Take a safety break!

Alan’s water bottle had slid off the armrest and out of reach.  I was mid-Sunday morning tired, and needed some air.  We had an hour to go until we got to the berry patch.

REST STOP, 1/4 Mile / Volunteer Coffee Available, said the white on blue sign (indicating “information or services” according to interstate sign iconography)

I drifted the car to the right lane, onto the slipway, and followed the signs to ample diagonal parking at the Smokey Point rest area, Interstate 5 north.  We parked amidst dozens of other motorists, seeking relief from their journey with toilets, free coffee, and modest bits of shade and lawn.

I fetched Alan’s water.  I got a cup of free coffee and donated a dollar and got a donut for Alan.  I relieved myself, checked the vending machines – yep, mostly empty – and gazed at the informational kiosk containing everything I could ask about Snohomish and Skagit county activities, breathed some air, and looked around.

I don’t think enough thought has been given to rest stops.  And I think it’s because they are the ultimate average class amenity.  I mean “average class”, not “middle class”.  I’ve been to rest stops in lots of countries, and rest stops cater to literally the dead center average – not always consistently, but they inevitably seek to meet some local expectation of the average motorist need.  We tend to avoid commenting on the average – so rest stops fall into society’s blind spot.  That makes them pretty interesting as a lens to see the average, and because they are designed spaces, it also makes them interesting lenses into what “planners” think of the average.

Think of the values that are incorporated into rest stop design.  First off, you have to have rest stops in the US on interstates – it’s part of the design code for superhighways that you put break areas every so often to enable fatigued drivers to pull over and rest if necessary.  But that’s the requirement – the range of potential designs is huge.  Designs range from utilitarian low-cost extremes, to the tourism information centers showcasing everything an area has to offer, to the massive food courts of the tollway operators.  States basically do the design work and pitch for federal money to build them, so local differences also emerge as state designers reflect their biases and their motivations through their choices of sites, landscaping, architecture, and amenities.

Because of the budget dynamic, outside of the big tollway service areas in the midwest and on the east coast, rest stops in the US are typically designed purely for using the toilet, walking around a bit, and maybe having a picnic.  A couple of soda vending machines are usually the only source of a pick-me-up, and at least half the time in my experience, the soda machines are either broken or practically empty.  While there’s usually some modest acknowledgement of nature, most rest stops are really designed for easy off / easy on access, with wide turning radiuses for trucks and RVs necessitating a “pave everything” mentality that results in small, grim picnic areas and windblown trees hanging on bravely on strips of dirt between pavements and tarmac.  The message from the interstate people – stalwart Eisenhower road engineers, with slide rules and short-sleeved button down shirts – is simple: the road is for driving.  Drivers need to pee, so we need to give them a space for that, but otherwise, the commerce of feeding drivers and slaking their thirst is for the free market.

For all that, though, American rest stops generally are sited pretty well, and regional differences emerge pretty readily when you’re paying attention – usually in some nice setting, although in Western Washington, a “nice setting” inevitably involves a lot of forest.  This is good for dogs – they have space to run about and quiet spots behind trees to get some privacy – although a bit dull for drivers.  Washington rest stops also do something rather clever: they have volunteer groups run free coffee stands, and they collect donations and sell baked goods.  Very basic, but it lets small local groups raise money (it’s usually Girl Scouts or the local Elks Lodge or something) and gives a friendly break to visitors.  It’s also a good solution to the usually malfunctioning vending machines.  That, though, is a very Pacific Northwest thing – the public space catering to local volunteer groups, small enterprise with baked goods, etc. – and you wouldn’t expect to find it, say, in the South, where such enterprises are conducted privately, so that you don’t have to worry about your charity serving people that they normally wouldn’t cater to.

Rest stops in the south are, without question, the worst.  With the exception of the grand palaces one encounters just over state lines, where state tourism boards try to sucker you into a longer stay through really good restrooms, racks of promotional literature, and an air-con wonderland of state historical facts, southern rest stops are usually the least clean and most prone to that spooky feeling you get when you think you might be an unintended extra in a low budget horror film.  The people forced to use rest stops are strange: twenty year old cars with rust spots packed to the ceiling with odd boxes and blankets.

Again, though, it’s a matter of regional values.  Good people don’t use rest stops, but they are mandated every so often by interstate highway design rules, so while Southern transportation planners were forced to build them, they did so without interest or concern for the people who would have to use them, and it shows.  Minimal budgets are assigned for cleaning and trash removal, and the plantings quickly grow ragged without care or lawn maintenance.  Southern politicians know that their core constituencies – rich white businesspeople mostly – are not going to grumble if the rest stops are hell holes.  Keep in mind rest stops are designed for what’s thought of as the average need – and in the south, politicians and road designers have decided that the average rest stop user is, in a real way, subhuman: the designer is building a theoretical structure for someone he or she fundamentally disdains, instead of building something for their own use.

