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“You can't take highways during the apocalypse, because they'll be packed with panicky people.”
― J. Cornell Michel, Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution

“I have never wanted to punch a highway in the face as badly as I do right now.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sparrow Hill Road

“Faster is fatal, slower is safe.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Explore often. Only when you will know how small you are and how big the world is.”
― Pradeepa Pandiyan

“What is the American fetish about highways?
They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.
Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.
But what is after them?
They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress.”
― Ishmael Reed

“They leave the insistent monotony of the interstate for more reasonable roads. While the former slices its path through entire states, peppering them with exit signs and mile markers, these lesser cousins of the grand highways keep their manners intact, clinging gently to the hemlines of all but the most obstinate geological points of interest. Charming and sometimes a bit frightening, their paths are as unpredictable and winding as a little boy's route home from school.”
― Kimberly Morgan, On Angels and Rabbit Holes

“In my own mind I find that I can also classify highways advantageously as dominating, equal, or dominated. A dominating highway is one from which, as you drive along it, you are more conscious of the highway than of the country through which you are passing. Six-lane highways, and four-lane highways, particularly in flat country, give this impression. You see the highway itself, the traffic upon it, and the life that has grown up along it and is dependent upon it—all the world of service-stations and garages and restaurants and motor-courts.
To many people, of whom I am one, parkways produce the same effect. Although esthetically beautiful, the artificial landscape on both sides of the parkway becomes part of the road itself, and is divorced from the countryside and from reality. The parkway by-passes towns, and therefore the motorist has no sense of actuality. A parkway is excellent at providing unimpeded transportation, and for allowing the city-dweller his escape, but when you drive along the parkway, you are not seeing the real United States of America.
The dominated highway, on the contrary, is one which seems to be oppressed and to lose its own identity because of the surroundings through which it is passing. Highways are dominated when they pass along city streets. There is too much close by on either hand. There is too much local traffic that has not the slightest concern with the farther reaches of the highway. On the other hand, highways may be dominated when they are comparatively small roads passing through high mountains or vast plains. Again the highway becomes insignificant, and one's interest is pulled outward, away from it.
In between, lies the equal highway, that one which seems to be an intimate and integral part of the countryside through which it is passing. On such a road there is a division of interest between one's focus upon the highway and its margin and upon the country back from the highway. . . .”
― George R. Stewart, U.S. 40: Cross Section of The United States of America

“We shall overcome every barrier by divine grace.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“One way to get up-to-date travel information while driving in the South is to install a citizens band, or CB, radio into your car.
…truckers devised their own radio dialect based on jargon filtered down from military, aviation and law enforcement radio protocols. A basic understanding of on-air etiquette and terminology is essential for those wishing to join in the conversations…might include an exchange like this (with translations):
Break one-nine. (Please, gentlemen, might I break in on this conversation? [on channel 19])
Go ahead, breaker. (Oh, by all means.)
Hey J.B., you got your ears on? (You, sir, driving the J.B. Hunt truck, are you listening to your CB radio?)
Ten-four. (Yes.).
“Can I get a bear report?� (Are there any police behind you?)
“Yeah, that town up ahead of you is crawling with local yokels.� (The town I just left has a number of municipal police looking for speeders.)
…For an average motorist, tuning a CB radio to channel 19 for the first time is like being cured of life-long deafness â€� provided there are truckers nearby. The big rigs that loomed large and soulless suddenly have personalities emanating from them. Truckers with similar destinations will keep each other awake for hundreds of miles at a stretch, chatting about politics, religion, sex, sports, and working conditions. This provides hours of entertainment for those listeners who can penetrate the jargon and rich accents.”
― Gary Bridgman, Lonely Planet Louisiana & the Deep South

“Ruling Venezuela as the unelected military strongman from 1948 to 1950 and as President from 1952 to 1958. The President of Venezuela was Marcos Pérez Jiménez, a Venezuelan General, who also considered himself to be a civil engineer. He spent much of the country’s oil profits modernizing the infrastructure, including the construction of the new Caracas to La Guaira highway. The new road was terribly expensive requiring bridges and tunnels. Two tunnels alone cost $20,000,000 and nearly broke the State Treasury, but the road was completed in 1953, just in time for me to ride on it up the mountains to Caracas. The old taxi went uphill at very steep angles, reaching an altitude of 7,400 feet before dipping back down into the city. Looking into the deep ravines next to what had been the old road, I could see wrecks of the vehicles that were unlucky enough to have gone off the road. Finally crossing the top of the Coastal ridge, we followed the winding road down into the extinct volcanic basin that housed the capital city. As we got closer to the downtown district, I noticed that the Guardia National police were everywhere! The traffic was horrendous and there was a layer of smog in the valley, but everything was reasonably quiet except for loud banging sounds. Since there was a noise ordinance in Caracas, cars were not permitted to blow their horns. Instead, the cabdrivers banged the side of their car door with their hand.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Salty & Saucy Maine"

“Florida is full of long-range, unending road jobs that break the backs, pocketbooks, and hearts of the roadside business. The primitive, inefficient, childlike Mexicans somehow manage to survey, engineer, and complete eighty miles of high-speed divided highway through raw mountains and across raging torrents in six months. But the big highway contractors in Florida take a year and a half turning fifteen miles of two-lane road across absolutely flat country into four-lane divided highway.
The difference is in American know-how. It's know-how in the tax problems, and how to solve them. The State Road Department says a half-year contract will cost the State ten million, and a one-year contract will cost nine, and a year-and-a-half deadline will go for eight. Then Doakes can take on three or four big jobs simultaneously, and lease the equipment from a captive corporation. and listlessly move the equipment from job to job, and spread it out to gain the biggest profit. The only signs of frantic activity can be two or three men with cement brooms who look at first like scarecrows but, when watched carefully, can be perceived to move, much like the minute hand on a clock.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“...America was supposed to be a place ruined and homogenized by highways, that that was its unique character, crass and vulgar sameness.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Although a new highway program was politically very contentious, President Eisenhower appointed an advisory committee of executives linked to General Motors, Bechtel engineering, the trucking lobby, and the Teamsters Union (to which truckers belonged) to negotiate the various special interests involved.In 1956 Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act providing for 42,500 miles of a 'National System of Interstate and Defense Highways' across the country at an estimated cost of $27 billion. . . . Journalist Helen Leavitt thought that Congress had been bought and bullied. In her brilliant book Superhighway--Superhoax, she noted that there was no real concern for national defense, since overpasses designed for fourteen-foot vertical clearance were too low to permit the passage of many Army, Navy, and Air Force weapons loaded on transporters, including Atlas missiles. The highway builds had never even consulted the Defense Department.”
― Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000

“Rather than create a city where all residents would be within walking distance of rapid transit services, officials built one where all residents would be within a short drive from a highway.”
― Philip Mark Plotch, Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City

“[Onto the highway] the milky stares darted along the interstate, southward bound. Past black tar wriggling with mirages of colonial gunpowder. Past old lynching forests where the trees had doubled over, as if to keep a man's feet on the ground. Past hand-hewn crosses beside dented guardrails and bicycles painted white, their wheels eternally spinning. Past endless remembering, warping the road. The highway, a cemetery for the lost and restless. A memorial. A circulatory system running through a nation.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot