Jig Jags

Christ Church 2010 Earthquake Result

To escape once again from the pain of seeing our country squander its hegemony abroad and misappropriate its leadership at home, I descend into an interesting trivial pursuit. This time I would like to deal with what I call “jig jags.” This is my term for abrupt offsets in country roads throughout the United States that were once caused by anomalies in section lines … which occur throughout the Midwestern and Western United States. The reason I know about this is that a friend was almost killed many years ago when, late at night, he missed a jig jag that occurred in his road and flew off into a corn field.

Let me explain. In the early days of automobile travel, roads were often laid out along section lines (“sections” being one-mile square parcels of land ... aggregated into townships ... that were surveyed and memorialized as this country expanded west.) Here follows a quote from Wikipedia on this matter:

In many jurisdictions, roads were run along every section line, giving access to previously remote areas and serving in many instances as firebreaks. A road or arterial in which the centerline is laid out along a section line boundary is often referred to as a section line road or section line arterial.

Unfortunately, perfection seldom occurs in science and surveying and there were many miscues in the process of setting up sections … see the following (again from Wikipedia … italics are mine):

Due to such factors as survey errors, poor instrumentation, difficult terrain, and sloppy work by surveyors, and primarily the curvature of the earth, that is as sections were surveyed from south and east to the north and west the sections got narrower on the north end, being the reason for the errors distributed on the north end of the township, the errors on the west included layout errors also influenced by the compass, or compass based instrument, the primary tool for obtaining direction. it is common for actual sections to differ from the PLSS ideal of one square mile. The distortions and errors were, by design, distributed to the northern and western edges of each township. As a result the sections in these areas diverge the most from the ideal shape and size. In addition there was a need to regularly adjust the entire township grid to account for distortions caused by the curvature of the Earth and the convergence of meridians toward the poles. In places where the grid was corrected, or where two grids based on different principal meridians came together, section shapes are often highly warped. Despite the survey errors and flas [sic], once the grid was established it remained in force mainly because the monuments of the original survey, when recovered, hold legal precedent over subsequent resurveys.

So, often the result of the confluence of these two factors, early country roads often had abrupt jig jags in them … which, I’m certain cause many auto accidents like my friend's. I assume and hope most of these hazards have now long since been smoothed out. But, as we can seen from the New Zealand photo (from reddit) above, Mother Nature again conspires to create road hazards like the ones that once occurred throughout the United States.