Why is taking a side street called a "rat run"?
I stumbled upon this expression for the first time while doing some research for an answer, and I have to admit I love it! An explanation of rat running/ a rat run is as follows
"Rat running/ A rat run" is the act of taking a detour, often planned, on a smaller and often little known or less traveled street or road. If you are familiar with the layout of an area, rat running can be a good way to avoid the congested main roads. There are some things to keep in mind when determining whether or not to rat run
How well known is it? If I use the expression with my British English friends and relatives will they be familiar with the term? Is it a recent coinage? Is a rat run similar to taking a shortcut?
Can anyone trace its history?
Thanks.
Is a rat run similar to taking a shortcut?
Not really. Quite simply, it is a minor street (let's say: "not supposed, by the authorities, to be used by commuter traffic") that is cleverly / sneakily / craftily / ironically used to avoid being on the "normal" major traffic streets. It would usually be shorter, but may be more circuitous as it avoids traffic.
As John Mee and Erik Kowal have both pointed out, it is a noun.
Josh61 has already posted the correct definition "rat-run: (British) a side street used for fast commuter traffic. A phrase and phenomenon of the late 1980s. link" Another correct definition from the OED, courtesy of Medica "British. informal. A minor, typically residential street used by drivers during peak periods to avoid congestion on main roads: 'our road was used as a rat run between two main roads.'"
How well known is it?
Every person in Britain, especially Londoners, know it.
Note too that the meaning is obvious, rats tend to scurry down pipes, tiny lanes, and gutters in order to avoid populated areas
I have to admit I love it!
It's an exceedingly rich expression so you are very wise to love it. You know how the single worst thing, in the Universe - worse than Nazis, worse than vegetarianism, worse than 5th degree burns, worse than child molestation, worse than politicians, worse than terminal cancer - is Commuting. It rather makes you think of the phrase...
The rat race
and just how the whole situation is unbearably horrible. Traffic in London is a killer: somehow rat run manages to do a number of things at once:
(*) It is rather derogatory towards the "civilians" living on the nice little quiet residential streets. ("Screw those rich bastards with their Balthaup kitchens - to me it's just an ugly pipe like a damned rat would run down. I'll drive on it if I want to! Hah hah! Keep your damned kids inside!")
(*) It anti-enobles the whole entire act - the whole lifestyle - paradigm - milieu - of living and working in London, down to a pointless, animalistic, disease-ridden subconscious scampering: in filth.
(*) For me it really captures the 80s (for some reason it's really like a kind of Brit equivalent to the film "Wall St", you know?): it has a pithy, brutal, self-aware-of-greed-and-pointlessness quality. Quite amazing.
For me personally, it immediately connects with The Stainless Steel Rat dystopian novel by Harry Harrison— commuters in a small way trying to beat the system; hopeless of course, but then we're all just... rats.
Note that as with any issue in the UK, it immediately became a sort of central issue in the overall police-state, authoritarianism, general sort of ongoing social battle. "The man" immediately tried to clamp down on drivers using rat runs, via adding strange bumps on the roads and so on. (In contrast, government-sponsored public transport vehicles such as buses got their own lanes. "Oh, you wanna try using rat runs huh? How's THIS? Stfu and pay taxes" ... sort of thing.)
Here's a poor attempt at indicating a typical London rat-run, but I encourage any real Londoners to click Edit and put in a better one (using AZ rather than the non-British Google.maps!) I wonder if any black cab drivers use this site as a pastime?
Poor example of a rat run. You avoid a very busy intersection by nipping along some residential streets, making as much engine noise as possible to irritate the overseas wealthy.
If I had an OED, I could be more specific, but the phrase rat-run is in the Oxford Online Dictionary:
British informal A minor, typically residential street used by drivers during peak periods to avoid congestion on main roads: 'our road was used as a rat run between two main roads.'
Etymonline lists rat-run from 1870 "in a literal sense", but doesn't give an example of its use other than a mention next to rat race.
An Asperger Dictionary of Everyday Expressions written in 2004 gives the definition (as does The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable of 2006):
A faster route between two points that is circuitous but avoids traffic hold-ups.*
The * denotes a level of impoliteness (I have no idea about the title!)
Finally, and interestingly, rat run is defined in the Spanish, but not the English) Collins:
rat run (Brit) (Aut) calle residencial usada por los conductores para evitar atascos (a residential street user by drivers to evade traffic jams.)
So, it's not a short cut by distance but is by time, and it seems to be better known in Britain than in the US.
I can easily imagine this coming from rat behavior in mazes. A-mazing research, Dr. C. James Goodwin writes (on the importance of rat maze studies:
In his 1937 APA presidential address, the noted neobehaviorist Edward Chace Tolman, PhD, made a startling claim: "Everything important in psychology … can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determinants of rat behavior at a choice-point in a maze."
This venerable tradition might well have it's origin in the Hampton Court Maze built in 1690 just outside London. The first maze study was conducted Willard Small and Linus Klineby (who had just returned from a visit to London in 1890s),two graduate students in psychology. Their 6' x 8' maze was called "the Hampton Court Maze".