, and he was too far away from civilization to mooch off of the library or McDonald’s like he does now.
We also went down one to take my brother to boot scout camp once.
You only see these if you’re really in buttfuck nowhere.
A good amount of back roads are effectively single track (need to pull off to let someone pass), but they generally dont have a specific name. A lot of the time they are dirt/gravel.
The phrase single track does exist, mainly for forest biking trails though.
Where I am even most of the country roads are two lanes, especially if they’re paved, but we have a ton of old underpasses for railroad tracks that are one lane only and some bridges are not high enough for larger trucks to pass under. These have signs on either side warning you to slow down or stop signs on either side so people take turns going through.
A couple of things:
The US is vastly, hugely large.
Most of the states are bigger than Scotland.
The US population explosion and development happened after cars existed, so the country is built for and designed around cars.
By sheer number of road miles, there are quite a few one lane roads, and probably more miles of one lane roads than in Scotland, however they are not common and are only found in very sparsely populated areas. So mountainous areas, deserts, forests, some national parks have them.
Closest thing I’ve seen like that is logging roads
I have never seen one.
That’s what we call a dirt road. “Single-track” sounds like racing, and these kinds of roads are definitely not racing tracks. Closest we come to what you’re describing is at one-lane bridges, where you yield to whatever’s coming through before it’s your turn.
Some older towns have narrow streets that may fit your description: cars are parked on both sides and there may be space to swerve if necessary. They can be a real adventure in winter. I call them “lane-and-a-half” streets.
The answers here sure reflect the diversity of the United States. I’ve seen these or their gravel equivalent all over mountain and rural areas out West, but it sounds like they’re rare or close to unheard of in some parts of the country. I’d simply call this a single-lane or one-lane road. If it were just gravel, it’d be called a dirt road.
Most single track roads in my area are logging roads that aren’t paved, up in the mountains. I’ve seen the kinds of roads you’re talking about in Scotland and very few, if any, paved roads of this sort here.
They are pretty rare but do exist. Any road that actually connects two places of any import and especially ones that are worth paving will be a minimum of 24′ wide.
One lane roads tend to be gravel or dirt and used primarily for agriculture access like a logging road or a farm road. Even then, the roads are often wide enough for two regular vehicles to pass (albeit carefully) because they are designed to be wide enough for trucks and or farm equipment to negotiate them.
I live in Boston, and there’s a lot of one way streets with plenty of lanes, and a few one lane streets that are two way.
I saw this written on a sidewalk in Cambridge:
One-Lane Two-Way Street
(AKA Ode to Howard Street)
“Only one car fits down this street
With two permitted, two could meet
So one of the cars, it must defer
Pulling over toward the curb
Moving is only a minor detour
Faith in humanity, thus restored.”
It’s not what you are asking about, but in some of the Northeast, there’s older urban and suburban two-way roads that are really narrow, but they would still be just wide enough for two cars… if they were to disallow parking. On a lot of them, there’s often games of chicken to see who is going to pull over to let the other direction through. What usually happens is either the town starts banning parking or makes one-way systems after many years of people complaining about traffic on side streets… or they ignore it and don’t acknowledge the problem in order to not create a lack of parking.
​
Edit: And to give some form of answer to your question, around the Pine Barrens in New Jersey there are some unpaved and narrow paved roads that could meet the criteria. There’s also roads around the cranberry bogs in the same area that are very narrow compared to normal, though still wide by European standards. There’s also public roads used by tanks from the army training range near there, but they aren’t so much narrow as that the car-traversable width of them is narrow since the tanks rip of the ground. (We lost a front bumper off our car doing a timed rally out there once from all the ruts.)