For those with more than just a passing interest in roads and highways. Things wrote and said by the online road enthusiast community.
A ghost ramp consists of a closed on or off-ramp that was partially built in anticipation of a future or scuttled highway project or permanently closed due to safety reasons, alignment changes, or to reduce a conflict point.
Road atlases using the Geonova base were a competitor to the long-running Rand McNally Road Atlas. It was published under the National Geographic Atlas banner between 1998 and 2001, and later as the Mapquest.com Road Atlas, Michelin Road Atlas, American Map Company Atlas, and the Barnes & Noble Road Atlas. The artwork base for these atlases was eventually discontinued.
A gantry is a road enthusiast term for an overhead structure on a freeway or expressway that carries guide signs. In highway engineering, this structure is known as a sign bridge. The term is also used formally for all electronic toll (AET) collection points, where an array of transponder readers and cameras are used to levy tolls from a metal truss based structure.
A route is considered clinched when a road enthusiast has driven it from one end to the other. The word stems from professional sports where a team "clinches" its division or conference title. See our list of Clinched Interstates and Jim Teresco's Clinched Highway Mapping for how the concept works.
A roadgeek specific term, a bubble shield is a shield that is characterized by wide, curved lines to make a shield appear almost cartoonish. Interstate and U.S. Highway shields of this nature began appearing in the late 1990s.