Crossing from LA to Mississippi, you notice there's a lot more cops.

The drivers for sure. I live in a major metropolitan area on the east coast and at the intersection of three jurisdictions.

My home state’s drivers are slow as molasses and geriatric or are obviously foreign and didn’t take U.S. driver’s ed.

Across the river is a bunch of sheltered drivers who I normally pity. Their city is usually walkable or transit-able so driving is not something you could even expect them to be good at.

And then there’s the adjacent state which is notoriously home to some of the worst drivers in the US who genuinely, routinely make me fear for my life when they’re in my proximity on the road lol. Hate those drivers.

Other than that, I think the culture of my home state is much warmer and friendly while the adjacent state is nice but the people are also a bit more standoffish and cold. Home state is a barren wasteland of awful roads and data centers, adjacent state has so much green space and well-developed communities.

Never been, but I've heard it's lovely.

Right now just with signs, but if Wisconsin doesn't get their shit together it will be a clearly marked, well equipped check point

I never saw these personally, but ten years ago in Matt Gaetz's district a shelter ran billboards with "She's your daughter, not your date". Yikes.

Well, I live on the Minnesota side of the Minnesota / Wisconsin border and normally I can tell I crossed the border because I have to cross the 4th largest river in the world, the Mississippi river.

Joking aside a big tell used to be frac sand mines. Minnesota cracked down on them much harder much more quickly than Wisconsin so you would see them all over the place in Wisconsin but not in MN. I haven't seen as many of those lately though. Also If I drive too far south I wind up driving out of the Kwik Trip gas station zone and into the vastly inferior Caseys gas station zone in Iowa.

It's only regularly spoken by a minority but most can and will break it out on ocassion. It's always fun to do on vacation.

Why is it always lawyers?

I saw one that was just a photo of an eye and a phone number. I wasn't from the area, so it was driving me nuts wondering what it meant. Didn't take long driving through the area to learn that this lawyer has so many different billboards up, that his eye alone has become recognizable.

Before everything got crazy on the Canadian border, we used to go over by boat to fish all the time without much problem.. just put put the boat on over.

Drive south far enough and you reach the vastly superior QT gas station zone.

NM perspective:
Border crossing at Anthony - immediate cattle feed lots, huge freeway, and then the pile of cookie-cutter houses that is El Paso.

North into Colorado: Seems pretty much like NM, but the food gets blander and more expensive as you enter Boebert's district. Denver is ok, but it's like Los Angeles at a little higher altitude. If Denver had a culture, it probably died in traffic.

East into Oklahoma/Texas: There's like... nothing there. For miles. It's really pretty, actually, but don't get a flat tire.

West into Arizona from Gallup: It's like a portal into the 1950s, all abandoned route 66 stuff and super offensive 1950s native american stuff.

Culturally, I'd say most of the 4 corners zone is pretty similar "southwest", though Texas is really obsessed with big box stores and Arizona is a bit obsessed with unmarked police cars. Colorado culturally is as bland as their chiles

The biggest cultural shift is traveling through the res lands between NM/AZ where you can actually go to grocery stores with local language signage.

I don't live near the border but on a road trip I noticed an immediate difference in the quality of the road surface when I entered Alabama coming from Florida. Florida has pretty good roads. Alabama, uhh, not so much. Mississippi and Louisiana roads were also terrible. Texas was better but the quality was spottier.

The AZ/NM area was absolutely my favorite part of the past 3 years of round trips across the country (driving someone who medically can't fly). I'll never be a desert dweller, but the Sonora, Payson, and heading into Gallup and Albuquerque is just jaw dropping.

One state is across a big river. Marijuana is mostly legal on the other side so the billboards start as you get close to the bridges.

The other state is culturally and geographically identical to the other side of the border. If you look closely you'll see that private liquor stores are allowed, as well as payday lending. That's it.

My friend visits chicago to Dayton Ohio often, he says the roads turn to shit the moment he crosses over to Ohio lol

That's crazy! Hope he never gets a retina biometric lock on his door.

There must be a lot of money in injury law, but no nationally-known firms, so your choice is either a referral or their name bobbing out of your subconscious from driving past it every day.

I live near two other states and can tell a distinct difference by the shape of the mountains (one has rolling hills, the other has very steep-sided hills, my home region has deeper valleys) and the building style since one state has lax building codes and the other has older and larger structures. The barns are typically discernable too.

State line road. If I'm driving north I'm in Missouri. If I'm driving South, I'm in Kansas. (Kansas City, Missouri)

Keeping in mind that I haven’t looked into this in over 20 years, back then the answer was technically yes but practically not really, or at least not well, and I’d be surprised if the answer has changed much in the intervening years. Radar has a fairly wide beam and most systems, at least at the time, would just leave it on all the time, so it would be pretty easy for a radar detector to pick up the signal while it was targeting other cars, well before the car with the detector would be targeted. This would typically give the driver time to slow down before they were targeted. By contrast, LiDAR uses a much narrower beam. IIRC the width of the beam even at some of the farthest effective distances was still about 3-feet (≈1 meter) wide or less, and the officers were trained to aim at where the front license plate would be. That meant it was quite likely that the targeted vehicle would absorb or reflect most if not all of the signal. On top of that, the LiDAR guns would only be active for a few seconds, so even if there was rogue signal that made it past the targeted vehicle there would only be a very limited window for the detector to observe it. It’s absolutely possible for the detector to pick up the frequencies being used, but more than likely if it was detecting a signal it would be because an officer was in the process of getting the vehicle’s speed so any alert would be coming too late.

I want to say Oregon but you can pump your own gas now there