The Straightest Roads in the World Are in Midwest America

This won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s driven there, but the U.S. Midwest has some of the straightest roads in world. That’s according to a curious mapping endeavor from Ireland’s Rory McCann. “How Straight or Bendy Are the Roads?” is exactly what it sounds like—an angular accounting of the planet’s pavement. McCann writes:

For anyone questioning McCann’s methods, rest assured he used an actual “bendyness ratio” defined as the “length of the road divided by the straight line difference between [its] end points.” He didn’t think to abbreviate this ratio with a mathematical symbol, but I would suggest ||/≈.