Name: The Highway Loophole That Created The Worst Town in America
Uploaded: 2026-03-03T21:31:19.000Z
Duration: 7 min 4 s
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Looking for a place where you can just kick back and relax?

Well, why not come on down to Breeswood, Pennsylvania, the most charming legal loophole in all of western Appalachia.

Yes, we've got McDonald's, Pizza Hut, affordable motel, gas station, gas station, gas station, gas station.

Ask any of the 5.5 million people who visit Breezewood every year.

That Breezewit just so happens to be sitting on one of the only quarter mile gaps in the U.S.

interstate Highway System and wouldn't exist if it wasn't exploiting a legal loophole in the Federal Aid Highway act of 1956 that forces millions of people to drive through this town in the middle of nowhere every single year.

But I think people come here for the small town charm.

If you're wondering about the loophole thing though, well, I can explain.

Breezewood was born at the intersection of two of the most important roads in Americaboth built at different times and for different reasons, but

they just so happen to converge here, a random valley in the middle of western Pennsylvania.

Of course, major roads intersect all the time, but those intersections generally look something like this or this.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that these look great.

Obviously they're both an affront to God and would better serve society if they were high speed train tracks or a Margaritaville.

As far as highway intersections go, this sort of thing makes sense.

You take a ramp or a loop from one highway to another and you're on your way in 30 seconds.

If you want to go from this major highway to this major highway, you can't just do this.

You have to do a quarter mile detour on surface streets through what can only be generously described as the most quintessentially American town in America.

Nowhere else on the U.S. interstate system does this kind of thing exist.

The whole point of the interstate system was for coastal elites to be able to drive their extremely expensive dog from one coast to the other without ever having to get out of their car and learn what Arkansas is.

So why is it like this only here on a single quarter mile stretch of interstate in a random part of Pennsylvania?

Well, it would seem it's that time again.

This highway, I 70 and this highway I 70 were not designed to fit together.

They were built with very different rules.

And those different rules eventually resulted in hell.

I76, or at least this section of i76 is better known as the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

And it was arguably the first modern highway in North America.

The turnpike was built to connect the major population centers of the Mid Atlantic to the rapidly growing industrial Midwest.

In the 1940s, the Appalachian Mountains made it almost impossible to cross this part of the country by road.

It took nearly nine hours just to get from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh on existing mountain roads.

And that was usually enough time for drivers to realize they didn't actually want to go to Pittsburgh.

The turnpike was unlike any road that had ever been built.

It was massive, modern, free of big inclines, traffic lights or intersections, and

it cut the time to cross Pennsylvania by road in half.

Though they didn't know it at the time, they had just built the first real section of the U.S.

Funding such a cutting edge road though, was tricky.

And the federal government wasn't in the business of spending taxpayer money on things that would be useful for taxpayers.

They built some toll booths, said this probably won't inadvertently break the future U.S.

interstate system and create a loophole by which the worst town in America is created 25 years from now.

President Eisenhower signs the Federal Aid Highway act of 1956 and begins creating the largest system of highways in the world.

These highways would be bought and paid for by the federal government up to the same standards as the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but

One such highway would be I 70 on a route running all the way from Maryland to Utah.

Now the good news was that the turnpike already covered a long stretch of this route through Pennsylvania and could basically just be used as i70 for that section of highway.

The bad news is that the turnpike was still collecting toll.

So you'd be driving along this supposedly free new highway in Eisenhower's communist America.

And all of a sudden a teenager sitting in a box would tell you that you owed the State of Penns 26 of your hard earned dollars.

Not exactly the glorious vision Eisenhower had in mind.

The federal government gave Pennsylvania two.

They could either stop collecting tolls and let people use the road for free, or they had to give drivers the option to get off I70 and onto another free road.

Instead of being forced onto the section of highway that would have tolls, they chose the second option.

In fact, they Chose the second option so hard that it created Breezewood.

The nearest free road where they could make that off ramp was right up here, U.S. 30.

It's really just a fairly normal four lane road.

But that wasn't technically part of the deal.

They extended I70 all the way up here, dumped the whole thing onto this random road for a quarter mile, and

then added another ramp to get back onto the highway.

The drivers now had this awesome and legally mandated option of getting off the highway in the middle of nowhere.

And it only came at the cost of forcing every single driver to take an extended detour through a congested corporate hellscape.

Of course, the only reason Breezewood looks like this is because it's an incredibly rare gap in the US Interstate system.

It's one of the only places in the entire country where you could build a Pizza Hut that is directly connected to America's backbone.

And while I'd love for this video to have a happy ending, Breezewood's days are numbered.

Pennsylvania's already eyeing a direct connection between i70 and the Turnpike that will leave this bounty of gasoline and french fries in the history books.

So visit while you can, or I should say, while you're forced off the highway and have no other choice.

Now, if you've made it this far in a video about highway infrastructure, I want to talk to you about a piece of infrastructure that is frankly much cooler.

These are being built all over the Rocky Mountains right now in a massive effort to rebuild and restore the grizzly's natural range across America.

I think this is awesome because it's such a clear example of how we can fix something we broke.

Now we're building ways for wildlife to cross them.

But projects like this need funding and we can only do so much alone.

And that's why I've joined and partnered with Planet Wild.

Planet Wild is a community based nature protection organization that includes myself and more than 20,000 members every month.

We, as a community, fund missions to restore ecosystems and protect species.

You can think of it as crowdfunding for nature.

They document all their work and videos on YouTube so we can see what our money has achieved.

One of Those missions, Mission 36, is focused on reconnecting the American wild with these amazing wildlife bridges.

I love knowing that my membership is just part of a massive community of people who want to make a big impact on conservation and nature protection and how their model really takes advantage of the power of the masses.

If you want to join a growing community that's passionate about making a difference in nature, please consider joining Planet Wild today.