Terminology: transportAYSHUN etc.

This newsletter is being written from a little outside the Washington DC Beltway by a writer settled in the United States for 16 years, born in Cambridge, England of European parents who travelled extensively in Asia in his youth and was based in Australia until 1980. It will rather inevitably therefore reflect an international outlook. Its readership and subject matter will be mainly American, at least to start with, and therefore we will generally use American terminology and measures. I wish however we could abolish the cumbersome and ugly ‘-ation’ that Americans put on the end of the perfectly good English noun ‘transport.’ And I’d love to spell the raised edge of the road a ‘kerb’ but I suspect we would look too British to our mainly American readership if we did that. We would like to introduce foreign terms where we think they improve communication. For example we like the British/Australian term ‘carriageway.’ A ‘carriageway’ has no equivalent in American English but it describes a continuously paved and unbounded section of roadway. Thus residential and collector roadways without any median are single carriageway, expressways are dual-carriageway, some highways with reversible central lanes are triple carriageway, and the New Jersey Turnpike in its middle section is a quadruple carriageway. We don’t much like the jargon words for highway high tech, namely the European ‘telematics’ or the American ITS or indeed much of the Pentagon-style shopping list of acronyms, tho’ we suspect we’ll have to use many of them for the lack of understood alternatives. We will use with great reluctance the mind-numbingly pervasive adjectives ‘intelligent’ and ‘advanced.’ Such labels seem to imply that other systems are dumb and retarded, and the marketing guys should be asked to be less impolite to competitors and predecessors. Can’t we have a little semantic imagination in the naming of new systems?

‘e-toll’

We’d like to push the term ‘e-toll’ as an abbrevation for electronic tolls and electronic tolling. Words have resonance through association and we think there’s an obvious analog with e-mail — e-tolling is fast, convenient, economical and takes good advantage of high tech. Won’t the public grasp the essence of electronic tolling better than if we use the jargony ETTM, ETC or AVI?

‘Expressway’ will be our preferred generic term for a limited access divided highway with grade-separated crossings. The U.S. Federal Highway Administration has tried to popularize the term ‘freeway’ which is the dominant useage on the west coast. Originally ‘free’ meant free of troublesome cross traffic at grade and free of traffic lights, but in comparison with toll roads it has taken on the connotation of meaning ‘free’ of tolls. At least it is an ambiguous term, so we will use the term ‘expressway’ as the best generic term for the highest standard highways whether tolled or ‘free.’ The British ‘motorway’ and the various European ‘auto-’ derivatives seem archaic to us because all roads have had predominantly motored vehicles on them since horses ceased being used for propulsion about 70 years ago. The Australians originally adopted the term ‘freeway’ but with all the new ones being built with tolls they thought they needed a new word. Maybe like the ad people who think it is somehow uncouth to suggest customers ‘buy’ from them and instead ask them to ‘pick up’ the product, so the Australian namers have eschewed use of the term ‘toll road’ and are getting everyone confused by calling toll roads ‘motorways.’ We love the historic term ‘turnpike’ and think it has positive associations but we are surprised by how many people don’t understand it, whereas everyone seems to know what a ‘toll road’ is, and that’s why we’ve chosen to go with it as the generic term. But we’re subject to correction and conversion on all this, and we’d like your reactions. Words matter a lot. They affect understanding and what people think. Editor•