jeriendhal | FYS: The Straight Road

In the very center of the Ring, is the greatest, and most useless, highway ever constructed. It's three kilometers wide, and over two-hundred and fifty thousand miles long, made of gleaming white ferro-crete, circling the entire circumference of the Ring. Power and hydrogen refill stations are available every twenty-five kilometers and the truck stops actually have comfortable beds and healthy, filling meals.

It has absolutely no reason to exist. Actual long-range transport is handled by high-speed vacuum sealed monorails embedded in the Ring's superstructure, or more rarely by orbital transports flying out from various docking stations on the Ring's outer surface or the beanstalks connecting it to the Earth.

It does, however have two salient features that makes it the darling of automotive fans on the Ring.

One: It has an absolutely perfect driving surface, very wide, very smooth, and effectively flat given the Ring's massive curvature.

Two: There's no speed limit.

Currently it hosts the quadrennial Trans-Circumferal Road Rally, now in its fourth running with over three hundred thousand participating teams, all attempting to be the first to circle the entirety of the Ring in less than one year. A singularly pointless goal, which the Groupmind allows mainly because it keeps several million clever and mechanically inclined people occupied in an absolutely useless manner, when they might otherwise be engaged in plotting against the Groupmind's benevolent rule.