To return to my introduction of e using the most roundabout method possible I’d like to imagine the problem of telling someone just where it is you’ve been stranded in a broken car on the New York Thruway. Actually, I’d rather imagine the problem of being stranded in a broken car on the New Jersey Turnpike, as it’s much closer to my home, but the Turnpike has a complexity I don’t want distracting this chat, so I place the action one state north. Either road will do.
There’s too much toll road to just tell someone to find you there, and the majority of their lengths are away from any distinctive scenery, like an airport or a rest area, which would pin a location down. A gradual turn with trees on both sides is hardly distinctive. What’s needed is some fixed reference point. Fortunately, the Thruway Authority has been generous and provided more than sixty of them. These are the toll plazas: if we report that we are somewhere between exits 23 and 24, we have narrowed down our location to a six-mile stretch, which over a 496-mile road is not doing badly. We can imagine having our contact search that.
But the toll both standard has many inconveniences. The biggest is that exits are not uniformly spaced. At the New York City end of the Thruway, before tolls start, exits can be under a mile apart; upstate, where major centers of population become sparse, they can spread out to nearly twenty miles apart. As we wait for rescue those twenty miles seem to get longer.
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