Are all the roads in mainland America connected?

Yup, they’re all connected. If I leave my house right now in a car and never get out, I can get to your house without leaving the road.

There are many trees and some shrubs.

There really are many trees with many branches, rather than just several trees or one tree with many branches. In the end, they are all connected by multiple roads/branches.

I’m glad you said “mainland America” because otherwise people would say that there are roads in Alaska and Hawaii that don’t meet this criterion!

@girlofscience

Oh, you don’t know about the underground tunnel that leads to Hawaii?

Well Oahu does have an interstate. Huh?

I don’t know about you, but I can drive to Hawaii.~

Yes they are and yes Alaska and Hawaii have interstates but Hawaii has interstates that only allow travel on that island. True continintal interstate traval is is connected in the US thanks to Eisnhower. I could leave home and go anywhere in the US if I want thanks to my favorite general/president.

It’s possible. Suppose you are driving along a road when due to natural occurrences or levee breaks, the road floods. You would then be isolated with no way of getting off the road.

Actually, prior to Eisenhower, everything was pretty much connected (how do you think people got to the west coast?)—my mom took a road trip as a kid from Pittsburgh, PA out to LA—Route 66 anyone?

Anyways, it’s not that it’s a series of trees, it’s a network—there’s local streets, like the one I live on, that feed into larger arteries, those arteries feed into Highways. Most places in the country, the Highways are are also the Interstates—it’s actually a tax designation—but in much of the west, the states have built some of the major state routes up to Interstate standards.

Basically comes down to this—an interstate highway is federally funded. There are many interstates that don’t cross state borders, not just the one in Hawaii. Actually, this article has far more information on the subject, and links to the info on the Interstate system (which is sort of a supergrid):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Highway

(My personal opinion is that LA is in need of “express routes” connecting its highways, but that is a horse of a different color)

I know that it is possible to get from one coast to the other using only public roads, for example, going from California to New Jersey. That’s simple enough to do. But my question is whether or not there might be a small isolated town somewhere where all the roads in that town are cut off from other roads—essentially a block of dead ends, where to get to that town you would have to drive through someone’s private property or walk through a swamp.

Would you include airplane runways as roads? If so, check out aviation fly-in community Jumbolair in Florida (where John Travolta has a house, for instance) which has a runway not connected to a road.

@bpeoples: I believe gooch was referring to Eisenhower before he was president. Check out American Road. It tells the story of the first trans-American journey made by the government before the highway system connected us all. Eisenhower was in a part of it when he was still just a military soldier.

There are some towns in rural Virginia and portions of Appalachia (and I’m sure other parts of the US.) where yes, you do have to drive on dirt roads and I’ve rarely seen a stoplight while driving through. To be honest though…I couldn’t tell you a single name of one.

They’re really un-awesome places.

There are several different types of roads that connect to each other, you can travel on County Highway (number) and it continues on as State Highway (number) which connects to Interstate Highway (number). They are each maintained by a different set of taxpayers.

I grew up in a small town in Illinois. It’s grown to about twenty times the size it was when I was growing up, but I still don’t think it has a traffic light, other than the railroad crossing signals. I lived on a dead end street off a dead end street, but you could drive to any other street in town. I think it’s pretty much the same for any othe small town across the USA. Why would there be a road (street, trail, etc) which was not accessible to other roads?

Yes, you can drive on a paved road all the way to New York City to LA and even Area 51 gateway!