As millions of Americans take to the road for the holiday weekend, a humble highway fixture is under attack.

Later this month, cash-strapped Virginia plans to barricade entrances and switch off the plumbing and electricity at nearly half its highway rest areas. Other states also are lowering budgetary axes on the public pit stops that have lined the interstate highway system since its creation in 1956.

But rest stops aren’t going quietly.

Truckers, blind merchants and a dogged historian are fighting to preserve them. If the battle is lost, every long-distance motorist will need “a strong rear end and a strong bladder” to hit the road, warns John Townsend, an official with the American Automobile Association in Washington….

–more at the Wall Street Journal
[via MP]