Talk:Breezewood, Pennsylvania

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Breezewood, Pennsylvania is an unincorporated commercial stretch of U.S. 30 in Pennsylvania that was served by exit 12 of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. When the Interstate Highway system was authorized, several states had already built limited access divided highways as toll roads by issuing bonds for their construction. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was the first of these, following the right of way of the defunct South Pennsylvania Railroad.

It was debated what to do where someone had already taken the initiative to provide a modern highway. Bypassing these with Federally funded freeways would have been a hardship on the bondholders. It was decided that Turnpikes could be incorporated if they met the standards for construction and that the tolls would be removed when the bonds were retired.

Interstate 70 was routed from Baltimore to Wheeling, West Virginia over a portion of the Turnpike. At Breezwood, if the state used Federal funds to connect the two highways they would have been agreeing to remove the toll. The Turnpike Authority already had an exit to U.S. 30 and did not feel compelled to build the connection, so I-70 was built, abruptly leaving the alignment of the old National Road West of Hagerstown and running due North, Crossing the Turnpike without a connection and making an at-grade intersection with U.S. 30.

It was strange, but given the circumstances, it worked.

When the Ray's Hill and Sideling Hill tunnels were later bypassed, the stub of the old Pennsylvania Turnpike was left as the Breezewood interchange. That created the current strange configuration of the exit. It could be easily fixed, but now the merchants of Breezewood lobby that they would be harmed by the loss of traffic.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.12.61.209 (talk • contribs) 20:24, 15 May 2006.


 * The above feels like copyvio to me. Where's it from?  + + Lar: t/c 00:54, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Agreed - my gut says it's likely a copyright violation, but Googling a few random passages doesn't yield anything up, so it may not be an obvious one if it is. SchuminWeb (Talk) 03:26, 16 May 2006 (UTC)


 * At times people just write really flowery, possibly unencyclopedic prose in WP.  For example, I have no reason to think this passage about Bear Bryant was plagiarized, although I have no reason to think it wasn't either.   Best policy then is to assume good faith, keep the facts, and rewrite it to be more encyc.  - 65.173.91.247 08:22, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Too good a quote not to use
I'm too sleepy to write it in the article right now, but check out this quote from http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/tollroad.htm :


 * However, as Business Week stated in 1991, Breezewood is "perhaps the purest example yet devised of the great American tourist trap":


 * Motorists must drive through the self-proclaimed Town of Motels, a half-mile stretch of blacktop and buildings sandwiched between the two roads. Breezewood, population 180, is the Las Vegas of roadside strips, a blaze of neon in the middle of nowhere, a polyp on the nation's interstate highway system.

Cheers, 65.173.91.247 08:22, 24 December 2006 (UTC) a/k/a User:PhilipR

Interstate 70
Is the section of Route 30 connecting the I-70 freeway to the Pennsylvania Turnpike entrance actually signed as Interstate 70? I just came through there and the exit on the turnpike says "US 30 to I-70" implying that you are leaving I-70 and picking it up again later. –Shoaler (talk) 10:34, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Use of generic term "a breezewood" and claim about traffic lights
I deleted the claim, formerly in the article lede, that similar short gaps on Interstate Highways had come to be called, generically, "breezewoods." The purported cite for that statement is, at least now, a dead link, and Googling has found no use of "a breezewood" in that sense except for citations to Wikipedia. Please re-insert this text if you can find a source that I can't.

I've also deleted the claim that there is only one other such gap with traffic lights on the Interstate system, and the link in the same paragraph makes it clear that that statement is not accurate. I have left intact the language later in the article claiming that Breezewood is one of only two such examples of traffic lights on two-digit Interstates in the system, as the link to the list of gaps doesn't directly contradict that claim.

To save hunting through the history for any editors seeking to restore the text I edited, here's the pre-edit version:


 * A highway funding anomaly gave rise to a gap of less than 1 mile on I-70 that was not built to Interstate Highway standards, featuring traffic lights — one of only two such places on a major Interstate highway in the United States. In roadgeek terminology, such a location is known as a "breezewood."

--JohnPomeranz (talk) 20:47, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140827173809/http://www.paturnpike.com/newsletters/summer98/page-4.htm to http://www.paturnpike.com/newsletters/summer98/page-4.htm

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Original settlement
Something should probably be said about the traditional settlement, which, using old PennDOT and USGS maps and Google Street View, I've found is along North Main Street, itself an older alignment of PA Route 126, southward from US 30; the post office is still there. However, when I went to use the GNIS entry as a source, I found that they use coordinates that identify a cluster of buildings just to the northwest along East Graceville Road so sources conflict. Mapsax (talk) 01:12, 11 May 2023 (UTC) [Follow up] While digging further, the GNIS actually uses three sets of coordinates, corresponding to the labels across three different 7.5-minute topo maps, so it actually contradicts itself, and even just isolating the coordinates for the one on the Breezewood map closest to the settlement wouldn't work because they place it at the west end of the commercial district rather than the older residential one, defeating the purpose. Mapsax (talk) 01:54, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Two external link candidates
Well-researched but guidelines say WP:NOBLOGS. Worth making an exception? Mapsax (talk) 02:52, 16 May 2023 (UTC)