The Pacific Northwest, on the other hand, lives deeply in a passive aggressive myth of total equality – we’re all middle class, we’re all alike, we all like the Seahawks.  In that environment, it’s no surprise that rest stops are spacious, nicely forested or sited to take advantage of the countryside, with cheerful volunteers, clean enough bathrooms, and a sense that someone actually gives a damn about making the place look good.  And the clientele is diverse – the parking lot last weekend on a Sunday morning had late model BMWs along side old VW Microbuses and high mileage working class Sentras and Civics.  People smiled at one another, although it being the Pacific Northwest, no hellos or anything expressive.  The average user here is much closer to being the average voter or average person in general – and thus the highway designer can think of himself or herself as being an actual user of the facility, and designs features that they would enjoy using themselves.

The architecture of the basic rest stop in the US still carries echoes of the glory days of building them back in the 1960s and 1970s.  There are a lot of low prairie style buildings, almost bunkers in some way but not as bunker-like as the school designs of the same era.  Occasionally you’ll see some space age whimsy with filigree columns and open wall designs – especially out in the prairie and high mountain desert states, where presumably the nearby location of ICBM sites out in the distance inspired some highway designer to think rockets.  There are admirable attempts to design for climate – western Washington rest stops aren’t heated or cooled except via open air circulation above eye level, which makes sense in this temperate rain forest of ours.  Often the prairie rest stops will be the same, but usually with windows – in the winter, you have to keep the snow out.  In deserts you don’t get air con but you do get lots of open spaces for wind to blow the smell around.  In the far north you’ll get enclosed areas which can be heated – and in theory this keeps the vending machines protected from the elements as well, although they remain poorly stocked.

On the toll roads, though, you get something different: the service rest area.  I used to love road trips as a kid when we drove along the New York Thruway or the Pennsylvania Turnpike, because the rest areas were like little mini villages (I was pretty easily impressed back in the day).  For a kid from Maine, it also held the air of the exotic, with fast food chains we didn’t have back home – Hardee’s, Carl’s Junior, Annie’s Pretzels – and just being in one of the large atriums, surrounded by people who looked different from the people in Maine, was a powerful mechanism for making me see America as something diverse and strange and magical.

The toll way rest stops were designed as profit centers by turnpike authorities who had to pay off bonds and return capital to state coffers, and as such, they had a bit of middle class glam.  We took enough East Coast road trips growing up that over the years, you could see a steady pace of competitive renovations up and down the northeast corridor.  One summer you’d be eating Burger King in a somewhat tired late 60s cafeteria with brown tile floors; the next summer there would be a construction site and prepackaged sandwiches from the gas station minimart, and then the following summer, a gleaming steel-and-glass atrium would appear, Burger King replaced by Wendy’s, but now with a Sbarro’s pizza and a Subway added to the mix.  Or if not steel and glass, then faux rustic farmhouse look – with the inside light and airy, with wood accents and a polished stone floor.  And a decade later, they’d be doing it again.

The vending machines work in the tollway rest stops, but they’re massively overpriced – it’s like airport pricing – and anyway, they really want you to buy from the fast food counters and then eat in the giant collective spaces in the middle.  The bathrooms are vast – rows and rows of urinals, enough so that even though a few are always broken and covered in plastic, there’s never a line for the men’s room – and there’s usually an arcade too.  It’s remarkable that there still are arcades, despite the fact that most kids are now permanently face down in a smartphone or tablet.  Disaffected teenagers still like playing arcade video games, and the turnpike authority people know it.

The outside areas still focus (naturally) on parking space, and it’s interesting to observe the differences that evolved over time to the use of outdoor space.  The oldest rest stops – the ones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the older ones on the New York Thruway – kept extra space to a minimum, essentially maximizing parking space around the central food building and gas pumps.  Middle aged rest stops – in Maine, in Ohio – grew the amount of outdoor space, largely by putting up picnic areas and groves of trees to separate the food building and its ample parking for automobiles from the more remote areas laid out for big rigs and RVs.  And the newest rest areas – in Maryland, for example, and some of the redesigned areas in Connecticut – occupied wide fields, with lots of space given over to lawns and trees, with siting that’s actually attractive, on the top of rising hills or spread out among a forest.

