Interchange tiles by Jess Giffin & Jim TerMeer

From an essay called “The Post-Carbon Highway,” by Geoffrey Thun and Kathy Velikov, in a jam-packed little book called Fuel, I just came across this interesting nugget, about the 401 highway in Toronto: “There are approximately 160 off-ramp interchanges along the 401. In total, approximately 8000 acres of land is underutilized as a result of its spatial isolation by the interchange configuration.”

Ever since J.G. Ballard’s novel Concrete Island, in which a man crashes and is stranded in an urban highway interchange, I’ve been fascinated by these dead zones, huge swaths of territory that we blindly whisk past. Thun and Velikov have their own ideas of what to do with them, but a few other ideas: Plant victory gardens of ethanol producing corn. Install turbines that capture the air generated by exiting vehicles. Put versions of Robert Smithson’s land-art sculpture the “Spiral Jetty” insider their clover-leaf loops. And didja know, by the way, that the weird little triangular bit of space between the highway and the off-ramp is called, rather ominously, the “gore area.” (nothing to do with crashes, but still…)

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Roads, Traffic Wonkery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.