Ring road

Cleveland, OH and San Antonio, TX, in the United States, also each have two, while Houston, Texas will have three official ring roads (not including the downtown freeway loop).

For example, the Baltimore Beltway in Maryland formerly crossed Baltimore Harbor on a high arch bridge prior to its collapse in 2024, and much of the partially completed Stockholm Ring Road in Sweden runs through tunnels or over long bridges.

Some towns or cities on sea coasts or near rugged mountains cannot have a full ring road.

Sometimes, the presence of significant natural or historical areas limits route options, as for the long-proposed Outer Beltway around Washington, D.C., where options for a new western Potomac River crossing are limited by a nearly continuous corridor of heavily visited scenic, natural, and historical landscapes in the Potomac River Gorge and adjacent areas.

By creating easy access by car to large areas of land, they can also act as a catalyst for development, leading to urban sprawl and car-centric planning.

[2] Ring roads have also been criticised for splitting communities and being difficult to navigate for pedestrians and cyclists.

[3] Most orbital motorways (or beltways) are purpose-built major highways around a town or city, typically without either signals or road or railroad crossings.

An excellent example of this is London's North Circular/South Circular ring roads, which are largely made up of (mainly congested) ordinary city streets.

Interstate spurs, on the other hand, generally have three-digit numbers beginning with an odd digit.

The first is a loose conglomeration of four major arterial roads with an average distance of 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) from the downtown core.

[6] The second and more prominent ring road is named Anthony Henday Drive; it circles the city at an average distance of 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) from the downtown core.

It is a freeway for its entire 78-kilometre (48 mi) length, and was built to reduce inner-city traffic congestion, created a bypass of Yellowhead Trail, and has improved the movement of goods and services across Edmonton and the surrounding areas.

[7][8] Stoney Trail is a ring road that circles the city of Calgary, Alberta, for an entire length of 101-kilometre (63 mi).

In major transit hubs, such as the Île-de-France region surrounding Paris and the Frankfurt area, major national highways converge just outside city limits before forming one of several routes of an urban network of roads circling the city.

Due to its unique architectural beauty and history, it has also been called the "Lord of the ring roads", and is declared by UNESCO as part of Vienna's World Heritage Site.