Thursday, January 17, 2008

Highways

A highway is a most important road within a city, or linking numerous cities together. It has roads known as interstate highway, motorway, freeway and autobahn, where a full description varies by country. In general, a highway is a road which has multiple lanes of traffic in all direction, often with a physical division (median) connecting opposing traffic, and separate access ramps to and from the highway which are more extensively separated than connections on a normal road and are often grade-separated. A highway may prohibit access by pedestrians and limit what vehicles may perhaps travel on it.
In olden times, a highway was any main road traveling a long distance outside of a city. Early roads between cities would at times suffer from highwaymen who would rob people traveling the route. In the 20th century, on the other hand, the word commonly came to be used simply for high-speed, often specially-designed automobile routes. On 10 September 1913, the first paved coast-to-coast highway opened in the US states.
Highways generally have a higher speed limit than other roads for the reason that they have additional lanes and are designed for driving at a higher speed. In distant areas, a highway may have rest areas where motorists may stop and calm down before resuming a long drive. By convention, the lane nearby to the median on a multi-lane highway is called the passing lane. The longest single national highway in the world is the Trans Canada Highway, which goes from Victoria, British Columbia, on the Pacific Coast, through ten states to the Atlantic Coast, at St. John's, the Newfoundland.

No comments: