Year 105, Early Summer · East Workshop
By Tirzah Amanuel
At a Living History table in East Workshop, we unfolded a road map made before the old system ended. Its lines showed several kinds of road. Small streets served homes and shops. Larger roads brought traffic across a town or city. Highways joined cities and regions over long distances.
The highway system was built mainly for motor vehicles. Cars carried individuals and families. Trucks moved food, building materials, and manufactured goods. Buses carried groups of passengers. The largest highways had several lanes in each direction, with ramps and interchanges so vehicles could enter, leave, or cross without stopping.
Those roads did useful work. They helped emergency workers reach people, allowed relatives to visit one another, and moved supplies across large countries. Designing bridges, drainage, pavement, signs, and traffic controls required real skill. Living History should remember that work honestly.
The same network also shaped daily life around heavy traffic. In many places, homes, work, food, and other services were far apart, so people needed a vehicle for ordinary errands. Wide roads divided neighborhoods and animal habitats. Collisions injured and killed people. Engines produced noise and pollution, and the roads required a continual supply of fuel, paving material, and repair work.
After the old system ended, some surviving roads remained useful while people moved supplies, cleared ruins, restored land, and welcomed resurrected neighbors. Useful corridors could be repaired for a time. Others were narrowed, replaced, or allowed to return to the surrounding land. The old highway system itself is now long gone. A surviving section may still be studied, but communities no longer depend on that network.
Paradise has roads and routes, but not one system built around private motor traffic. Local paths connect homes, gardens, workshops, meeting places, and nearby farms. People walk, use bicycles and carts, or take a tram where regular passenger numbers make one useful. Rail carries people and heavy loads over suitable land routes. Boats and ferries serve rivers and coasts. Machines can still carry large loads without determining how every settlement must be arranged.
For longer travel, Bethels help coordinate supplies, schedules, lodging, and connections between regional routes. Permanent bridge-and-causeway routes now connect the major landmasses. The network is earthwide, but each part is built for an actual need and maintained by people who know the place.
The difference is purpose. The old highway system had to support commercial competition, long commutes, and very large numbers of separate vehicles moving at once. Under God's Kingdom, routes can be planned around service, safety, care for the earth, and reasonable access. The fastest route is not automatically the best one, and no community has to surrender large areas of useful land merely to keep traffic moving.
Paul wrote: “Let each one keep seeking, not his own advantage, but that of the other person.” — 1 Corinthians 10:24. That principle gives route planners a practical question. A route must serve the traveler, but it must also consider nearby homes, workers, animals, soil, water, and the people who will maintain it.
We remember the highway system because its workers and engineers solved difficult problems, and because a road network shows what a society expects people to do. Paradise has not forgotten route engineering. It uses that knowledge with different priorities: decide who needs to travel, what must be carried, and what is the smallest safe route that will serve the need well.