I came across Peter Gorman’s artwork of Omaha intersections, and to my knowledge no one has done this for Lincoln. It had been stewing in my brain for a while, so I finally decided to pick up my (digital) pen and draw it myself. I think I’m going to make a poster and a T-shirt of it for myself. At this moment, Spoofy Randomness doesn’t have a store so I doubt if it will be printed up for general consumption, unless there’s significant demand. (And yes, it’s copyrighted, ya dang internet scalpers!)
Choosing which intersections to include was a bit tricky, so if your favorite didn’t make the cut, sorry. I decided no freeway interchanges fairly quickly, and it had to be in Lincoln city limits. Runners-up included 56th/Cotner/Randolph, Cotner/66th/Starr, Cotner/Adams/66th (Cotner is very unique, okay?), W Fletcher/NW 13th, 14th/Superior, Capitol/Randolph/G, Pine Lake/91st, 84th/Yankee Hill/Yankee Woods, Fallbrook/Tallgrass, and 33rd/Sheridan. I actually had finished drawing 56th/Cornhusker/Havelock/Superior/Touzalin/Russell when I realized that I had not included Rosa Parks Way, so it got eliminated because I had another Cornhusker intersection less than a mile away and there were too many road names involved.
A couple interesting (well, let’s be honest, interesting for me and not many others) bits of trivia from this map. First, the top left does not include Pinnacle Arena Dr in the title. There’s some debate as to when Salt Creek Rdwy ends and Pinnacle Arena Dr begins. A lot of maps have it at the left roundabout, but the signage actually shows the change occurring at N 8th St. Being an OpenStreetMaps guy, I follow the rule of signage, hence that decision. The other unusual choice I had to make was Nebraska Parkway’s name (top middle). Currently, it is actually Nebraska Highway, but very soon (in construction terms, 2024ish) it will have a name change to Nebraska Parkway as N-2 will be rerouted onto the new south leg of the beltway and Nebraska Highway will join Lincoln’s parkway system as Business N-2, hence the renaming. By doing this, this also allowed me to feature every parkway (yes Rosa Parks Way is actually part of the parkway system, and yes, it is a glorious pun) in some form. Also, yes, there are a few side streets that connect that aren’t shown. Artistic liberty. Same goes with scaling (especially on O Street).
I wanted something unique, other than a different style of artwork, to set my work off from Gorman’s. Hence, including O Street (despite technically not being an intersection). While technically it has five names (Road 9, O Street Road, West O Street, O Street, and East Union Road, and also designated the Bess Streeter Aldritch Memorial Highway for a stretch), it is arguably the longest stretch of straight Main Street in the world (there’s some debate on this matter), with no curves between south of Waco to the Missouri River, and 9 Rd after a slight curve continues west almost to Grand Island.
On a non-road geek note, this art had me tinker with some things that I didn’t really do with webcomics. My biggest problem was how to make the road widths consistent. This led to a rabbit hole that never really answered my question (I just drew a thick line over a screenshot of the map and outlined it on a new layer, then discarded the layers with the thick lines and the map), but did introduce me to the world of vectors and how to use them in Clip Studio. WHY DID I NOT LEARN HOW TO DO THIS WHEN I WAS MAKING COMICS????? Man, that would have made life so much easier. (I was aware vectors were a thing, but didn’t know much about them. Remember, I never took art after 6th grade, and I was still on an Apple IIGS then…)
