State highways, Google Maps, and Place

I frequent Illinois’ east-west corridor of Interstate 88 with a certain degree of frequency.

My spatial sense of the route has been shaped by maps (mostly Google), perhaps in significantly greater proportion than the actual act of driving it. My Place sense of the route has been shaped by the set-back structures that pass while driving. Despite this, mapping and interstate driving are similar in scope: both offer a broad, generally glancing look at the area they represent.

This week, as an exercise in experiential diversity, I chose instead to follow Route 38. 38 and 88 run parallelesque, both functionally east-west vessels, but I found the difference between them to cover far more than the mere differences in effective speed and net toll cost: The interstate was built for location. The roads were built for place.

Taking 38 through the hearts of several suburban communities reveals a much more colorful picture than the speed-and-distance-obscured structures to which the interstate offers a view. Light-governed intersections invite the eyes to break entirely from the road without threat of vehicular danger: Offbeat shops, tidy shopping districts, aged theaters, ornate Victorians, tasteless boxes; sprawl and tradition eye each other with uncertainty across the street. It is Americana, observed from the definitively American vantage of the interior of an automobile.

Of course, driving through a community is an admittedly shallow replacement for actually stopping, parking, walking, and experiencing.

Though the two are, to be fair, only one level of zoom apart.

1 Comment so far
Leave a comment




Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Name (required)

E-mail (required)

URI

Your Comment