Someone once said (it was me) that a truly great world city has a few traits... great parks, beautiful landmarks, progressive people, and too-low-capacity freeways. This is true of Montreal as well, but what it might lack in freeway capacity in makes up for in sheer numbers of them. Here is a little look at some of the views around the city centre, and as always, click the pictures for larger versions. [...]
Quebec City is the capital of Canada's French-speaking Quebec province. The city celebrates its 400th anniversary next year, and has the only city walls in North America north of Mexico that still stand. But how to the freeways stack up? Well, they dont really "stack" but there are quite a few of them for a city of about 750,000. Autoroute 73 forms the main route in from the south, and [...]
US 75 originally connected Canada with the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston. That all changed in 1987 when it was truncated to end in Dallas. South of Dallas, the remaining segments that were not on IH 45 became SH 75. Currently, Texas is updating all of its big green signs in the new (and stupid) Clearview font. On the new signs along IH 45, every mention of SH 75 along [...]
Ahh, Texarkana. They say it is "twice as nice" but it is not "twice as many interstates nice" because I-49 is not here yet. Regardless of your maps, the freeway stretching south of Texarkana is signed only as AR 549. No "Future I-49" signs here, no sir. Here it is, plus some AR 245 goodness. AR 549 is an all concrete facility, with lanes 2×2 but a small [...]
SH 121 connects DFW airport and several large employment areas with Collin County, north of Dallas, TX. Collin County is the fastest growing county in the state and one of the top 5 fastest growing in the nation. As such, SH 121 is undergoing massive traffic strains. 15 years ago it was a bucolic 2 lane rural highway, and today it is a snarly mess with a regional mall on [...]
So, this is the Big Dig: Interstate 93 through the Big Dig We all know about the big dig, and if you don't, you're a terrible roadgeek. The main thrust of the project was to take the ugly central artery and replace it with a tunnel beneath downtown. Where the central artery was, was to become a pretty urban park. Let's see what is going on up [...]
Lets take a look at Mass. Route 2 through north-central Massachusetts. Picture below is the French King bridge. The bridge takes its name from nearby French King Rock, which was in turn named by a French army officer during the French and Indian wars of the eighteenth century. The span opened September 10, 1932. The French King bridge was constructed in 1932 to take Route 2 over the [...]
Let's take a quickie look at SR 146 from Providence, RI up to Worcester Mass. The pictures are from last weekend, when the New England spring was in full swing with budding dogwoods and hordes of people moving to Vermont. Route 146 leaves Providence as a fairly major freeway. The six lanes give way to four just as the northern suburbs are at their peak. Route 146 [...]
Construction on the destroyed US 90 bridge over the mouth of Biloxi Bay is proceeding at a rapid rate. I guess it takes a hurricane to whip the asses of the DOTs into gear. This photo from April of this year shows just how quickly the process is going. It's not China-fast, but in terms of US road construction they are going fairly quickly. AAroads has updated road photos post-Katrina [...]
A while back there was an interesting story http://www.hoosiergazette.com/News/Nov2004/news003.htm in the Hoosier Gazette about a congressman in Indiana who was convinced by religious leaders to change the number of I-69 to something more "moral sounding". The story noted that the congressman wanted to change the number to I-63 past Indianapolis. The article was fictitious satire, but I'm in a mood for a new interstate number. I-69's extension is sometimes called [...]
