Biking on the freeway

When I was a kid I was fascinated by freeways. I used to create these really complicated maps of freeway interchanges and freeway systems, which probably would have been a huge headache for people to try to navigate in real life. Occasionally I built road systems out of pieces of wood. At one point I decided that when I grew up I was going to live in a house in the middle of a particular freeway interchange along the Ohio Turnpike. I just remembered that now. I wonder if I could actually do that.

I also had a fascination with the streetlights along freeways (and to a lesser extent streetlights in general) and the variations among streetlights in different locales. When my family vacationed in another city the most anticipated thing for me would be the freeways and the local streetlight design. For awhile after I graduated from college I planned to be a truck driver. As a small child my favorite streetlights were the assymetric ones found along the I-75 median; I thought these were hilarious. There were some of these downriver just before the lights end, but later I was happy to find that a few were put up at the M-10 intersection; the latter were quite close to where I've been biking.

A Google search of "freeway fetish" turns up mostly porn (conventional, no freeway porn) and condemnations of American car addiction. Here's one summary: "The California automotive fetish had resulted, locally, in the planning of an extensive freeway network, which included I-480, an unsightly and obstructive..." Unsightly in whose eyes? I bet it's gorgeous. I have a friend who's involved in activism against the new I-69. I'm 2/3 as liberal as him but in this case I'm secretly rooting for the freeway.

This is all by way of explaining why I got excited when I biked past an I-75 exit ramp yesterday and noticed that I-75 had been closed and you could just bike down the exit ramp. I biked the length of the closed off section and explored the I-75 / I-96 interchange. This is one of the more interesting interchanges in the Detroit area; I think only the I-696/M-10/US-24 and I-696/I-275/M-5/I-96 interchanges are cooler. What's unique about it is the half mile where I-96 and I-75 run parallel, interlocked with each other. A daring idea.

Unfortunately the interchange ramps, which I had been anticipating biking on most strongly, were under construction and unbikable. Also my stupid "smartphone" won't talk to my stupid PC to transfer the photos I took. So I'll be returning. Still, it was pretty cool just to bike down the center of the freeway all by myself, with the cranes towering all around.