There are many times when you scratch your head when it comes to decisions made by governments when it comes to roads-and-highways. Whether it's renaming the Queensboro bridge after Mayor Koch, the Tri-Borough after RFK or some two lane road in the middle of Queens to 'honor' Jackie Robinson. Well all that is strange but I guess there are political points to win but something that never made sense is probably a legacy of Robert Moses which to this day has done nothing but confuse half of the city and probably left him laughing in his grave.
The BQE has to be one of the most ridiculously named highways around, not because the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is in-itself a bad name but because for some reason somebody gave it a the federal highway number 278 which means that –at least in theory- it runs East-West. Anybody who has ever driven on this road knows that it surely feels a lot more like North-South road than an East-West. I am sure that I'm not the only one who has gotten into Brooklyn and nearly killed myself as I was trying to picture the entire road in my head when asked to make a quick decision. For example when you get off the Williamsburg Bridge and you are heading to South Brooklyn you see two signs: BQE East and BQE West with nothing else on them to give you sense of your place so it becomes a game of Russian Roulette.
And they wonder why there have been so many accidents off the Queensboro bridge in the last few years, there are probably cars so damn confused trying to make a BQE decision.
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