Highways
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50 free Highways trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Highways are more than a way to get from one place to another. They carry stories: wagon trails that became numbered routes, wartime roads cut through wilderness in a single season, and scenic drives that people travel across the world to see. Much of American history, and a fair share of its music and television, happened along the shoulder of a road. This quiz covers the roads themselves and everything around them. Expect questions on famous American routes such as Route 66 and U.S. Route 1, on the people who planned and paid for the first long-distance roads, on signs, lane markings and interchange designs, and on remarkable roads abroad, from mountain passes to motorways. A few questions follow the highway into pop culture. It is written for road-trippers, geography fans, truckers, students of American history and anyone putting together a trivia night or a printable quiz for a long drive. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will know the story behind the next road sign you pass.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01From the 1920s until a 1954 rule change, American stop signs had a background of which color?
Yellow
Yellow was chosen because no red material of the day could resist fading in the sun. The 1954 national sign manual finally switched the stop sign to white letters on a red field.
Q 02Which country switched from driving on the left to the right overnight on "Dagen H" in September 1967?
Sweden
Sweden cleared its roads of all non-essential traffic in the early hours of a Sunday to make the change. In a 1955 referendum, 83 percent of voters had wanted to keep driving on the left.
Q 03A highway off-ramp passes straight through three floors of the Gate Tower Building in which Japanese city?
Osaka
Osaka got its drive-through office block after the landowners refused to sell and negotiated for about five years. The elevator skips from floor 4 to floor 8, because the road is the tenant in between.
Q 04The Darién Gap, the only break in the Pan-American Highway, lies on Panama's border with which country?
Colombia
Colombia begins on the far side of a roadless rainforest: the highway stops at Yaviza in Panama and resumes about 66 miles away at the port of Turbo.
Q 05Which country's Highway 1, a loop of about 14,500 km around its coast, is the world's longest national highway?
Australia
Australia's Highway 1 joins every mainland state capital, though it misses the national capital, Canberra. It outruns the Trans-Siberian Highway by more than 3,000 km.
Q 06Which author called Route 66 the Mother Road in a 1939 novel about Dust Bowl migrants heading west?
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck used the name in The Grapes of Wrath, his story of a family fleeing the drought-stricken plains. Boosters preferred a grander title for the road: the Main Street of America.
Q 07What is the name of Germany's motorway network, where many stretches have only an advisory speed limit?
Autobahn
Autobahn stretches with no fixed limit still carry an advisory speed of 130 km/h, about 81 mph. A driver who goes faster and crashes can be held more liable for the damage.
Q 08U.S. Route 1 runs about 2,370 miles from the Canadian border in Maine to which Florida city?
Key West
Key West became the end of the line in 1938, when the Overseas Highway across the islands was finished. U.S. Route 1 is the longest north–south road in the country.
Q 09Which president, impressed by Germany's motorways in World War II, championed the Interstate Highway System?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower had also crossed the country with a 1919 Army truck convoy that averaged only about 5 miles per hour. The system he signed into law in 1956 is officially named after him.
Q 10Which state's stretch of U.S. Route 50 was named the Loneliest Road in America by Life magazine?
Nevada
Nevada turned the 1986 put-down into a tourist campaign, with a passport that drivers get stamped in towns along the way. Finishers earn a certificate, signed by the governor, saying they survived.
Q 11Route 66 began in Chicago and crossed eight states to end in which California beach city?
Santa Monica
Santa Monica became the western end in 1936, when the route was extended from Los Angeles. The pier is called its symbolic finish, though the official end was a street corner farther inland.
Q 12Which San Francisco landmark carries both U.S. Route 101 and California's Highway 1 across the same strait?
Golden Gate Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge splits its six lanes unevenly to match the rush: on weekday mornings, four of them run southbound into the city. Tolls are collected only from southbound drivers.
Q 13Which scenic road runs 469 miles from Shenandoah National Park to Great Smoky Mountains National Park?
Q 21Which Canadian singer wrote "Life Is a Highway", later covered by Rascal Flatts for Pixar's "Cars"?
Tom Cochrane
Tom Cochrane rebuilt the song from a shelved demo after a famine-relief trip to eastern Africa, looking for something positive in what he had seen. It was his only top-40 hit in the United States.
Q 22Which hard rock band released the 1979 album "Highway to Hell", the last to feature singer Bon Scott?
AC/DC
AC/DC cracked the top 100 of the American album chart for the first time with it, peaking at number 17. Bon Scott died in February 1980, less than seven months after its release.
