Culture
The Sign Says You've Got 72 Miles to Go Before the End of Your Road Trip. It's Lying.
How do they measure distance markers? It's complicated.
Long road trips can be mind-numbing experiences. But there comes a time in every drive when finally, at long last, you get a physical marker of just how far you are from your destination. Way before we had GPS, we had highway distance signs.
When I was a kid, family trips up I-95 from D.C. to New York were broken up by those signs. On the way back down, somewhere just south of Baltimore, a sign let us know we were in the home stretch. Washington was just 30 miles away.