When I was writing Maphead, my 2011 book about cartographic obsessives, I discovered a new class of wonk previously unknown to me: the roadgeek. Roadgeeks are fascinated with every detail about roads and specifically about the U.S. interstate system. They’ll travel from miles around to drive highway oddities such as the 16-lane stretch of I-285 near Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, or fractional roads such as the route 35/12 in West Virginia. But no ground is more hallowed than that of Breezewood, an unincorporated town of perhaps 200 residents in south central Pennsylvania.

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When Interstate 70 was built through Breezewood along the old US-30 back in the mid-1960s, a tangle of highway funding bureaucracy complicated the interchange between I-70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The federal government wouldn’t pay for a direct interchange because the turnpike was a toll road, and the state didn’t want to kick in either, because ramps are expensive and the new interstate highways were already shrinking toll revenues.

Who would blink and pay for the interchange? In the end, nobody did. A gap of about a quarter-mile of surface road was left between I-70 and the turnpike, a gap not built to federal interstate standards. Most notably, the two highways now meet at a regular old intersection, which means drivers along the interstate today still hit the brakes in surprise when they see a stoplight and cross-traffic—on the freeway!

Three and a half million vehicles use this intersection every year, so the effect of a traffic light on the interstate is exactly what you’d expect: gridlock during rush hour times, and a strip of neon-lit tourist traps that suddenly appears in the middle of nowhere. An old billboard long heralded travelers’ arrival at “Breezewood: Town of Motels, Food, and Fuel.” The owners of these businesses have worked to keep Breezewood breezy over the years by opposing any effort to build a real interchange there.