Q 23Which singer's 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited" is named after the road that ran through his birthplace, Duluth?
Bob Dylan
Blue Ridge Parkway
The Blue Ridge Parkway is the longest linear park in the United States, crossing 29 counties in Virginia and North Carolina. At its northern end it runs straight into Skyline Drive.
Q 14Going-to-the-Sun Road crosses the Continental Divide at Logan Pass in which national park?
Glacier
Glacier National Park's only through road takes about ten weeks to plow each spring. Up to 80 feet of snow can lie near Logan Pass, in a snowfield that crews call the Big Drift.
Q 15Hawaii's winding Hana Highway, with about 620 curves and 59 bridges, is on which island?
Maui
Maui's road to Hana covers only about 52 miles from Kahului, yet the drive takes around two and a half hours. Of its 59 bridges, 46 are just one lane wide.
Q 16California's Highway 1 clings to sea cliffs and crosses the Bixby Creek Bridge in which coastal region?
Big Sur
Big Sur was one of the most isolated corners of California until the road opened in 1937, after 18 years of construction. Landslides have closed it more than 55 times.
Q 17The Great River Road, marked by a green pilot's-wheel sign, follows which river through ten states?
Mississippi
The Mississippi is shadowed by the Great River Road for about 2,340 miles, on a patchwork of state and local roads. The sign shows a steamboat inside the pilot's wheel.
Q 18The Overseas Highway through the Florida Keys was built on a railroad bed laid by which Gilded Age tycoon?
Henry Flagler
Henry Flagler finished his railroad across the islands in 1912, a project nicknamed his folly. After a 1935 hurricane wrecked the line, its roadbed and bridges were sold to the state for $640,000.
Q 19Wall Drug, a roadside stop famous for billboards offering free ice water, is in which state?
South Dakota
South Dakota's Wall Drug was struggling until the owner's wife, Dorothy Hustead, thought of advertising free ice water to travelers bound for Mount Rushmore. The water is still free.
Q 20The Million Dollar Highway, a cliff-edge stretch of U.S. 550 between Silverton and Ouray, is in which state?
Colorado
Colorado's Million Dollar Highway has steep drops, hairpin curves and few guardrails. Nobody agrees on the name: one legend says it cost a million dollars a mile, another that its fill dirt holds gold ore.
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on a highway that ran all the way south to New Orleans and its music. The album was preceded by his hit single "Like a Rolling Stone".
Q 24Which singer and pianist's trio made the first recording of Bobby Troup's 1946 song about Route 66?
Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole recorded it in Los Angeles the same year Troup got the idea, on a drive from Pennsylvania to California. Troup first planned a tune about U.S. 40, until his wife Cynthia suggested Route 66.
Q 25Which former "Little House on the Prairie" star played an angel in the 1980s TV drama "Highway to Heaven"?
Michael Landon
Michael Landon created the series and directed most of its episodes himself. He said the idea came to him in Beverly Hills traffic, as he watched drivers honking at one another.
Q 26Which rock singer turned a ticket for driving 62 mph into a 1984 hit about the national 55 mph limit?
Sammy Hagar
Sammy Hagar was pulled over at two in the morning on a nearly empty four-lane road outside Albany, New York. "I Can't Drive 55" stayed in his set through his years fronting Van Halen.
Q 27Which brushless shaving cream lined American highways with rows of small rhyming signs from the 1920s to 1963?
Burma-Shave
Burma-Shave usually spread each verse across six small signs, spaced so that passing drivers read one line at a time. The signs came down after Philip Morris bought the company in 1963.
Q 28Which actor barked orders over the police radio as chief Dan Mathews in the 1950s TV series "Highway Patrol"?
Broderick Crawford
Broderick Crawford had won the Best Actor Oscar for All the King's Men a few years before taking the role. Asked why the hit show ended after 156 episodes, he said they had run out of crimes.
Q 29The Tail of the Dragon, with 318 curves in 11 miles, runs from Deals Gap, North Carolina, into which state?
Tennessee
Tennessee holds the whole 11-mile run, where bends carry names like Copperhead Corner and Gravity Cavity. The speed limit, once 55 mph, was cut to 30 mph in 2005.
Q 30Roadside mission bells along California's U.S. 101 mark which historic route linking 21 Spanish missions?
El Camino Real
El Camino Real got its first marker bells in 1906, each hung from a tall post shaped like a shepherd's crook. The Spanish name means the Royal Road.