[missionhill]

Bluecountry, it all depends on what road you're on. Say you travel down to New York on I-684 through the "forests" of Westchester County, then merge onto the Hutchinson parkway-- you don't see much more than houses until you get to Coop City in the Bronx. The sections of Westchester through which 684 passes are like some of those towns the Mass Pike goes through--very residential, tightly zoned, no commercial development permitted. That's why you can't base your judgments on what you see from the road. Plenty of other roads in the New York area hide the development too--all the Long Island parkways, for instance, or the Palisades. In the Hartford area land was available for development, the zoning allowed it, and so you see quite a lot on 84 and I-91 south. If you take the Wilbur Cross and Merritt Parkways you don't see any of that development through southern Conn even though there's plenty to see from 91 and 95, a few miles away. I think a better indicator of a big city is how easy it is to get through it on highways. You breeze right through Hartford on the Charter Oak Bridge. Same with Providence. Cities like Boston and New York are more challenging--Boston has been a notorious traffic tangle for decades; that's why they built Route 128 around the city back in the '40s and '50s to keep through traffic out of the center.

[ronson]

Folks, 5 pages on this????? It's exhausted, no?

[kidyankee764]

Originally Posted by ronson

Folks, 5 pages on this????? It's exhausted, no?

I personally think it's an interesting topic. I've learned a bit, thanks to this thread, about the layout of highways in the Northeast and why they are where they are.

It's the debating on whether or not CT is part of NE that gets exhausting.

[missionhill]

Originally Posted by ronson

Folks, 5 pages on this????? It's exhausted, no?

Sorry, ronson. Guess the horse is already dead.

[McMolly]

Originally Posted by ronson

Folks, 5 pages on this????? It's exhausted, no?

Personally I never tire of a discussion about CT and/or New England. Any debate about whether CT is part of NE is silly, of course, because it most definitely is.

Since the thread is still going, it's obviously still interesting to some.

I'm always curious on any message board when people say a subject is exhausted, yet seem interested enough to read it and to post.

We all have the option to skip over anything that's exhausted (or dead for that matter).