The Devil's Roadgeek Dictionary
This is simply a roadgeek glossary inspired by Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary (1911).
- AASHTO
- An agency charged with a biennial review of highway numbering, as well as miscellaneous lesser tasks.
- Alternative
- One of several pretend activities the EPA might require a DOT to contemplate doing instead of its planned project, such as improving a different road or coercing higher bus ridership. However, the "No-Build" alternative is, in certain states, implemented quite often.
- Arizona Highways
- A periodical now true to only half its title, but for history's sake still shelved alongside Public Roads at your university.
- Auxiliary Lane
- An extra passing lane, created for space reasons to the right. Careless passers, however, may find themselves taking an unintended exit.
- Bus
- A transit vehicle that, once a man's income exceeds a certain level, he can never be persuaded to ride.
- Bypass
- A means of spurning yesterday's congestion in favor of today's.
- Carpool
- To share a ride with someone who lives where you do, works where you do, and does not mind stopping by the bank, your child's soccer practice, the dry cleaners, and the gym.
- Cloverleaf
- 1930s An exciting innovation. 1990s An obsolete deathtrap.
- Control City
- A warning; the dire fate awaiting the traveler who does not promptly exit this highway.
- Diamond Interchange
- A low-cost, low-profile facility advocated by manufacturers of traffic signals.
- Elevated Highway
- A facility to preserve right-of-way for a future depressed or tunneled highway.
- EPA Region 1 - New England
- The eye of a needle.
- Expressway
- Eastern U.S. Freeway; Western U.S. Divided highway, access partially controlled
- Freeway, n.
- Western U.S. Divided highway, access fully controlled; Eastern U.S. What they call expressways on "CHiPS".
- Frontage Roads
- A means of crossing Texas without ever getting on a freeway.
- Gore
- A short-term parking area, marked with diagonal lines, where the decision of whether to exit the highway can be made at one's leisure.
- HOV lane
- A special lane requiring each vehicle to have at least two riders. In some locations the minimum is three. After sunset the practical minimum is one.
- Induced Demand
- The tragedy of a highway, once built, being used as intended.
- Metering lights
- The discovery that one can get more drunk without vomiting by sipping one's beer.
- Michigan left
- A maneuver in said state that begins with a 90-degree turn to the right.
- New Jersey Turnpike
- An ingenious thoroughfare familiarizing the traveler with all aspects of the Garden State, so that sweeping generalizations may later be made therefrom.
- No Thru Traffic
- Indicates a convenient shortcut fronting one or more residential properties. Sadly, its destination is usually not documented, and must be discovered empirically.
- Non-Chargeable Interstate Highway
- Part of a longitudinal study of Randian objectivism, namely, whether any city will be special at the time when all are.
- Numbering Rules, Interstate
- A system for the sake of whose consistency the Ohio Turnpike is said to carry Interstates 80, 90, 76, 84, 86, and 88.
- Pork
- A federally funded highway improvement located outside your congressional district.
- Route 66
- America's most prestigious national highway, reaching only halfway across its breadth and missing by a thousand miles its most important city.
- Rural Character
- A non-renewable quality which can be destroyed by adding lanes on a road, but is apparently immune to the retail zoning up and down its length.
- "Slower Traffic Keep Right"
- A saying of uncertain origin, possibly a phonetic translation from an extinct language. Generally acknowledged to have no semantic value.
- Toll
- A fee charged for the privilege of using a highway or crossing. The money collected may fund: bond payoff; construction of another facility; continued operation of the toll authority; the transportation fund; the general fund; or the Mob. A tollgate also accrues goodwill over the years, which may be redeemed in the future by the authority deciding to dismantle it. A tollgate also subdivides the most ideologically pure of the privatization advocates, into those who claim the benefits of a government-subsidized facility free to the public, and those who do not.
- Traffic Calming
- The idea that enraging the motorist will prod him to select a different route.
- Urban Renewal
- The practice of clearing a slum by aiming a freeway at it.
- Variable Message Sign
- A freeway sign with programmable display for the purpose of announcing
sports championship results, missing children, and the benefits of buckling one's
seatbelt.
- Wetland
- Swamp.