Highways
A highway is a major road within a city, or linking several cities together.
It includes roads known as interstate highway, freeway, motorway and autobahn,
where a full description varies by country. Generally, a highway is a
road which has multiple lanes of traffic in each direction, often with
a physical division (median) between opposing traffic, and separate access
ramps to and from the highway which are more widely separated than connections
on a standard road and are often grade-separated. A highway may prohibit
access by pedestrians and limit what vehicles may travel on it.
Historically, a highway was any major road travelling a long distance
outside of a city. Early roads between cities would sometimes suffer from
highwaymen who would rob people travelling the route.
In the 20th century, however, the word generally came to be used only
for high-speed, often specially-designed automobile routes. On 10 September
1913 the first paved coast-to-coast highway opened in the US.
Highways usually have a higher speed limit than other roads because they
have additional lanes and are designed for driving at a higher speed.
In remote areas, a highway may have rest areas where motorists may stop
and relax before resuming a long drive.
By convention, the lane nearest the median on a multi-lane highway is
called the passing lane.
The United States has a vast network of national highways (Interstate
highways) linking the different U.S. states together, as does Australia
albeit on a much smaller scale and mostly concentrated on the southeast
coastline. Some highways, like the Pan-American Highway or the European
routes, bridge multiple countries. With the latter a single road may have
several national designations in addition to the European one.
Probably the most famous highway in the United States is Route 66, as
immortalised in the song "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66", while
if one follows Australia's Highway 1 the driver can travel from state
capital to state capital, almost the entire way around the whole country.
The longest single national highway in the world is the Trans Canada Highway,
which runs from Victoria, British Columbia, on the Pacific Coast, through
ten provinces to the Atlantic Coast, at St. John's, Newfoundland.
Nomenclature
The terms used for various types of highways such as freeway, expressway,
motorway and autobahn, vary between countries or even regions within a
country. In some places a highway is a specific type of major road that
is distinct from freeway or expressway; in other places the terms may
overlap. In law highway may mean any public road or canal. However, in
some countries, the term highway is not generally used at all.
Australia
In Australia, a highway is a distinct type of road from freeways and motorways.
The word highway is generally used to mean major roads connecting large
cities, towns and different parts of metropolitan areas. Metropolitan
highways often have traffic lights at intersections, and rural highways
usually have only one lane in each direction. The words freeway or motorway
are generally reserved for the most arterial routes, almost always with
no traffic light intersections and usually significantly straightened
and widened. The term motorway is used in some Australian cities to refer
to freeways that have been allocated a metropolitan route number, and
in Sydney, a motorway has a toll, whereas a freeway is free of charge.
It is now possible to travel from Melbourne to Sydney without having to
stop at a traffic light. Roads may be part-highway and part-freeway until
they are fully upgraded.
Brazil
In Brazil, highways (or expressway/freeway) are named "rodovia",
and Brazilian highways are divided in two types: regional highways (generally
of less importance and entirely inside of one state) and national highways
(of major importance to the country). In Brazil, rodovia is the name given
exclusively to roads connecting two or more cities with a sizable distance
separating the extremes of the highway. Urban highways for commuting are
uncommon in Brazil, and when they are present, they receive different
names, depending of the region (Avenida, Marginal, Linha, Via, Eixo, etc).
Very rarely names other than "rodovia" are used.
Regional highways are named YY-XXX, where YY is the abbreviation of the
state where the highway is running in and XXX is a number (e.g. SP-280;
where SP means that the highway is running entirely in the state of São
Paulo).
National highways are named BR-XXX. National highways connects multiples
states altogether, are of major importance to the national economy and/or
connects Brazil to another country. The meaning of the numbers are:
001-100 - it means that the highway runs radially from Brasília.
It is an exception to the cases below.
101-200 - it means that the highway runs in a south-north way.
201-300 - it means that the highway runs in a west-east way
301-400 - it means that the highway runs in a diagonal way (northwest-southeast,
for example)
400-499 - another exception, they are less important highways and its
function is to connect a city to an arterial highway nearby
Often Brazilian highways receives names (famous people, etc), but even
though, they continue to have a YY/BR-XXX name (example: Rodovia Castelo
Branco is also SP-280).
See List of Brazilian Highways
China
"Highways" in China, more often than not, refer to China National
Highways. The multi-lane, central-separation routes are instead called
expressways.
In Mainland China, private companies reimbursed through tolls are the
primary means of creating and financing the National Trunk Highway System.
There is actually no separate classification for expressway (which is
the term more often used in the PRC). Most likely, they are lumped with
first-grade guodaos (meaning National roads). Beneath guodaos in rank
level are shengdaos (provincial roads) and xiandaos (pronounced hsien-daos
or shien-daos, which equate to county-level roads). Some expressways are
numbered with a leading zero (e.g. G030).
Freeway was used on a few expressways (such as the Jingshi Freeway) before
expressway was chosen as a standarised term.
The Chinese name for expressways (or freeways, as they used to be called)
is uniform; in pinyin, it is gao su gong lu, which literally means "high
speed public road".
In the mainland of the PRC, highway does not refer to a freeway or expressway,
but instead to a normal road equivalent to an "A"-level road
in Britain, or a class-one non-expressway. This can cause some confusion,
though.
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