The photo (mainly due to use of the telephoto lens) provides a sort of dense charicature, but the overall look can be found in lots of places. Not the most beautiful aspect of the US, but a reasonable one. We're a huge, sparsely populated country where many people still get around by way of long driving trips. If you've been on the road for eight hours and you and the kids are hangry, often you want some gas and a reliable, safe, familiar meal. Gas stations and fast food chains provide that.

Criticizing these photos is a bit like criticizing a landfill or sewage treatment plant as reflecting on the beauty of an entire area. It's essentially utilitarian infrastructure. It's ugly, sure, but you can't have everything be ivy-covered brick and artisanal bakeries.

Highwayland is the America that connects the other Americas together. It spans the entire continent by itself, but everywhere else is only a short drive from it. No one lives there, but everybody passes through. The interstate highway system didn't create Highwayland, but homogenized and unified it.

Everyone is a little bit comfortable in Highwayland, but also a little bit bored. It has McDonald's, Subway, Taco Bell, a Cracker Barrel, a 4-story 1-corridor hotel with indoor pool and fitness center that offers free copies of USA today in the lobby, a 2-story discount motel where the room doors open to the parking lot, the dine-in restaurant open from 6 to 10, two gas stations or truck stops across the road from each other, each with their own bustling convenience stores that sell sausages, egg rolls, and round tacos that cook on the hot dog roller, with 128-oz fountain drinks, all for $4.

If it were too interesting, people wouldn't want to leave, and the transit dimension would clog up with loiterers and squatters.

You can take a photo of Highwayland from anywhere in Highwayland, and see all the same features, but you can also strike out in a random direction from Highwayland, travel 15 minutes, and find a place unlike anywhere else on Earth, with its own local character that is instantly identifiable to anyone that has ever been there.

Sometimes the local character is strong enough to overwhelm Highwayland, just for a few miles (Highwayland abhors kilometers), and the uniqueness seeps in. Maybe you can see the city skyline, or a university campus, or a hospital. It doesn't happen often, though. Highwayland craves sameness. Mostly, it is the realm of the consistent, the predictable, and the reliable.

Ernst Haas took basically the same picture in New Mexico in the 60's.

https://www.mbphoto.com/artists/167-ernst-haas/series/other-...

Looks a lot less...interesting than the photo.

Does it really have to be so ugly to be functional? This isn't some out of the way piece of infrastructure, these are areas of high traffic density and it is not unreasonable to ask why aesthetic considerations are so universally ignored in these types of areas in this country.

People- interactions- matter more than places do- the happiest family I've ever met lived in a poorer neighborhood and their house was obviously not doing well.

This had its own consequences, which you can see rather clearly in many smaller Western towns that formerly sat on a US Highway. The road through town which served as the highway spawned a great number of restaurants, gas stations, and especially motels. When a freeway was built along the same route as the US highway, it departed the old highway route before and after the town in a curving 'bypass.'

The result was that the businesses in town lost their large pool of customers passing through, and often relocated or went out of business. This manifests throughout the west as a blight of abandoned and run-down motels doomed by the freeway system. You can often see this pattern in cities as well as smaller towns (e.g. Central Ave/historic US 66 in Albuquerque, Powell Blvd/US 26 in Portland). The bypassed highway sections were often, but not always, later signed a "business loops" of the freeway (fwy number on 'transparent' or green freeway shield), a designation which promised that following the road straight on would put you back onto the freeway reasonably promptly, but this did little to help the problem.

And so, new businesses formed along the immediate exit of the freeway, which was at the outskirts of the town since the freeway was placed far enough out to obtain an unimpeded right of way. This has contributed significantly to the loss of the historic cores of towns and even cities, as well as reduced the economic vitality of many of these "truck stop towns."

To a large extent, the freeway system created the modern American roadside stop. But, at the same time, it destroyed a different version of the roadside stop that had thrived before it. Just like the US highways had before it, and the railroads before that, right back to Puebloan trade routes in these parts.

And the answer is no, but it's pretty similar.

>Breezewood is a deliberately awkward transition between Interstate 70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where they (almost) meet. Back in the 1950s, as I-70 was being built, a law prohibited spending federal funds to channel drivers directly from a free road to a toll road. The law was later overturned, but to comply with it, highway planners designed a looping interchange that lets drivers avoid the turnpike if they (hypothetically) want to.

More detail from Wikipedia:

>I-70 uses a surface road (part of US 30) with at-grade intersections to connect the freeway heading south to Hancock, Maryland with the ramp to I-76, which through this section is the Pennsylvania Turnpike toll road. According to the Federal Highway Administration the peculiar arrangement at Breezewood resulted because at the time I-70's toll-free segment was built, the state did not qualify for federal funds under the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 to build a direct interchange, unless it agreed to cease collecting tolls on the Turnpike once the construction bonds were retired;[11] a direct interchange would have meant that a westbound driver on I-70 could not choose between the toll route and a free alternative, but would be forced to enter the Turnpike. However, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission was not willing to build the interchange with its own funds, due to the expected decrease in revenue once Interstate 80 was completed through the state.[11] Accordingly, the state chose to build the unusual Breezewood arrangement in lieu of a direct interchange, thus qualifying for federal funds because this arrangement gave drivers the option of continuing on the untolled US 30.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breezewood,_Pennsylvania#Unusu...

Yay stupid bureaucracy...

If that law didn't exist at the time, I could totally see local politicians and their federal representatives colluding to put revenue-generating toll road segments into the federal highways. I'm not sure why the law was later removed, but maybe once a critical network of free roads was established, it made sense to allow toll road connections for other local highways the feds didn't want to pay for.

The "avoid the turnpike" part refers to the fact that the segment of road in the picture, which has to be traversed to get from the turnpike to I-70 or vice versa, is actually US Route 30, so hypothetically someone coming off I-70 could just stay on that route instead of being "forced" to get onto the turnpike. There are a couple of other interchanges on the PA turnpike that work similarly: the one with I-79 north of Pittsburgh (US 19 is in between) and the one with I-81 at Carlisle (US 11 is in between).

Most freeway interchanges between toll and non-toll highways don't work like that; you just go straight from one to the other.

When I first passed through this place due to work, driving from one work location to another, I stayed the night because I could and "was allowed" [by the job] to break up the drive. It was a nice demarcation; some catching-up on "The Shield" was had.

As jobs and life moved on, since I have some extended family and friends around the Portland area, Grant's Pass remained a demarcation but in different respects: as a boarder-crossing signal, as a sign-post, as a pit-stop as needed whilst I just kept going "straight on 'til morning" [I preferred one long drive back then, can't be sure now for reasons].

I cannot tell you anything particularly special about Grant's Pass other than "it's near the border" and "I-5 goes through it". No offence intended to people living there.

Going south, we'd usually stay in Red Bluff of Redding; going north, Grant's Pass or Roseburg. And, regardless of need for accommodation for the night, these towns (and many others, but these are the largest I remember) offered ample fuel and fast food options.