Category:
Highways, Roads, Streets and Traffic
Last year, Alex gave us
a UK Concrete Queen. Let it never be said that the Yanks could not keep up!
I found two holders of the 'Miss Kansas Turnpike' title. The first was Theo Tautfest, who won the title in 1960. The second was Lois Rhodus, who held the title in 1961, while simultaneously being 'Miss Kansas City'.
Some info about the Kansas Turnpike from Wikipedia:
The Kansas Turnpike was built from 1954 to 1956, predating the Interstate Highway System. While not part of the system's early plans, the turnpike was eventually incorporated into the Interstate System in late 1956 and is designated today as four different Interstate Highway routes: Interstate 35 (I-35), Interstate 335 (I-335), I-470, and I-70...
Because it predates the Interstate Highway System, the road is not engineered to current Interstate Highway standards and notably lacks a regulation-width median. To reduce the risk of head-on collisions, the Kansas Turnpike now has a continuous, permanent Jersey barrier in the median over its entire length. On opening, there was no fixed speed limit on the highway; drivers were merely asked to keep to a "reasonable and proper" limit, although, shortly afterward, signs were erected in certain stretches indicating a maximum speed of 80 mph (130 km/h).

Clinton Daily Democrat - May 31, 1960

"Lois Rhodus, Miss Kansas Turnpike, poses in a convertible at the Kansas City Athletics American League ballpark in 1961." Source: Pageant, by Keith Lovegrove
Residents of the Northeastern U.S. may be familiar with the concept of shunpikes. Though I lived in Massachusetts for five years and just learned of their existence recently.
A 'shunpike' is a road deliberately built, or taken, to avoid a toll road. It's short for 'shunning a turnpike'. This differentiates a shunpike from a 'freeway' which also doesn't have tolls, but wasn't deliberately built to avoid an existing toll road.
More info:
wikipedia

image source: hmdb.org
Shunpikes are like the engineering equivalent of
spite houses. Their purpose is to give the finger to someone else (the owner of the toll road). As such, they often inspire bitter grievances and feuds. Details of one such feud was reported in the
Poughkeepsie Journal (June 3, 1962):
Dutchess Turnpike Co. was chartered in 1802 to build a new road from the Courthouse in the village of Poughkeepsie over the approximate path of the old Filkintown road for some 35 miles east to Sharon, Conn... The president of the Turnpike Co. was Jesse Oakley who had a storing, freighting and ferrying business at the Upper Landing, near the mouth of the Fallkill.
The principal landowner in the Lithgow area was old David Johnston who called his vast property and home Lithgow, a name borrowed by the little settlement nearby... David Johnson was so infuriated that the new turnpike was laid out considerably west of the old road, and so, quite a distance from his home, that he built the Shunpike on his own land...
Whatever the plans for the Shunpike were at that time, they certainly irked the Dutchess Turnpike Co. It published a notice, signed Jesse Oakley and dated Dec. 16, 1809, in the Poughkeepsie Journal of Dec. 20 telling of its intention of asking the next Legislature to permit to to change the location of its toll gates "from time to time in case any road shall be opened to permit travelers to pass around it. . ."
Residents of the Towns of Washington and Clinton promptly called an "Anti-Turnpike" meeting for Dec. 29.
1970: Liverpool officer Lionel Piper urged young women to wear mini skirts. In the interests of road safety. Sure, that was it... road safety!

The Hackensack Record - Jan 14, 1970

Young women in the 1970s dressed for road safety
Throughout the 20th century, it seemed to be widely assumed that the mood of the husband was determined by the behavior of his wife at home. So, concluded the District of Columbia's traffic safety office in 1963, if a man was in a 'disgruntled disposition' and consequently got into a traffic accident, it must have been the fault of his wife who didn't cheer him up adequately when he left home with a goodbye kiss "as though she meant it."
See also:
Whose fault is it when your husband is cross at breakfast?

Minneapolis Star - Nov 12, 1963
Mills & Boon books are the British equivalent of Harlequin romances.
Which is the setup for an odd fact, which sounded to me like an urban legend when I first came across it, but it turned out to be true. As you drive along the M6 Motorway in Britain, you're driving on copies of Mills & Boon romances, because 2.5 million of these books were used in the construction of the road.
According to BBC News:
about 2,500,000 of the books were acquired during the construction of the M6 Toll. The novels were pulped at a recycling firm in south Wales and used in the preparation of the top layer of the West Midlands motorway, according to building materials suppliers Tarmac. The pulp which helps hold the Tarmac and asphalt in place also acts as a sound absorber and is vital in the construction of roads.
Richard Beal, the company's project manager for the M6 Toll, said the books' absorbent qualities made them a vital ingredient in the construction of the country's first pay-as-you-go motorway.... for every mile of motorway approximately 45,000 books were needed.