Word: mile
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...total of seven hours, it becomes a virtual parking lot. The highway, a six-lane stretch of Interstate 93 that snakes through Boston's downtown section from the Massachusetts Turnpike to the Charles River, handles 180,000 automobiles a day -- nearly 2 1/2 times its stated capacity. The two-mile elevated section, built without any shoulders or slowdown and speedup lanes for exits and entrances, has an accident rate that is twice the average for urban highways in the U.S. Next year Massachusetts will begin a ten-year, $4.3 billion project to rebuild and reroute some seven miles of highway...
...building for a long time. (The term gridlock apparently came into common use in New York City during a transit workers' strike in 1980, when a surge of commuter autos paralyzed Manhattan's street grid.) Congestion on two-lane highways in the 1950s hastened construction of the 42,797-mile interstate system, which will be officially completed in 1991 (estimated final cost: $108 billion). But the interstates eased overcrowding only temporarily. Says Transportation Secretary James Burnley: "It's not a problem that will be resolved in a final, permanent way in my lifetime...
...many suburbs, the beltway serves as Main Street, lined with office buildings, shopping complexes and Cineplexes that attract more and more home buyers. The Washington Beltway is a notoriously clogged 64-mile loop that carried an estimated 466,000 vehicles a day in 1976 and now handles 735,000. The average speed for Beltway commuters driving across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge from Virginia suburbs to Maryland communities is currently 23 m.p.h., down from 47 m.p.h...
...magnetic-levitation train, or maglev. Supported and propelled by the force of powerful electromagnets, the streamlined maglev could reach speeds of 300 m.p.h. or more. West Germany and Japan are developing prototypes based on different operating systems. One proposed high-speed maglev route in the U.S. is a 230-mile-long link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a five-hour auto trip that the maglev could cover in about 70 minutes...
...Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway took $2 billion and twelve years to build, but even before the 234-mile-long canal opened in 1985, it became notorious as one of the biggest Government boondoggles of all time. Connecting the Tennessee River with Alabama's Tombigbee River, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile, the waterway was intended to give commercial traffic an alternative route to the Mississippi River. But the Tennessee-Tombigbee quickly proved to be much more popular with pleasure boaters than with shippers, who prefer the Mississippi because it is deeper, wider and has fewer locks...