253: Highway Engineer Pranks
explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
| Highway Engineer Pranks |
 Title text: Prank #11: Boston |
[edit] Explanation
This deviant design given makes the cloverleaf interchange inescapable. The tangled interchange below gives you zero choice; and the unconventional rotary makes all the cars supercollide.
Boston is a (slightly more complicated) prank in itself. A common fiction is that the streets evolved from old cowpaths; but in the 17th century they avoided swamps and marshes and followed shorelines before the original peninsula comprising the city was expanded with landfill in the 19th century. Boston's road infrastructure in general lacks a street grid. On top of that, roads change names and lose and add lanes seemingly at random. Prank #12 is Duckburg.
[edit] Transcript
- [Each panel depicts a highway intersection.]
- The Inescapable Cloverleaf:
- [Roads lead onto the rings for each leaf, but then are trapped in the circles. Minor roads also allow travel between the rings.]
- The Zero-Choice Interchange:
- [On and off-ramps exist, but they lead back to the same lane they disconnected from.]
- The Rotary Supercollider:
- [The roads lead into a traffic circle, and then a loop reverses the direction of flow so all the roads run into each other.]
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