I grew up in Iowa and Wisconsin. Iowa’s road system is beautiful—a road every mile, every few miles a paved road, all either east-west or north-south. If you know the general direction of where you’re going, you can bumble around with confidence. It’s Manhattan over an entire state.

Wisconsin, nothing makes any sense. Sure, sure, Wisconsin is maybe a little hillier, but the roads curve and splice together in crazy ways in the flat valleys, too, and the roads adhere to no particular direction, and of course County B in one county bears no relation to County B in the adjacent county. And there are so many routes where I live in southwest Wisconsin where you might as well say, “you can’t get there from here,” given how indirect and circuitous the best route is in relation to how the crow flies. If you like driving for hours at 35mph while watching out for deer, Wisconsin’s county highway system is for you.

This is somewhat unique to Southwest Wisconsin due to all the bluffs. I've lived in Eastern Wisconsin and the Northwest, and while they aren't quite Iowa's grid, they're generally all east-west or north-south running.

I live in Wisconsin. I'm a cyclist, and I love the roads. The urban folklore was that the state maintained good paved roads in order for the milk trucks to reach the dairy farms during the winter, when everything would otherwise turn into a mud pit. I read about "mud season" in Ukraine, and it was instantly familiar.

I hadn't thought much about the circuitous-ness, but it's true. My assumption all along has been that the roads have to work around the labyrinth of rivers and streams. In fact my biggest annoyance as a cyclist is finding routes where I don't reach a dead end and have to back-track. And now it's not just rivers but major highways.

Still, it's easier for a cyclist because our hours don't cover as many miles.

I also grew up in Wisconsin and Iowa. Iowa's road system may be comprehensive but a very substantial fraction of those are unpaved gravel roads. Wisconsin's roads are paved.