Free Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

sidelined. If not for roadgeeks, who would appreciate the lowly highway? Mark pauses for a moment in our route to point out the road construction connecting Sprague Avenue to state highway 16; a new westbound viaduct is being built because the unique design of the existing one—four-legged piers, each leg weighing almost four hundred tons—means that it can’t be widened. It’s true: the tapered legs of the old viaduct are quite distinctive, even beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever really looked at the supports of any elevated highway, though I’m sure I’ve driven on thousands.
    Maybe roadgeeks can find something to fascinate them on just about any highway in America, but they also have their own speciallandmarks and pilgrimages. Some of these oddities are so bizarre they’d be spotted even by amateurs like me. There’s the traffic light in Syracuse’s Tipperary Hill where the green signal is on the top (a nod to the neighborhood’s Irish roots). Or 1010th Street west of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, believed to be the nation’s highest-numbered road . Or the strange vortex that is US-321 through Elizabethton , Tennessee—it enters town signed as south–north but reverses the signage when it hits US-19E: now the two directions are north–south, respectively. No matter which way you leave town on US-321, you’re headed south!
    Breezewood, Pennsylvania, an unincorporated hamlet of only two hundred people, is perhaps the most notorious destination. “Most people would say, ‘What’s in Breezewood?’” Mark tells me. “But mention it to a roadgeek, and they’ll shudder.” When I-70 was built through the area, funding disagreements with the Pennsylvania Turn-pike Commission meant that no ramps could be built connecting the new freeway to the turnpike. As a result, there’s still a gap of less than a mile in the freeway there, and drivers on I-70 are puzzled to see traffic signals suddenly appear on the interstate . Local gas stations and fast-food franchises love the anomaly, of course, and have opposed any attempts to build a real interchange. Roadgeeks now use the term “breezewood” to refer to any place where stoplights unexpectedly interrupt highway traffic, and some darkly blame former Pennsylvania congressman Bud Shuster for the original imbroglio. Shuster is still well remembered even in the real world for spearheading an array of pork-barrel transportation projects in his district, but in the road-geek world, he’s a scheming supervillain of Fu Manchu proportions. In 1991, Shuster insisted that a new highway through Altoona be signed as Interstate 99—in violation of national guidelines—despite the fact that it lies between I-79 and I-81. The numbering was out of order ! To roadgeeks, with their sometimes Asperger-like insistence on order and constancy, this was an unforgivable sin.
    But the road buff’s eye for detail often performs a public service as well. We all rely on the design of the nation’s highway system every day, whether we’re commuting to work or buying a head of lettuceshipped to us straight from California on I-80, but how many of us actually follow proposed improvement projects or monitor new road signs to make sure they’re right? Roadgeeks are the only ones writing huffy e-mails to their state transportation departments when they notice confusing signs or misnumbered shields, and time and again, from Kanab, Utah, to Pensacola, Florida, they’ve been pleased to see the errors they reported fixed the next time they’ve driven by. We may not know it, but we are all in their debt.
    The patron saint of these highway watchdogs is Richard Ankrom, an artist fed up with the confusing interchange between the Pasadena Freeway and I-5 near his downtown Los Angeles home. Instead of waiting for the state to replace the unhelpful overhead sign, he conceived of an art installation he called “ Guerrilla Public Service ,” to be performed before an audience of 140,000 motorists every