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By Root 802 0

is perhaps the most notorious destination. “Most people would say, ‘What’s in Breezewood?’” Mark tells me. “But mention it to a roadgeek, and they’ll shudder.” When I-70 was built through the area, funding disagreements with the Pennsylvania Turn-pike Commission meant that no ramps could be built connecting the new freeway to the turnpike. As a result, there’s still a gap of less than a mile in the freeway there, and drivers on I-70 are puzzled to see traffic signals suddenly appear on the interstate. Local gas stations and fast-food franchises love the anomaly, of course, and have opposed any attempts to build a real interchange. Roadgeeks now use the term “breezewood” to refer to any place where stoplights unexpectedly interrupt highway traffic, and some darkly blame former Pennsylvania congressman Bud Shuster for the original imbroglio. Shuster is still well remembered even in the real world for spearheading an array of pork-barrel transportation projects in his district, but in the road-geek world, he’s a scheming supervillain of Fu Manchu proportions. In 1991, Shuster insisted that a new highway through Altoona be signed as Interstate 99—in violation of national guidelines—despite the fact that it lies between I-79 and I-81. The numbering was out of order! To roadgeeks, with their sometimes Asperger-like insistence on order and constancy, this was an unforgivable sin.

But the road buff’s eye for detail often performs a public service as well. We all rely on the design of the nation’s highway system every day, whether we’re commuting to work or buying a head of lettuce shipped to us straight from California on I-80, but how many of us actually follow proposed improvement projects or monitor new road signs to make sure they’re right? Roadgeeks are the only ones writing huffy e-mails to their state transportation departments when they notice confusing signs or misnumbered shields, and time and again, from Kanab, Utah, to Pensacola, Florida, they’ve been pleased to see the errors they reported fixed the next time they’ve driven by. We may not know it, but we are all in their debt.

The patron saint of these highway watchdogs is Richard Ankrom, an artist fed up with the confusing interchange between the Pasadena Freeway and I-5 near his downtown Los Angeles home. Instead of waiting for the state to replace the unhelpful overhead sign, he conceived of an art installation he called “Guerrilla Public Service,” to be performed before an audience of 140,000 motorists every day. Ankrom crafted a perfect replica of a regulation California Department of Transportation directional marker and I-5 shield marker, and, early one morning in 2001, he armed himself with an orange vest and hard hat, some safety cones, and a fake invoice in case he was challenged. Twenty minutes later, the “art” was successfully installed on the sign—so seamlessly that nobody even noticed the fix for nine months. When a free weekly paper finally broke the news, Caltrans roundly condemned the project as vandalism but, unable to argue with progress, left the homemade sign in place for the next eight years, where it helped millions of Angelenos and tourists navigate downtown successfully. In 2009, Caltrans finally replaced Ankrom’s sign with an official one—but the new one still incorporates Ankrom’s improved design.*

A time-lapse view of Ankrom setting up his “installation”

“Where are we now?” I ask. We’re driving down a rather dreary commercial strip between Tacoma and neighboring Lakewood, and, though I’m trying to think like a roadgeek, I can’t possibly see why this particular road is on our itinerary.

“This is the old U.S. 99,” says Mark in unusually reverent tones. The West Coast’s Route 66 (only upside-down!), Highway 99 once ran from the Canadian border all the way to Mexico, but it was decommissioned in 1968 when I-5 was completed, and much of it is now anonymous and unsigned. Roadgeeks are archaeologists as well, finding history in the modern urban ruins. They see the ghosts of Esso stations and motels shaped like tepees where now there’s only