I suppose it literally "could be only be one place", but it looks almost identical to thousands of small towns across the US. My entire childhood roadtrip experience was up and down the west coast on I-5, and you could absolutely convince me this was somewhere like Grant's Pass, OR, if not for the signs with PA route information on them. You'd have to convince me a chain or two (Perkins, Sunoco) expanded westward in the past few years, but that wouldn't take much doing.
I still don't quite follow this line:
> "highway planners designed a looping interchange that lets drivers avoid the turnpike if they (hypothetically) want to"
That seems no different from any other exit (you could hypothetically avoid any toll road by exiting and stopping and just staying wherever you are), but I guess the actual 'bypass' function of this road in the real world is less important than what it's come to be.
I still don't quite follow this line:
> "highway planners designed a looping interchange that lets drivers avoid the turnpike if they (hypothetically) want to"
That seems no different from any other exit (you could hypothetically avoid any toll road by exiting and stopping and just staying wherever you are), but I guess the actual 'bypass' function of this road in the real world is less important than what it's come to be.