Traveling north on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Interstate 278 one clear, sunny August afternoon in 2001, a month prior to 9-11. We've just merged onto the expressway from the left having come off the Williamsburg Bridge. We're about to leave the Williamsburg neighborhood, heading into Greenpoint to the left and East Williamsburg to the right. Dig the speed limit here, a paltry nanny state 45 miles per hour. Let's face, when you build an arterial highway where drivers can only do 45 miles an hour, you failed!

We're heading toward the next northbound exit, Exit 33, the famous radio traffic report landmark known to evening rush hour sufferers as McGuinness-Humboldt. We have a big-ass commercial grade van directly in front of us and a van wannabee Suzuki Grand Vitara mini SUV to the right, both showing off their spare tires to the world behind them. Though the beat looking van is almost certainly used for commercial purposes, it has a standard license plate, which allows it to travel on parkways where commercial plates are forbidden, even if they're on a Mini Cooper car. While commercial plates may be an advantage if you need to frequently load and unload cargo in congested neighborhoods, not having one allows much faster travel to places like Kennedy Airport, where you can use the Belt Parkway, or to LaGuardia Airport via the Grand Central Parkway. Depends on your business needs. In my youth Suzuki, like Honda was primarily known for motorcycles. Unlike Honda, they didn't transition into four wheeled vehicles very well. Suzuki cars were notoriously unreliable, always ranking low in statistic based references like Consumer Reports.

Moving on, the Grand Vitara has passed out of view, or we passed it. Maybe it broke down and sits helpless in the lane behind us. Our front right companion now is another commercial van, only this one has commercial plates. I say plates instead of plate because New York is one of those hassle states that make you have two license plates, front and back. The flip side of that inconvenience is it forces plate thieves to undo 8 bolts instead of four, combined with having to move about the vehicle more, increasing chance of getting caught. Not that it did us much good when our Nissan Sentra had its plates stolen after a blizzard. The BQE evidently doesn't feel just having the name Queens on the big overhead directional sign is enough of an incentive to draw drivers north, so for insurance they added Bronx. One tiny problem with that, it really should be called THE Bronx. Even sillier though is that they insist you're heading East. Why? Because Interstate 78, the parent route I-278 belongs to, is technically an East-West highway and this is an extension of the eastbound part of it. Only you're not going East here, but North, at least if you're headed to the Bronx. I-278 never even ties in again with its I-78 parent. That relationship died in New Jersey. Once you're in the Bronx, Interstates 87 and 95 rule.

Exit 33 is drawing near and now a Yellow truck has joined the party along with another spare tire lugging van, this one a passenger van, possibly taking travelers northeast to LaGuardia Airport. Now that's an idea for adding to that big directional sign we passed earlier for Queens and the Bronx. It certainly had enough dead space to add in the airport, which would have been most helpful.

We're finally at the McGuinness Boulevard, Humboldt Street exit 33. In addition to their strange relationship, these are probably the most commonly misspelled streets in New York City. McGuinness is almost certainly misspelled with 1 N, McGuiness. I'm sure others spell it the Scottish way, MacGuinness. Others probably assume its designation is Street, because that's what Humboldt is and I'm sure most New Yorkers assume Humboldt is spelled Humbolt. Then there's the fact that in reality, especially if the Brooklyn Queens Expressway weren't here to emphasize the transition, that these roads are basically a single road from end to end, just changing name as they cross Meeker Avenue beneath the BQE. All the more striking given that is that the relatively major, dual carriageway thoroughfare McGuinness Boulevard becomes the relatively minor two lane Humboldt Street. Streets are almost always the deprecated parallel routes of more substantial boulevards, sort of in the same way Roads and Drives usually defer to parallel Avenues. There are exceptions of course, maybe as many as there are norms. 63rd Drive and 63rd Road in Rego Park are two examples and actually the same road renamed after crossing Queens Boulevard. Both are far busier commercial routes than parallel 63rd Avenue. McGuinness Boulevard goes leftward through Greenpoint until it crosses the Pulaski Bridge into Queens where it runs into another negligible Street street, 11th Street in Long Island City. So there you have it, one boulevard, bookended by two streets, with a fairly major, big deal bridge thrown in.

Don't you just love that little Exit 33 sign? Don't you just want to take it home and hug it to death? It's a very usual exit directional. Most are squares or smallish landscape oriented rectangles at least twice the size of this one.