It’s the very commerciality of US turnpike rest stops that says so much about how the US driving class behaves and is perceived.  The tollway authority people know that average drivers in the US are middle class in their own minds, regardless of their actual class, and want to feel both exalted – hence the high ceilings, light, and modernity of design for the constantly-refreshed buildings – and feel comfortable.  Comfort comes from recognizable fast food and, increasingly, enough space outside to not feel like you’re on the highway, at least for a little while.  It also comes from the safety that you can only achieve with high crowds, high throughput, and excess space – just enough for everyone to find a seat, not so much that you’ve created negative spaces where bad things can happen.

Resting on a road trip means food at some point, of course.  When you’re on the tollways, you’re in luck, of sorts, in the sense that you can buy your lunch or dinner or breakfast at a fast food counter and be on your way.  I say luck of sorts because eating fast food isn’t particularly good – it leaves you immediately satisfied but quickly gives way to a vague queasiness and a logey sort of dragged out feeling, not ideal when you’re driving or in the passenger seat.  But with very few exceptions, I don’t know of many Americans who eat anything other than fast food when on a road trip.  It’s just what you do.

My mom used to pack a cooler with sandwiches and snacks and fruit and the like when we took our road trips, and that was fine, but my sister and I really just wanted to go to the service stops and have Pizza Hut or Burger King.  So did my dad.  Looking around at the other cars in the parking lot, we were the same as every other family – and plenty of families had the cooler in the back, surely packed full of more nutritious food for the journey that would likely be served in a motel somewhere for supper, not on the road.

Outside of the tollways back east, though, strip malls and clusters of fast food or middle tier sit down food (you know, the “upscale burger joints” or Applebee’s or the equivalent) spring up at least every thirty miles or so on the coasts, and roughly every eighty to one hundred miles on the wide expanses of western and midwestern routes.  American merger and acquisition prowess being what it is, they all tend towards a small number of identical chain restaurants; when there is a new one that pops up in these clusters, you can sense a new chain emerging or being tested, and the menus inevitably are anticipating massive chain explosion potential by virtue of their slick laminated glamour pictures and hokey menu naming conventions.  But the food is the same: huge burgers, too many fried things, macro beers and soda.  All leaving you feeling the same as the tollway rest stop food: sort of queasy, but full, caffinated, and ready to resume driving.

I just got back from a trip to France, though, and despite the country’s culinary reputation, the rest stop and highway pullover food is essentially no different – delivering a dose of cheap, processed, doctored up calories that leave you a bit sick once you get back on the road.  And yet at the rest stops, you see the kids and their parents in line, actually looking a bit excited to be almost ready to order from McDonald’s after spending the last few hours in the car together, and you realize that the French want their road fast food as much as their driving American counterparts do.  Even though – surely – we all carry within us the memory of feeling like crap within a half hour of consuming it, we still go back to the trough, happily, with a craving, when we’re on our road trips.

I’m curious as to how all of this will change in the coming years.  I’m assuming that 20 or 30 years from now, the cars will almost entirely be self-driving and electric.  The rhythms of how we go on road trips will change and how we rest while we’re on them will change as well.  Presumably we’ll still need occasional toilet stops, and we’ll need to eat.  But if our actions on the road change, how will our desires and needs to rest change as well?  Will we pack our own food when we can spend real time on the road savoring good food – thus saving some cash from the overpriced fast food stops as well?  Or will the advertisements and background flashes on our touchscreens plant their subtle messages in our brain as we hang out on the Internet in the car, making us crave even more intensely the overly processed, salty-sugary-meaty pleasure doses served up by the roadside food experts?

I’m not sure, but I’m more aware now of how my body just doesn’t like road food as its come to be.  I’ve noticed that when I’m on my own, I’m stopping more and more at grocery stores instead of fast food places, or stopping at the local restaurant in the strip mall instead of the chain.  I’m not always totally happy with what I get – unlike fast food, which is a bit like a drug and for the minute or so after you eat it, while the glucose is surging into your bloodstream and the salt and meat electrolyting themselves into your brain’s pleasure centers – but I don’t feel like garbage an hour later.

I use the rest stops for the toilets, though, and for a space for my dog to get a little exercise when we’re on the road for a long time.  I like noticing the trees, I like poking around the reinforced concrete picnic tables and the informational kiosks.  I like seeing other people, especially families who all have their little rituals associated with piling out of the car, piling back in, setting up their activities and magazines and phones and blankets to resume maximum comfort after their stop is over.  At the best rest stops, I like watching the sun light up the surrounding hills, or listening to the wind blow through pine trees and aspen.  And then I load my dog into the back, ease into the driver’s seat, close the door, and get back on the highway.