These photos of freeway spaghetti junctions are oddly mesmerizing
Knotty transportation on the road to everywhere
The interchanges and access points of freeways and highways are not the sexiest of urban spaces. They don’t have the verdancy of parks or the urgency of bike lanes. None inspire like a rooftop vista. But these junctions are central to the life of cities.
Some crossroads have cute nicknames: Birmingham’s “Spaghetti Junction,” the “Mouse Trap” in Denver, San Francisco’s “Hair Ball.” Most are innocuous tangles of infrastructure built for efficiency in the moment, often failing to keep pace with the growth of the cities they help propel. Freeways can be balkanizing even as they keep us moving.
The first freeways—or controlled-access highways—were built in Europe, in Italy (1924), followed by the German autobahn system in the 1930s, constructed in anticipation of WWII. New York City had parkways starting in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until President Eisenhower initiated the interstate highway system in 1956 that freeways, and the freedom of movement they facilitate, began having a signifiant effect. Speedier transport meant perishable goods could be shipped further and faster, while industries could locate for reasons other than proximity to market. With reliance on coastal access waning, the freeway system also contributed to the development of interior cities and rural areas. Today, if freeways embody what’s most liberating about car ownership and the open road, the places where they connect and diverge represent contingencies on the road to everywhere.
Like the debate over ships and boats, the difference between a freeway and a highway can be difficult to parse. As a rule of thumb, all freeways are highways, but not all highways are free (the term “highway” itself only denotes a contrast to “waterway”). The important distinction concerns access and flow. Freeways regulate both by controlling entry and exit points, erecting dividers between opposing traffic lanes, and grading all intersections with the use of under/over passes and tunnels. In this sense freeways are the automobile’s ideal environment. A closed course for pushing one’s vehicle to its mechanical limits. After all, there is little romance in stopping for a red light.
Topographical photographs of traffic interchanges can be at once beautiful and intimidating, brutal and banal. Commuters may experience the prick of past trauma—pedestrians a sense of calm—as ribbons of pavement correlate and meander past, through, and between each other like computer circuitry. Here roads collide, tangled in a kind of dance, finding a hurried unity before heading out in their own directions once again.
