The sign on the right side of the road said, “Entering Lincoln”. One half mile later, there was another sign that said, “Entering Lincoln” on the left side of the road. So I went to google maps to see the town border between Lincoln and Concord runs down the middle of the street. Some other examples: The La Jolla, CA, border partially runs down the middle of Interstate-5. Part of the VT-QC border runs down the middle of Rue Canusa (cute). I’ve seen several others.
Do they intentionally build roads along borders, or do the two districts agree to alter the border for convenience after the roads are built?
In the case of Canusa, Wikipedia quotes, “Strict border crossing policies” but doesn’t get into specifics other than you can’t walk across the road. The several people who live on the street can’t take a left in their car without crossing the border. Near (but not on) Rue Canusa, is a company called Rock of Ages Canada, but 10% of the building is in the USA. The whole town looks like a smuggler’s dream. (They should rename one side of the street to Usacan, and the other side to Usacan’t)
In Lloydminster, Saskatchewan/Alberta, Wikipedia suggests that the main street was placed along the Fourth Meridian of the Dominion Land Survey and that the provinces of Sask/Alta were created a couple of years afterwards (using the same meridian as the border).
At the western edge of VT is the Alburgh crossing into Canada. If you go there from Rouse’s Point, NY you can drive over dinky, little, hardly used Line Rd. I know of lots of Township Line Rds & County Line Rds but despite not having ‘Country’ in the name this is really Country Line Rd. Yes, I rode down it swerving from side to side, saying, “I’m in Canada, I’m in the US, I’m in Canada, I’m in the US, I’m in Canada, I’m in the US” Made a dozen or so illegal crossings in a matter of seconds. Interpol may or may not have a warrant for my arrest because of it.
There is a road I occasionally travel that is mostly in Allegheny County, until about 1/10 of a mile before it ends, where it is in Westmoreland County very briefly.
When road maintenance is done, the Allegheny County work crew stops precisely at the County border. The short section of Westmoreland County road is a mess, all potholes and cracked asphalt.
I guess Allegheny County got tired of dealing with phone calls complaining about that section of road, so they posted a sign there that says, Allegheny County Maintenance Ends Here, I always laugh at the “fuck you, Westmoreland County” attitude.
It seems to me that placing municipal borders along roads is the only sensible arrangement. How else would you do it? You wouldn’t want a border to pass through a building, so part of the building is in one jurisdiction and part is in another.
It is very common. In many cases the “town on one side - township on the other side” is because one side was extended to include a sub division in the city proper. I particularly like Oberlin, Ohio near me. That wide section to the south connected to the main city with a narrow strip is to allow retail development by providing a path for the water and sewer lines. It was a contentious plan and took years to get approved.
I remember that crossing. One day I was heading down QC A15 towards Rouses Point and heard about the long lines, so I took the dinky road over to the Alburgh crossing. When I got to the border, the agent in the booth had fallen asleep there was so little traffic. I had to literally rap on his window to wake him up. The trouble was that there was no easy way to get back to I-87.
The thread reminds of bridge crossing Cobb’s Creek on City Line (now called City Ave.) that is the triple point between Philadelphia, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties. It was in bad need of repairs and none of the three counties accepted jurisdiction.
Don’t mention this thread to my sister! Outside her house there’s a strip of grass, a pavement (sidewalk), and then another strip of grass. The council border is the pavement, so the two strips of grass are cut by different council teams at different times and frequencies.
The tail end of the main road in our old subdivision was split by a town line. 4 houses were in the town, the rest weren’t. So the road in front of their houses was town/county divided. It seemed that the county did the repaving.
The original town line had been a circle (pure genius) but had been adjusted here and there. So the line was straight down the street. Except …
The last house on the other side had the town line thru it. Maybe. Even the county’s own maps for various purposes went various ways. Some in the town, some in the county, some split.
A somewhat relevant anecdote: my sister was once in a strange auto accident. She was driving on a road, the centerline of which happened to be the border between Chicago and a suburb. She was stopped at a red light. On the other side of the light, facing her, was a car driven by a young man with apparent aspirations to be a race-car driver. When the light turned green, he floored his accelerator and accelerated so hard that the lug bolts holding one of his wheels sheared off (!), sending the spinning wheel careening forward and hitting my sister’s car. When the (Chicago) police arrived, there was some confusion because at the time of the accident, my sister’s car was in Chicago but the other car was on the other side of the road in the suburb. It took some time for the cops to decide which police department had jurisdiction. (They eventually decided it was Chicago, which I suspect was partly just because the Chicago police were already at the scene.)
Never mind township borders - how about the people of Baarle, which is in both Belgium and the Netherlands, depending on which bit of a shop you’re standing in
There was an episode of How the States Got Their Shapes that showed a restaurant where the border of Tennessee and Georgia went through the restaurant. If I recall correctly, serving alcohol was legal on one side of the restaurant but not the other.
The border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is very tortuous. It runs through workplaces, churches, roads and towns.
There are many versions of the joke - ‘I was going to overtake the slow truck, but I didn’t have my passport with me’.
We actually had a case here in Washington a few years back where a hotel that straddles the border was being used for smuggling. It probably didn’t help their case that the hotel, which has since been shut down, had an EXTREMELY on-the-nose name;
