The Terminus

When a really long road ends, why don’t we do more to celebrate the staggering amount of collective work that went into it? The ancient Romans really outclassed the federal highway system on this front.Today in Tedium: What does it mean for a road to end? Particularly, a big, imposing one that represents an essential connection for millions of people across an entire country? Often, major highways take up massive numbers of lanes, become both the primary path and bottleneck through which people travel. But that’s usually in the middle. Often the terminus of a big road, no matter how important or influential it is, can be anticlimactic in nature. One that comes to mind for me is the end of Interstate 64, a road that starts near the St. Louis area and goes all the way to Virginia, where it absolutely dominates the Hampton Roads area. But then, somewhere in Chesapeake, it just stops at a spot called the Bowers Hill Interchange, where it splits off into three separate interstates:…