Feeder Road vs. Frontage Road

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Katie and I’m calling from Denton, Texas.

Hey, Katie, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Yeah, what’s up?

Thank you so much. Something’s been bothering me ever since I moved for school.

I lived in Houston, Texas for my entire childhood and grew up calling the road that goes by the highway, the feeder road. This is what I knew it as, like my whole life.

And so as soon as I moved up to BFW for school, I would say the feeder road and people would look at me like I was crazy and would say that it was called the access road. And people actually got kind of like upset about it until I started calling it the access road.

They did.

Yeah, it was kind of a big deal at one point.

So I have graduated to calling it the access road. But I guess my question is, is there a certain name for it? Am I wrong in calling it the feeder? Because I don’t know. I just kind of personally like that better.

First, Katie, let me just say they should not have been giving you a hard time. I mean, you listen to the show, so you know that’s our attitude, right?

Right.

Because we have different words for things sometimes. That is part of the delight of language.

Absolutely.

And it turns out in Houston, where you’re from, they call it the feeder road. So you’re fine.

I know, right? You grew up with that. Everybody around you called it the feeder road. You’re normal in Houston.

But the generic term for it is usually frontage road. You’ll probably find that in a lot of Department of Transportation glossaries for a variety of states.

Actually, there’s an interesting fellow. I think he’s in San Antonio. He calls himself the Texas Highwayman, and he’s a website called TexasHighwayman.com. And he’s got a really great glossary where he talks about this and specifically says, feeder road is what’s used in Houston and around there, and a couple little pockets here and there in other parts of Texas.

Most people call it the service road or the frontage road or a variety of terms. But these are these roads that are parallel to the main highway, and every once in a while, you can go off of them onto the main highway, right?

Feeds the traffic, right?

Yeah, it feeds the traffic. It makes a lot of sense. And if there’s a traffic jam on the main road, they serve to provide a release valve for that traffic jam so people can get off and go take another route to their destination.

But do check out his website. His name is Brian Purcell, TexasHighwayMan.com. He’s got really good stuff on there about this and a whole bunch of other highway stuff.

Okay. Well, I’ll have to check him out, and maybe I will keep on calling it the feeder road, and people can just, you know, deal with it.

Yeah, you know, we run across this all the time where people have their own experience with language. They have an idiolect that differs from maybe a new workplace or a new school or a new family member or something. And there’s always this period of reconciliation where you kind of negotiate, all right, am I going to take on your words? Are you going to take on mine? Are we going to do it 50-50?

And it sounds like it didn’t go all that well for you for this word, but there’s nothing wrong with saying feeder road instead of access road or frontage road.

Yeah, you’ll start a lot of conversations, right?

Or stop down a lot of conversations, too. That’s the problem. You know, I think it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but apparently it is.

I hope we’ve been some help to you.

Oh, yes, you definitely have. Thank you so much.

All right, take care now.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, Katie.

Bye.

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