The road to hell is paved with good intentions — and so was the City of Lancaster’s musical road, which has since become a cautionary tale about how easily government ideas can go sideways.
First constructed in 2008, the city’s whimsical road is designed to make sounds with your car that mimic the theme from “Lone Ranger.” It was originally built for a Honda commercial at no cost to the city. The intention was to keep it around indefinitely as a tourist attraction.
For some reason, the original version was built near a residential neighborhood. It had to be torn down because of noise complaints.
“The neighborhood just went nuts,” Destination Lancaster’s Mark Hemstreet told SFGATE, which recently published an article on the project. “It was really cool for the first two weeks, and then it got really old really fast.”
Unable to part with the idea, the city decided to build a new musical road in a more industrial part of town. This one did cost money — around $35,000 for a quarter-mile of specially-carved asphalt. It was music to the ears of local officials eager to salvage the project, who saw it as a second chance to turn a commercial gimmick into a local landmark. But the new road came with its own problems. Namely, as SFGATE explains, the thing doesn’t sound right.
The complaint that the road is simply out of tune isn’t correct, David Simmons-Duffin, a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech argues. It’s that the notes are wrong to begin with. The engineers didn’t take into account the total width of the spacing plus the groove, and with just the focus on the spacing of the grooves themselves, the song turned out slightly off.
Back in 2008, Simmons-Duffin wrote a thorough assessment about what went wrong. There’s also a great analysis available on YouTube.
Simmons-Duffin told SFGATE that cities have contacted him over the years to get his advice as they consider building their own musical road attractions. Alas, no other California cities have gone forward with the idea. Aside from the tonal pitfalls, localities may want to avoid situations like this one where a driver filmed himself going 100 miles per hour to make the music sound better.
Some experts, including Simmons-Duffin, have recommended that the city pave over the road. But nearly two decades on, it remains. For all its issues, overall, Lancaster’s musical road remains a fun and quirky claim to fame — even if it does sound more like a fart solo than the overture from “William Tell."