The Highway: Trapped in Spaghetti

THE HIGHWAY

You are tooling along the superhighway when the signs suddenly begin to snap up before your eyes. You want to get off at the interchange. But where? There it is -no -yes -better hurry -and you spin into the cloverleaf with the sickening feeling that you're probably wrong and doomed to go miles out of your way.

The brand-new Pook's Hill Inter change near Bethesda, Md., is different. There you can be absolutely certain that you're wrong. They left out half the exit ramps.

At Pook's Hill, Washington's new four-lane Capital Beltway, which circles the metropolitan area, intersects the six-lane Route 355 and the four-lane Route 240; and the designers have ingeniously arranged it so that all three superhighways come together at once in a magnificent swirl of concrete spaghetti. Tourists tend to think their frustration is their own fault; it is all but inconceivable to the average mind that on such an elaborate interlacement of roads, eastbound traffic on the beltway cannot go north on Route 355; westbound beltway traffic cannot go south on Route 355; southbound on 355 cannot go west; northbound on 355 cannot go east on the beltway; and motorists coming from Pittsburgh cannot head north on Route 355.

Local residents have discovered that the only way to turn off the beltway onto Route 355 is by heading in the opposite direction and making a U-turn into the oncoming traffic. Not only is this uncommonly hazardous, but during rush hours it chokes off one traffic lane with cars waiting (drivers fuming) to make the turn.

No one seems to know how the Pook's Hill plans got so pixilated, and no one seems to know what's going to be done about it.