If You Drive Down a Stretch of Route 66, the Road Will Play “America the Beautiful”

If you find your­self in New Mex­i­co, trav­el­ing down a stretch of Route 66, you can dri­ve over a quar­ter mile-long rum­ble strip and your car’s tires will play “Amer­i­ca the Beau­ti­ful.”  That’s assum­ing you’re dri­ving at the speed lim­it, 45 miles per hour. Don’t believe me? Watch the clip above.

As Atlas Obscu­ra explains, the “Musi­cal High­way” or “Singing High­way” was “installed in 2014 as part of a part­ner­ship between the New Mex­i­co Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion and the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Chan­nel.” It’s all part of an elab­o­rate attempt to get dri­vers to slow down and obey the speed lim­it. “Get­ting the rum­ble strips to ser­e­nade trav­el­ers required a fair bit of engi­neer­ing. The indi­vid­ual strips had to be placed at the pre­cise dis­tance from one anoth­er to pro­duce the notes they need­ed to sing their now-sig­na­ture song.”

You’ll find this par­tic­u­lar stretch of road between Albu­querque and Tijeras. Here’s the loca­tion on Google Maps. Oth­er musi­cal rum­ble strips have popped up in Den­mark, Japan and South Korea.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Turned Into Google Dri­ving Direc­tions & Pub­lished as a Free eBook

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps