(Roughly) Daily

The image you see above is a “magic roundabout” in Colchester, England. It includes 5 mini-roundabouts embedded in a giant one. Imagine driving that on the left side of the road!

Roundabout. Traffic Circle. Rotary. According to the Harvard Dialect Study, we Americans are pretty divided about what to call a traffic circle, which is my own word of choice, like nearly 40% of the rest of you…

Read on at Deborah Fallows’ “Magical Roundabouts and the Language of Signs,” one of a fascinating on-going series of dispatches from Deb and her husband James Fallows in the Atlantic series “American Futures“– tales of “reinvention and resilience across the nation.”

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As we name that turn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that the last segment of the Natchez Trace Parkway’s Double Arch Bridge was set into place in the Franklin Crossing, over Route 96 near Franklin, Tennessee.  The National Park Service had been paving the Natchez Trace a little bit at a time since 1938, turning it into a scenic modern highway.  The last stretch was the Franklin Crossing, where engineers had to figure out how to elevate the bridge over Route 96 and the densely wooded valley below while preserving the natural beauty of the site.  Engineer Eugene Figg settled on an open, double-arched bridge that supports its deck without spandrel columns, preserving most of the view across the valley– the first precast segmental concrete arch bridge to be built in the United States.

The bridge was officially opened in the Spring of the following year, and the Parkway was complete.

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