King Of The Road, Scott Kozel, Profiled

"Kozel came to understand that our cities have been remade to accommodate cars, that well over half our downtowns’ footprints are devoted to driving and parking them, that our once-pedestrian culture – in which people lived within walking distance of work or streetcar, and shopped, schooled and worshiped within blocks of home – was erased by them.

Kozel’s Web site, called “Roads to the Future,” [www.roadstothefuture.com] answers all manner of questions about the Old Dominion’s roads – how and when they were built, why they were built where they were, how much traffic they carry, the genius of their engineering. It does so with such specificity and such disinterested language that it’s become a go-to source for government officials, journalists, historians and students.

...The site’s reliability comes thanks, in no small measure, to Kozel’s painstaking work out of doors. With his Buick’s odometer ticking toward 50,000, his assignment today is to snap a few pictures of Va. 288’s newest section, a 16.7-mile stretch of four-lane that is the western piece of a perimeter highway ringing the capital."