Besides the obvious “welcome to [state name]” sign. Is there a significant change in architecture, infrastructure, agriculture, store brands, maybe even culture?
Yeah, the roads instantly change color and texture. If you cross into south carolina, BAM. All the roads are whiter and rougher.
There are 50 states and a lot of different border arrangements. If a border is something dramatic like a river and you know that’s the state border you can tell.
Often the only way to tell is a change in road surface or signage, or the “Welcome to state” sign. Google navigation will tell you too.
Yeah most often the road gets worse /better, either because one state does a better job with road maintenance, or they’re just on different schedules.
Also sometimes the signage for state routes changes slightly.
I live on a border and my jogging path cuts through one state and then rounds back home to the other. The only way you can tell a difference is the states have different paving and road work schedules, so usually one state has more shitty roads then the other.
Ah yes, CO to NM
It’s Nebraska.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
field on one side, field on the other. if I am on the interstate, the surface gets really shitty on our side because brownback and the republicans in topeka drained the highway fund to give the koch bros and fat corpo-farmers a tax break.
Heading west out of Connecticut into New York the most obvious difference is they don’t trim tree branches over the road/power lines. It suddenly feels like you’re driving through a tunnel of green. Its actually quite nice but those parts of nys must have a lot of outages after storms.
A lot of our residential infrastructure is underground, because of the weather we have. Though, there’s a fair amount of aerial hardware as well. Where I live is famous for ice storms, and every few years there’s a major outage that lasts anywhere from 12 to 48 hours. They’re rare, but they do occur. More often it’s because someone hit a pole or ground mount transformer, versus a falling branch or lightning bolt.
I still prefer ice, snow, and occasional outages to unbearable heat and humidity, earthquake, and hurricane tradeoff being further south or west.
To answer OP, there’s a visible change in road surface and signage not only at state borders, but even between county and town lines. Each county handles the road a different way, and the finish/quality can differ a LOT even between municipalities and counties.
A lot of our residential infrastructure is underground, because of the weather we have.
I get that. A lot of ours is too. But I live an hour from the area I’m talking about, the weather isn’t that different, and I still see wire poles up there waiting to be taken down by a tree branch in the next ice storm. CTs trees tend to be pruned so they don’t overhang the roads at all. Its the most jarring difference driving from, for example, Sherman CT to Pawling NY.
I pay money to cross a large river.
North Carolina paves its roads. South Carolina air drops its roads.
You know you have crossed into South Carolina when the suspension of your vehicle is torn out from under you.
I don’t live in a state that borders SC, but I can think of no better answer to the question at hand.
I love that the Dutch talk the same way about the Belgian roads
It usually depends on how big the road is that you’re driving on. Most state borders are in very extremely rural areas, so sometimes there’s not even a sign. On interstate highways it’s always quite obvious, but little country roads might not have any signage at all.
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There’s usually no obvious change in architecture, no; often the only architecture is farm buildings, and those are more or less consistent architecturally. And broadly speaking architecture is regional, rather than state-specific; the difference in architecture from northern Indiana to southern Indiana is far more pronounced than the difference in architecture from southern Indiana to northern Kentucky, for instance.
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As noted elsewhere, sometimes the infrastructure can be different (usually seen in road quality), but most states tend to number their county roads in different ways, so when you cross the border you’ll often find that the number of the roads you’re crossing tend to suddenly shift from “300W” to “2300E.” The signage may also change very slightly, though if you’re truly out in the middle of nowhere, there might not be any signage to change.
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Agriculture, like architecture, is usually much more defined by region than by state. All of the states around mine farm corn, wheat, and soybeans, just like mine does. Most also farm cows, though Kentucky notably has a lot more horses than any of its neighbors, so that can be a tell. But you don’t get into a ton of ranching until you get further west, and then you see large changes across multiple states at a time.
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Store brands often do change, but again, since most crossings are in rural areas, there often aren’t any stores around to notice the change right away. You’ll roll out of a state with a lot of Meijer stores and into a state where Publix is the regional grocery store, but until you get into a town, there’s no way to know.
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Culture is probably the thing you’ll notice least. People who live in rural areas tend to think of themselves as American before any other identifier, so you’ll find a lot of jingoism anywhere on both sides of any border. American flags, Christian crosses, gigantic emotional support pickup trucks, bizarrely aggressive patriotic bumper stickers, Trump signs and flags, etc. Depending on where you are those sorts of things are accompanied by very clear signs of deep poverty (mobile homes, trash-strewn lawns, run-down houses), but they can just as often be on or around very well-kept houses on huge acreage.
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And if you mean “culture” in the sense of theater, music, etc., you’re unlikely to find any at all near a state border.
I guess the other thing is that Google Maps will tell you “Welcome to (state)” when you’re navigating. There are some times that that’s the only way you’ll know.
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Leaving South Carolina to enter North Carolina or Georgia, the roads are so much better and there’s a noticeable decrease in overall loudness in road noise.
Holy fucking shit the SC roads are B A D
I’ll never forget driving home from college with some friends for the holidays one year. I was from PA, he was from Ohio and had never been more east. We were headed to NY with another friend and our route took us briefly through Jersey.
“How will we know we’re there?” he asked as the car suddenly lurched and felt like we hit a gravel road despite ostensibly being a paved highway …
That’s strange, I grew up in NJ and our roads tend to be well maintained. It was kinda shocking when I moved to PA and the roads had way more potholes and skinny useless shoulders!
I do concede, I am … old. Things may well have changed and it depends on the part of Jersey. States around Jersey just like ripping on them to feel better about themselves, but PA is no treat either which is why I got the hell out of there =P
There is a body of water under the bridge, toll collection booths right before or right after the bridge crossing. Also GPS confirms it.
Also wherever the last hills are within 10 miles of the border there is a guaranteed police officer sitting on the other side out of view pointing a lidar at the top of the hill so when you go over they can clock all your speeds. More so on whichever border county is keeping their side up better… but if your heading to say Georgia you can tell your almost to Georgia because you can see the Florida cops waiting for the people heading South on the other side of the road.
(Although in Florida they often lack the hills to hide behind so they often use bushes, drainage ditches and overpass walls to hide behind.).
More than a 2500 different types of palm trees/bushes. And on 75/95, they are going to be invested with pigs.
Grew up near the US/Canadian border, there is a line of white rocks that tell you it’s the border.
There was no line when I saw it while in basic training; just a nice, 20-foot-wide laneway of cleared trees and mown grass, just perfect for tromping along. Armed.
And that’s how we may have accidentally invaded America.
Connecticut is making a bold claim here to anyone leaving NY
What’s the point of putting the governor name on the road sign? How is that information useful to drivers?
In Wisconsin, Walker straight up put a campaign slogan (“Open for business”) on those signs. Fortunately, those got taken down for a simple “Tony Evers, Governor”.
Ya know. I don’t know. Every state does this as far as I can tell and so I’ve never questioned it.
If I had to guess, its how the DOT or Highway department shills to Tue new governor
“Hey look boss, we put ya name on da side of Interstate 69 from Illinois!,”
It’s totally legit highway info. Completely not grifting public money for the governors election campaign. /s
Yeah I would hardly call Ned Lamont a governor.
He legalized weed at least
Mayor of the town of Connecticut.
You have to pay to leave the state so very obvious leaving!
New Jersey?
Indeed!
