the.com/carriageway
the strip of road where strangers agree to hurtle at lethal speeds and mostly survive
means The part of a road designed for vehicles to travel on, as opposed to the verge or footpath, often used in the UK to describe each directional half of a divided road (as in 'dual carriageway').
from A straightforward English compound of 'carriage' and 'way.' 'Carriage' comes from the Old North French 'cariage,' meaning the act of carrying (from a Latin root 'carrus,' a wheeled wagon — also the ancestor of 'car'). 'Way' is deeply Germanic, from Old English 'weg,' a path or road. So the word literally means 'the way for carriages' — coined when the things being hurtled were horse-drawn, and kept on as the horses gave way to engines.
- origin
- named for horse carriages, now ruled by engines
- dual meaning
- dual carriageway splits traffic by a central reservation
- width matters
- lane widths are engineered to subtly slow you
- global term
- chiefly British; Americans just say roadway
m25 london orbital — uk motorway with 3-4 carriageways, 117 miles around london, completed 1986
interstate 95 florida — us divided highway with 4-6 carriageways in places, runs 1,924 miles along east coast