WORLD'S WIDEST STREET

Evening Star, Issue 18160, 28 December 1922, Page 1

WORLD'S WIDEST STREET

• -4* IS IT STURT STREET. BALLARAT? Which is i/ho world's widest street ! Bulawayo’s allowance of 140 ft may seem generous to dwellers in old-world cities, Sut those familiar with the ambitious, ephemeral “towns” of the dominions must remember streets far wider (says Mr E. C. Buley, an Australian writer, in the ‘ Daily Mail ’). The dominion town-planner, especially when he happens to be of British birth, invariably sketches his main street on a grandiose scale. He allows plenty of room for the traffic of the city with a' million population, which ho has in hia magnificent mind. One of the widest streets in the world, if not the very widest, is Sturt street, the main thoroughfare of the once famous gold mining city of Ballarat, in Australia. Its width is some multiple of the length of a cricket pitch, either 66yds or 88yds. In any case, the generous allowance, even in the heyday of mining prosperity, defeated one df the main purposes lor which business streets are presumably planned. Business on one side of the street did not stimulate trade on the other. The city fathers, apparently realising this, planted an avenue of oaks and eucalyptus along the centre of the street, and provided green lawns, flower beds, and band stands as further decorations. To-day the oaks and eucalyptus form a noble and unique avenue, but they have divided the main street into two onesided thoroughfares, with tramway lines running along both, and a tradesman’s tradition of “No connection with the parties opposite.” I have the word of James Oddie, one of the men who helped to shape Ballarat in 1851, the year of the gold discoveries, that the city owes its possession of one of the widest streets in the world to a curious circumstance. “ Of course the street is too wide,” he said, impatiently. “We knew that at the time. But what could we do? In those days all stores carno from the seaboard in bullock drays, and the roads were so bad that the smallest bullock team numbered twenty-four animals. We had to provide a street which would allow a bullock team to turn. So there you are.”