Word: highway
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...seat-of-the-pants introduction to America's highway misery, try rattling down the joint-jangling Southwest Freeway in the shadow of the Washington Monument. On this long-neglected strip of pavement, a washboard ripple effect experts call rutting jiggles the front wheels into a dervish dance. Farther along in a newly rebuilt section, potholes already lurk, like so many blacktop booby traps...
America's road system is a marvel and a mess. With 3.9 million miles of highways and roads, many of them built in the asphalt rush of the 1950s, it is by far the world's biggest system. Ninety percent of all U.S. travel occurs on highways, and three-quarters of all domestic goods are shipped by road. No stretches are busier than the 1.2 million miles of interstate and other major highways. And yet, despite the $28 billion spent each year on maintenance and construction, the Federal Highway Administration admits that 52% of these thoroughfares are in miserable condition...
...Highway experts often blame such conditions on the unexpectedly heavy pounding delivered by American traffic, especially from behemoth 18-wheelers. Many U.S. roadways carry three or even four times their design weights. "Nobody in their wildest imagination predicted these load factors," says federal highway administrator Thomas Larson...
...pathways bringing the country into the city, there is a web of urban corridors in which the city seeps out into the country. Rt. 135 is a good example of this strip development. A block or two away you find secluded one-acre plots, but along this two-lane highway you can measure your progress by counting the arcaded shopping malls...
...edge of Salem was humming. Not long ago, Larimer wrote in the Washington Post about driving east from St. Louis and rarely being far from the sight of a Wal-Mart. He felt engulfed in a new culture reaching from horizon to horizon. "If I had kept driving on Highway 50, the same road that eventually runs through Maryland to Easton, I would have passed more Wal-Marts, in Illinois towns like Flora, Olney and Lawrenceville. Each its own town, not so long ago; now they scarcely seem distinguishable. All Wal-Mart towns...