Welcome to the Roadscapes Wednesday segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Roadscapes Wednesday will feature roads and infrastructure related topics. Geek Alabama Editor / Publisher Nathan Young is often called the “road geek” for a good reason, Nathan loves roads and loves talking about roads!
In Cheyenne, Wyoming, an interstate runs for one mile with five traffic signals on it. Nobody ever upgraded it. Nobody has to.
The blue and red shield is a promise. Twelve-foot lanes. A ten-foot paved shoulder on the right. No crossroads. Nothing waiting at a red light. Ten places on the interstate system keep almost none of it, and every one of them is perfectly legal. This film ranks them by one test only: how much of the federal design book is missing. Age does not count. Neither does how bad a place looks from a dashcam.
The reason sits in one line of regulation. Interstate standards apply to projects, not to roads. Build, rebuild, resurface, restore or rehabilitate, and the book lands on the desk of whoever signs the contract, and any design below standard needs a written exception filed with the Federal Highway Administration. Leave a road alone and nothing in that book touches it. So a crossing opened in 1917, a bridge opened in 1938 and a tunnel opened in 1927 can each carry a federal shield for another century without meeting a single modern line.
The list holds a lift span that stops interstate traffic about two hundred and fifty times a year, a four-lane tunnel under a harbour with no shoulder at all, a tunnel where two road numbers share the same two lanes at forty-five miles an hour, a two-lane international bridge where you pay a toll and stop for customs, three stacked decks in Brooklyn carrying thirteen thousand lorries a day, eight miles of single-lane parkway that Congress exempted by statute in 1973, an interstate with no exits that now ends in a roundabout, and a tube from 1927 with ten-foot lanes that cannot be widened because it is a National Historic Landmark.
Breezewood is left off on purpose, and the film says why in the first two minutes. Nothing here is a mistake, either. Somebody signed off every one of these places, with a reason, a budget and a file, and you will hear the reason each time.
Number one is the only signed interstate route in the country that is not a limited access highway at any point. The Federal Highway Administration rejected its freeway design on the fourteenth of December 1970, then approved the at-grade version four months later, and the shield stayed because federal money had already been spent on the drawings.
Every date, cost and measurement in this film traces to a public record: federal regulation, state transportation files, city reports, court rulings and published toll tables.
Categories: Roadscapes Stuff
