Geeking out (transportation edition)

It's weird driving out here.  It feels different.  Part of it is that the roads are flatter and wider.  A lot of this is because it's the Midwest: the land is less hilly, and towns were settled further apart.  It's not just geography though: the date they were settled means they were designed to handle more and larger vehicles.  I'm used to our parkways, designed for turn-of-the-century autos barely breaking 20mph; to Downtown Boston's streets, laid out before 1700; and to layers of history evident in the landscape.  (Yes, any readers from across the pond may laugh at me now.)

Driving up to and from the apartment in our first days here, I found Huron Parkway was a good way to go South or Southwest.  It's a parkway! It's familiar! I'll take it!  Its median is marked "Prairie". Cute!  It also has the cutest pictorial golf-cart signs.*  Best feature: buses are allowed to run along it.  This is helped by it having just one bridge along the length of it. (Obviously not designed by Robert Moses.) Its lanes are huge, it barely has curves or hills. I feel like I'm going soft.

There are Center Turn Lanes everywhere.  You know, left turn in both directions?  They take some getting used to.  And they feel really narrow.  Oh, and
CENTER LANE
   MUST
TURN LEFT
is a really weird sign.

Highways in Michigan have actually gotten with the program and implemented the Clearview font on their highway signs.  Vermont is the only other state I've seen do this so far. It makes me happy -- Highway Gothic's lowercase letters are rubbish.

I can get to a limited access highway in less time than it would take us to get off Tower St some days.  At the same time, I go 10 minutes North and I'm on dirt roads.  The scale is off somehow.

I want to know how road maintenance is funded around here.  Worse winters from what I understand, and much of the state is in fiscal crisis.  But there are new, legible signs at every intersection, and the worst road surface I've seen is better than the average street in Boston.  This could be explained by Washtenaw County (which contains Ann Arbor) being one of the richer counties...but even my trip into decaying Detroit in the spring was over well-maintained roadways.

(Illustrations for this post may, or may not, arrive at a later date.)