Snowmobile Route Signage in Quebec

Recently, I took a trip around Quebec, visiting rural landscapes, small towns and cosmopolitan cities alike. One thing that I stumbled across, in a couple of instances, was Quebec's snowmobile trail system. The Quebec Federation of Snowmobile Clubs (FCMQ), who represents that snowmobile clubs in Quebec, has set up an extensive trail system for snowmobiles around the province that appears to be loosely based on the highway system in Quebec. There are Trans-Quebec trails, which tend to be longer, and regional trails which are just within a smaller area, but just as fun. The signage appears to be on par with highway signage as well. The various member clubs maintain the trails for the most part, with the Ministry of Transportation Quebec (MTQ) helping with maintenance where necessary. Here is an example of the signage I saw near Sherbrooke in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec.

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Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

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Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

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