Hello:
I have been following this forum off and on and finally decided to join. I have long been fascinated with highways (and railroads, ports and airports).
I am an American ex-pat living in Belgium, near the Walloon town of Enghien, but I actually live in Flanders. Prior to that I lived in Germany, so I have some exposure to Belgian, Dutch, German, French, and UK highways, but despite the much longer history of roads in Europe (Celtic or Roman roads that are now superhighways) or the glamor that surrounds the no speed limit segments of heavily travelled Autobahnen, I still find that American roads make the biggest impression on me. I will be moving back to the USA (to Virginia) in May, so I plan on taking a lot of road trips throughout the Northeast and the Midwest while I am there.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and have lived there most of my life, on both sides of the mountains in Washington, but also just across the border in Oregon (Portland) and Idaho (Bonners Ferry and Moscow) so I am most familiar with roads like I-5, I-90, I-82, and I-84, US 95, US 195, US 395, US 2, US 101, etc. Moving to Virginia will expose me to East Coast highways.
The fictional highways topic is particularly interesting because I find myself wondering why the US Government (specifically AASHTO) had the gall to decommission a legendary road like US 66 and replace it with several different interstates (55, 44, 40 and either 10 or 210) and then reuse that number as an essentially intrastate stub that connects DC to I-81, far from the original US 66 route. I don't have a problem with upgrading or realigning an out of date design, like upgrading two lanes to four lanes and/or adding interchanges or creating bypasses and then transferring the route to the new alignment (I'm not that much of a purist), but why discard already established routes?