No point going half-assed: take all of British Columbia (simple: just rename it American Columbia ;-), a chunk of the Northwest Territories gets annexed to Alaska in exchange for…Greenland (it will take them a while to figure it out).
Then we can extend I-5 to go all the way from Mexico to Prudhoe Bay !!!
Interesting, but that means we’re still stuck with Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas.
Just move those 4 to near Texas then push the whole lot out of the USA. We fought a war to establish for all history that states can’t secede. We never said they couldn’t be banished for bad behavior.
The Alaska panhandle is really not that strange a feature. There is a mountain range that makes it essentially inaccessible to BC. No roads cross those mountains until you get up to Haines and Skagway. It does seem kind of odd, though, that Juneau, the capital, is only reachable from the rest of the state by air or boat.
You could bring back “54 40 or fight”. 54 40 is/was roughly the latitude of southernmost point of Alaska. Account Suspended
Not a misconception, but an observation. I first started Driving in Denver Colorado. Most of the streets are on a grid North/South, East/West. And you can often see the Rocky Mountains which are to the West. Between that and that I’m in GIS, I use cardinal descriptions for directions.
My Wife is from Pittsburgh. Not a straight street in the city. Confused by three rivers and many bridges. My Wife gives directions by saying left turn/right turn.
I think that the US wins big and Canada loses big in this swap. We already have to put up with one Alberta - why would we want 4 more?
Come for the Alberta.
Stay for the… Alberta.
Think of the new province as “Southern Saskatchewan.” At least then the province would have some vertical relief.
My wife, like most women, is a little bit geo-directionally challenged compared to the average guy. Not lost; just a little handicapped vs Joe Average. I’m a navigation whizkid.
She grew up in Tucson. Which is a basin surrounded by 4 sets of very differently shaped mountains more or less aligned with the cardinal directions. The roads are mostly a grid and between the mountains and the eternal sunshine, figuring out which way in North is not hard.
So we get hitched and she moves to Las Vegas to join me where I’ve been living. Years before anyone had GPS or Google maps or whatever. Vegas is largely, though not entirely, gridded like Tucson. She’s lost and it doesn’t get better with experience. Why not?
Vegas is in a basin, surrounded by distinctive mountain ranges on all 4 sides. But they’re totally in different places vs Tucson. The close big tall ones are N in Tucson and W in Vegas. The distant flat ones are S in Tucson and E in Vegas. Etc. Her gyros were totally and irrecoverably tumbled. It was funny to watch.
If you’re used to knowing North, south, etc. at the drop of a hat, go to Panama. While it’s understandable that I, a person who can get lost in a Sears was consistently lost, my father, who has an excellent sense of direction and never fails to point out he was an Eagle Scout whenever I get lost, was equally perplexed.
Right. Most people have the idea that Panama runs north-south, when it actually runs east and west.
I had a Mormon missionary tell me that the Latter-Day Saints invented “cities with streets in a grid”, and I told him that I’d have to look that up, but that I agreed that it’s worthy of being deemed a modern miracle.
I have a great sense of direction, and my family assumes it’s innate. Even though I’ve explained that I work at it. I always keep track of which way North is, and how to get to where we’re going.
Oh, and how to get back to where we were. I especially do this inside complicated buildings. It’s handy that, after we get shuffled to four different government offices in a sprawling complex, I can say “Wait, if we take the stairs in that corner, we’ll come out right near the car.” Super power!
This is a huge difference between me and my wife. I’m making maps in my head, while she has no interest in keeping track of where she is. Makes driving with her on trips a lesson in patience.
Now, if she has a GPS, she’ll get home okay. She’ll “Turn Left in… One Quarter… Mile.” But she’ll have no idea why.
Modern miracle? What an insult to history.
By 2600 BC, Mohenjo-daro, major cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, were built with blocks divided by a grid of straight streets, running north–south and east–west. …
The tradition of grid plans is continuous in China from the 15th century BC onward in the traditional urban planning of various ancient Chinese states. …
Perhaps the most well-known grid system is that spread through the colonies of the Roman Empire. The archetypal Roman Grid was introduced to Italy first by the Greeks, with such information transferred by way of trade and conquest.
Lived there too. So did then-future wife.
The arrangement of the country wasn’t too bad once you got clued in once.
What buffaloed me for the first 3 or 4 months was driving in Panamá City. This was pre-invasion, before a lot of the really old areas got wrecked. Also pre- any of the autopistas and the explosive growth of recent years.
Anyhow, I’d be exploring along on an unfamiliar semi-major road confident of my general location within the city and my general direction of travel. Then suddenly I’d come upon an intersection that I recognized as being several miles away from “here” and I recognized the cross street as running the direction I thought I’d been going on my street. WTF Batman; did we just go through a wormhole? Nope; just been Ciudad de Panamá-ified. 
It still happens to me after living here for 30 years.
The traffic patterns used to be haphazard. There were not stop lights, and trying to take a left turn off a busy street was a nightmare.
Now the have rationalized traffic a bit, with stoplights at a lot of intersections. However, they often don’t permit left turns, and you may have to go a long way past your intersection before you have a chance to turn around.
That’s fascinating!
One of my exes was born and raised near Panama City. He told me that from his childhood home, he’d go north-west to see the sunset over the Atlantic Ocean, and south-east to see the sunrise over the Pacific.
And the summers weren’t nearly as bad as those in NYC.
That’s true. It never gets to 100 degrees here like it does even in New York.
The whole northern half of Indiana is on a grid. Out in the country you can drive north or south for a few miles, until you get to a jog. Turn on the crossroad for a bit until the curvature of the planet is adjusted for, then turn back north or south again.
In contrast, Georgia roads are just a big messy spider web of interconnected pavement. Not a nice orb web, either- they’re like a two-dimensional black widow’s nest.