the.com/highway
a river of strangers all pretending they aren't terrified of merging.
means A main public road, especially one built for fast through-traffic between towns and cities.
from Plainly literal Old English: 'heah' (high) plus 'weg' (way). The 'high' didn't mean elevated in importance only — many old roads were quite literally built up on raised banks of earth and gravel to stay above the mud and flooding, making them the 'high ways' as opposed to the lowly tracks beside them. The word has carried the sense of 'principal public road' for over a thousand years, long before anyone merged onto anything.
- origin
- Romans paved 250,000 miles to move armies fast
- phantom jams
- traffic stops for no reason, just rippling brake taps
- king's road
- "highway" once meant the monarch's protected route
- length record
- Australia's Highway 1 circles a continent, 9,000 miles
- hypnosis
- long straight stretches literally lull drivers into trances
interstate 95 — runs 1,915 miles from florida to maine, the longest highway on the us east coast
route 66 — historic 2,448-mile highway from chicago to los angeles, established 1926, decommissioned 1985
pan-american highway — world's longest road network spanning 19,000 miles from alaska to argentina