Don’t you hate misleading headlines? I’m not really revealing a secret because it always hid in plain sight. The information was publicly available as long as one knew where to search for it. I’m talking about a so-called "secret" Interstate highway route that was outed recently by the District Department of Transportation in Washington, DC.
There are a number of secret Interstates. Actually, a more proper name would be "unsigned" Interstates. Lists of them can be found all over the place. I guess if I wanted to get even more technical I should call them unsigned Auxiliary Interstates because they all have 3-digit designations. I’m not a road geek so please forgive my lack of precision. I know this actually matters to some of the 12MC audience.
Lots of sites on the Intertubes insist that there are 21 secret interstate routes without bothering to list them, repeating the mantra verbatim as if it’s fact. The version of the list on Wikipedia includes 14 of them. The most comprehensive list I found (meaning it requiring the least amount of effort using a search engine) is AARoads’ Interstate Guide. This site lists 22. However it includes four roads in Alaska and three in Puerto Rico, not all necessarily built to Interstate standards although they are part of the Interstate Highway system. Yes, I know, let’s try to not get too hung up on Interstates in a state that’s not connected to any other state or to a territory that’s not even a state. Similar issues exist for Hawaii and the District of Columbia. Let’s not take "interstate" too literally.
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Nonetheless, what I’m trying to say (and failing badly) is that there’s one less fewer 
secret Interstate as of December 2011. The District decided to sign I-695.
Well, actually, there is an I-695 in DC and there has been on for a long time. But while residents and commuters are intimately familiar with I-295 and I-395, you can’t blame them for not knowing where I-695 is located; as far as we can tell it was not previously signed although it was shown on some maps. I-695 has been the designation for a portion of the Southeast/Southwest Freeway, beginning where I-395 enters the Third Street Tunnel and extending to the northern side of the 11th Street Bridge, a grand total of 1.4 miles
Secret Interstates exist for lots of reasons. The most common cause is that they already had a well-established name when they were upgraded to Interstate status. I’m not going to talk about every instance –you are free to peruse the lists yourself — but I will select a few of my favorites.
Maryland Interstate 595
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I’ve driven Maryland I-595 probably a hundred times. Anyone heading away from Washington, DC for a weekend at the nearest beach likely does the same. Growing up, I’d always thought of it as Route 50. Others call it the John Hanson Highway. It was a pretty difficult drive back then. Maryland upgraded the section from the Capital Beltway to Annapolis to Interstate standards in the 1990’s. They didn’t change the name because everyone, myself included, already believed it had a perfectly acceptable name. Nobody calls it I-595.
This road has the distinction of being the longest unsigned Interstate, extending nearly twenty miles.
New York Interstate 478
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I like New York I-478 because it’s mostly underwater. Most everyone calls it the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel (although Google Maps seems to like I-478). The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says that "When the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel opened in 1950, it was the longest continuous underwater vehicular tunnel in North America. It still is." Drivers cross beneath the East River and Governors Island nearly two miles as they travel between Long Island and Manhattan. They get to pay $6.50 for the privilege too, if using cash.
Louisiana Interstate I-910
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Louisiana chose to designate I-910 as Business Route 90, extending from New Orleans to Westwego in Jefferson Parish. I like this one because it crosses the Mississippi River on the Crescent City Connection, subjecting drivers to the geo-oddity I described in, "Where West is East." Louisiana does have a bit of an ulterior motive. They envision I-910 as part of a future extension of Interstate 49 that will stretch from here to Lafayette. Why rename it when it’s going to change anyway?
I’m in New Orleans, Louisiana this week. Unfortunately I’m not here for a family visit this time, but purely for business. That means I haven’t had much of an opportunity to get out into the city. I’m spending long days in a hotel meeting room during the day and then more hours in the evening catching-up with all my other work that continued to collect during daylight hours. I do manage to get out for a little while at points during the day and evening so don’t feel too sorry for me:
See, here’s an instance where I found time to grab lunch along the Mississippi River at the Riverwalk Marketplace and got to watch barges and the Algiers Ferry pass hypnotically for about an hour. I’ve taken a ride on that ferry before but today I’ll have to be content to be a spectator.
