FX's Blog - Clinching the Interstate Highway System

Behold, the United States Interstate Highway System. 47,182 seemingly endless miles of concrete and asphalt that stretches to every corner of the country. Construction began in 1956 after the Federal Highway Act was signed by former president Dwight D. Eisenhower becoming one of the largest public works projects ever to be seen in the world.

I-95 Approaching MIami, FL

Image By User:Juliancolton (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Today, I'm sure that many of you that live in the United States have ridden or driven a vehicle on the system at least once. Whether it is for a vacation, traveling to see family, or just going to work as usual. Many of us have experienced its conveniences (or inconveniences).

The main reason for this post is to share an interesting tool that keeps track of travels on Interstate Highways. Allow me to introduce to you, http://cmap.m-plex.com .
This website contains a database of highways around the United States including US routes and many State-wide systems (Some state systems are unavailable and still being developed) and it allows you to keep track of which highways you have been on. Even if you live outside the US, the site also keeps track of systems in Canada, Great Britain, Spain, France, Turkey, and other countries. The way it works is sort of tedious. The site has a Highway Browser where you can select a system and region and a list of highways will show up. Clicking on a highway will bring up a google map with a set of way-points marked on the highway within the selected region.

Here is an example map I screen-capped of I-95 in New York


The next part is to copy the the way-points that you traveled in to a plain text file. I won't go into too much detail, since they explain it better here. The next part is sort of old school; email the text file to the site admin. In my opinion this can be handled better automatically with a file upload form. But, they probably do it this way to prevent any malicious files from being processed. (But that's a different blog post entirely) The text file then gets processed by a script (likely written in perl, python, php, or a similar language) once every week and it generates a map of the highways you have traveled along with other statistics such as mileage you have driven, the percentage of highways clinched (completed), and other things.

I went ahead and tried this out myself. I did my best to think back on all the vacations I took and recalled all of the highways I have encountered.
As it turned out, I have clinched 12.8 % of the total system mileage. I have clinched 18 highways; most of them short auxiliary routes.  The longest highways I have clinched are I-4 (134.3 miles), I-476 (131.6 miles), and I-83 (83.8 miles).
The largest amount of mileage I have driven on a single highway is I-75 (962 miles). Followed by I-95 (923.8 miles) and I-81 (633.9 miles).

I think this is an interesting site and if you would like to keep track of travels on the highways, I would recommend it if you have the time.

The generated map highlighting highways that I have traveled. (As of this post)


The Raw text file that I submitted.


You can view my profile on the site here.