superhighway

super- +‎ highway

superhighway (plural superhighways)

1. (US) An expressway, especially one designed for high speeds.
2. (by extension) A major route that carries most of the traffic going in a given direction by a specified mode of transportation.
   • 1996, United States Congress House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Subcommittee on Aviation, Computer outages at the Federal Aviation Administration's Air Traffic Control Center in Aurora, Illinois:

     We cannot and should not be rebuilding old "two lane" sections of the air transport system with segments having "eight lane superhighway" capacity without knowing the full economic, safety, and environmental impacts of the entire air traffic superhighway.

   • 2015, Ian Morris, Stephen Macedo, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, →ISBN:

     By 1400, however, Western Europeans had developed their own versions of oceangoing ships, and these transformed the much narrower Atlantic Ocean from a barrier into a superhighway.

   • 2018, Mikael Colville-Andersen, Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism, →ISBN:

     One of them was exploring the possibility of a bicycle superhighway along the River Dodder.

3. (figurative) The primary mechanism used in the movement of electronic data or information; information superhighway.
   • 1996, V. J. J. M. Bekkers, Bert-Jaap Koops, Sjaak Nouwt, Emerging Electronic Highways:New Challenges for Politics and Law, →ISBN:

     In the discussion about the pros and cons of the electronic superhighway, people often refer to the Internet.

   • 1996, Richard Collins, Converging Media? Converging Regulation?, →ISBN, page 29:

     How should we reinterpret the universal service obligation for the superhighway? It is clear that price is already a barrier to access to the basic telephone service.

   • 2000, Charles Addo, Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions: A Case Study, page 113:

     As both Bell Atlantic and TCI have made clear, their superhighway will give them full control over the programming from its point of origin through its delivery to the home.

• For quotations using this term, see Citations:superhighway.