The bridge in the distance is the Crescent City Connection that leads to one of my favorite geo-oddities and trivia questions, where west is east. I have fond memories of many places in New Orleans from the dozens of times I’ve returned here but not the memories of a typical tourist, albeit I have a few of those from days when I was younger and more rambunctious. I’m too old to deal with hurricane hangovers anymore.
Oh, and to the person who turned off the heat in New Orleans: please flip the switch back on. I didn’t come all the way down south to experience temperatures barely above freezing. I can get plenty of that back home. Thank you.
I’ve noticed a wonderful development during this trip. My employer has finally rolled out a completely-functioning and integrated Voice over IP network throughout our organization. We’ve at long last hit a tipping point — probably something you experienced years ago but my employer is a bit behind the times so please bear with me — and literally it no longer matters where I sit physically to do my job. We’re already teleworking regularly and it’s only It’s only a matter of time before they take that next logical step and close those redundant office buildings.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve been very close to that standard for a long time, but the final tools have been turned on and my laptop completely replicates my office setup in every respect and detail. Nobody can tell if I’m sitting in my office or at home or in a hotel, or on the dark side of the moon. It’s completely invisible. Most of my peers work hundreds of miles away as do most of my direct reports. It’s still important to get together face-to-face occasionally to hash out important issues and develop personal working relationships, which is why we’re in New Orleans this week, but that’s just one of many tools available to make an organization run.
That’s what I mean when I say that geography has collapsed. It still has all of its original glorious meaning for every other purpose in my life, but no longer for my employment situation.
My grand plan has long been to someday sell my house, buy a bus-sized recreational vehicle, and county-count until I collect them all. What has changed is that I wouldn’t even have to quit my job to do that. I’d just need a laptop and wireless Internet connectivity — which I already have! Now I just need to convince my wife to go along with the plan. That, unfortunately, is where the strategy comes to a screeching halt. At least for now…
It’s only a matter of time.
I’ve been on the road these last few days, at present in New Orleans, Louisiana. During this outing I’ve managed to collect another Strange Geography sighting and I would like to give the regular readers of Twelve Mile Circle a little preview of what I’ll be adding to my more comprehensive website in the coming days.
There is a section of New Orleans known as the west bank. It’s a designation that refers to land located west of the Mississippi River, the lifeblood of this riverport city. In the United States the Mississippi often serves as a pseudo-cultural divide between the eastern portion of the country and the western, much as the Mason-Dixon Line mentally splits it from north from south. In New Orleans the river takes on an additional significance. The older settlement sits east of the Mississippi and is considered by many residents to be a more prestigious address.
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There’s one very unusual feature (and I provided a little foreshadowing on my recent South of Detroit entry). The west bank is actually EAST of the city. Notice the marker I’ve placed on historic Algiers Point, the oldest section of New Orleans located on the west bank. It was settled as early as 1719 although not intensively so until the 19th Century. Clearly it is to the east. Now use the map controls to zoom out from this location. While the Mississippi River generally flows towards the south, notice that when it gets to New Orleans it’s running in an eastern direction with lots of twists and turns. One of those curves happens to occur right at the point where the French Quarter and Algiers line up on opposite banks of the river. So here, the western shore of the Mississippi is actually east of the eastern shore.
The Crescent City Connection is the name of two steel truss cantilever bridges that carry U.S. Route 90 between the New Orleans central business district and the west bank. They run almost exactly east – west. The west bank sign marking the approach to the Crescent City Connection can be quite disconcerting if one is not familiar with the odd geographic anomaly that goes along with the moniker.
There is even a more scenic way to travel to the west bank however, by using a free ferry service departing from the base of Canal Street. I took this photograph as we crossed the Mississippi by boat. The famous St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square is the building with the three spires on the right side of the photo. The ferry provided perhaps the most magnificent views of the city from any location.
Indeed, east is west and west is east in New Orleans, and experiencing it first hand is half the fun for a geography fan.
