It’s the equivalent of the “soda/pop/Coke” question for roadgeeks: what do you call a highway with fully-controlled access (i.e. a road like Germany’s autobahns, French autoroutes, British motorways, or American interstates), a freeway or an expressway ? The preferred engineering term is “freeway,” but “expressway” has quite an established tradition in many parts of the eastern U.S.—including much of the south. (Georgia is the only southern state that consistently refers to its freeways in public by that name, although “freeway” does seem to have gained some limited currency in Alabama as well.)

Yet “freeway” creep may be happening in Memphis. The Commercial Appeal‘s Tom Bailey Jr. uses the term in this Go weblog entry, and it’s used more often than “expressway” in the associated article in Friday’s CA.

Bailey also notes Dan McNichol’s visit to Memphis to view the Midtown interchange reconstruction. McNichol is the author of the 2003 book The Roads that Built America. McNichol’s book struck me, when I looked through it at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago, as a more road-friendly but ultimately less engrossing take on the subject than Tom Lewis’ 1997 Divided Highways, which accompanied the PBS series of the same name.

Both books, alas, overlook the second great phase of freeway building that is now getting underway: not just the “Big Dig” style projects that will rectify the mistakes of the past, but also the grand plans like Interstate 69, Interstate 49, and Interstate 73/74, as well as the Trans Texas Corridor. These are the routes that will apply the lessons of Overton Park and the Vieux Carre without compromising the central goals of the Interstate system—improving mobility, bringing economic opportunity, and increasing safety.