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The loop on the left, at Dean Street, is a perfect Trumpet. As for the knot at right (the eastern outlet runs between Providence Place Mall to the north and the Westin Hotel to the south), I think it most resembles The Whirlpool, Both designs are in Part 2 of What's A 'Spooey'? A Field Guide To Freeway Interchanges at The Infrastructurist.

Everybody knows what a cloverleaf looks like -- but could you identify a volleyball, a double trumpet, or a "spooey" if you drove on one in the course of your highway travels? These are among the distinctive designs that transportation engineers have conjured up to keep traffic flowing and motorists headed in the right direction when major roads intersect.

For your driverly edification, we've compiled photo examples of more than 20 different kinds of strange and delightful highway interchanges found both here in the US and abroad. In fact, right now stimulus dollars are being spent to build or upgrade many interchanges into one of these forms.

This led me to Google Maps, to match the interchanges along Route 95. Is that a Braided Cloverleaf where Route 6 meets 295?

I would have enjoyed this map game as a kid, and as an adult I have a kid's delight in the sometimes goofy names serious adults give to their traffic-flow designs: The Lofthouse, The Butt, the Spaghetti Bowl...

If you search, you can creep around the state just by changing the longitude or latitude numbers in the google Maps search form on any of these map links. (Latitude is north/south, measured from the equator; longitude is east/west, measured from Greenwich, England.) I didn't know, until now, just how long a second of latitude is: about 90 feet.

You can enter your street address and find its exact coordinates at Stephen Morse's Converting Addresses to/from Latitude/Longitude in One Step. When I entered mine, results arrived from several sources, all accurate, and by clicking on the Google link and then choosing street view, I was in the street looking at my house.

 Tags  design

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