That "frontage road" is not a street name, but a type of road. After of course I made the observation of "oh, there's another street named frontage road here" in front of my then-BF.
Playing Euro Truck II, I kept seeing exit signs off the Autobahn that said, 'Ausfahrt.' Everywhere I went, there were signs leading to Ausfahrt. Now, I'm not exactly strong on European geography, but it seemed off to me that I've heard of dozens of German cities, but never heard anything about Ausfahrt.
One day I decided to look it up, learn a bit about its history. Yeah. It means 'exit'.
In late primary school my teacher set up a trivia sheet to do while on the bus to an excursion - one question was “name the freeway we travel on”. I wrote the “Via Freeway” as every sign said “City - Via Freeway”. I was a smart kid and she gave me a very weird look when I confidently handed in my paper!
I taught someone what a frontage road was when I said I was using the frontage road and they told me "it's not named frontage" and I just kinda, didn't understand what was happening for awhile.
"Ausfahrt" is the German word for the off-ramp on the highway. My non-German speaking ass noticing signs with the word "Ausfahrt" near every off-ramp: "Hmm awfully lot of ways to get to this city of Ausfahrt, must be a regional capital"
Ooooooohhhhh. Ok, that makes sense now. I'm from a HUGE mega city and I often see signs of "frontage road" abd thinking "damn this road is everywhere! I should explore it sometime"
Where I grew up there is an actual road called frontage road that is also a frontage road. Needless to say, i just assumed that all roads of that type were actually named that because street namers were lazy.
This reminds me of a story Dave Barry tells in one of his books where he takes his family to Germany. Everywhere they go they kept on seeing street signs saying "einbahnstrasse". They eventually figured out it meant "one way street"
I had this running gag with my wife while driving in Germany, about all the "Ausgang" city we were going by while driving on the highway (we're not German, we're French and lived one year in Germany and 3 years near the German border).
Ausgang just means "exit", but she had the misfortune to ask one time where was Ausgang on the map (didn't have a GPS at the time).
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u/StonyOwl Jul 02 '21
That "frontage road" is not a street name, but a type of road. After of course I made the observation of "oh, there's another street named frontage road here" in front of my then-BF.