Yeah most often the road gets worse /better, either because one state does a better job with road maintenance, or they're just on different schedules.

Also sometimes the signage for state routes changes slightly.

Yeah, the roads instantly change color and texture. If you cross into south carolina, BAM. All the roads are whiter and rougher.

A lot of our residential infrastructure is underground, because of the weather we have. Though, there's a fair amount of aerial hardware as well. Where I live is famous for ice storms, and every few years there's a major outage that lasts anywhere from 12 to 48 hours. They're rare, but they do occur. More often it's because someone hit a pole or ground mount transformer, versus a falling branch or lightning bolt.

I still prefer ice, snow, and occasional outages to unbearable heat and humidity, earthquake, and hurricane tradeoff being further south or west.

To answer OP, there's a visible change in road surface and signage not only at state borders, but even between county and town lines. Each county handles the road a different way, and the finish/quality can differ a LOT even between municipalities and counties.

Ah yes, CO to NM

It's Nebraska.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In Wisconsin, Walker straight up put a campaign slogan ("Open for business") on those signs. Fortunately, those got taken down for a simple "Tony Evers, Governor".

Also, the ad signs will alternate between adult toy stores and anti-abortion messages every few hundred feet.

A lot of our residential infrastructure is underground, because of the weather we have.

I get that. A lot of ours is too. But I live an hour from the area I'm talking about, the weather isn't that different, and I still see wire poles up there waiting to be taken down by a tree branch in the next ice storm. CTs trees tend to be pruned so they don't overhang the roads at all. Its the most jarring difference driving from, for example, Sherman CT to Pawling NY.

I mean, thats kinda exactly what happens when you go from German highway to Czech highway

Everything just instantly gets yellow and dusty

Because they go through the door in the border wall to Mexico.

Between States with more or less lax laws on liquor, firearms, explosives, tobacco, etc, there's usually various merchants immediately on the side of the border with more lax laws.

I can sometimes tell what county (not country) I am in from differences in the design of street signs (mostly the street name signs at stop lights), changes to the look of highway overpasses, and whether or not Flock cameras outnumber people.

The roads go to absolute shit crossing from Ohio into Indiana. And it's not like we have exactly great roads here...

It's usually on a highway and highways usually have a "Welcome to …" sign at the border.

Roads. It is pretty common around where I grew up to notice you are in a different states when there is a sudden shift in road conditions. They never communicated about when to do repairs or anything, so it was almost always an obvious line between either a really shit road and a smooth one, or vice versa. Sometimes you could even tell based on the noise or feel of the road, if the other state uses different road construction materials.

Haha, I'd be combing through the state codes for shenanigans to get up to.

I wonder what their property taxes were like.

My crossing is a river, so basically pretty obvious. I was out of town on a work trip though and I was warned that when I was going to a Home Depot to not miss the turn because I would be at the Canada border and doing a U-turn there would probably get me chased down and pulled over.

I don't know if it is still the case, but the border between Washington and Idaho went from motorcycle helmet law to no helmet law and when people drove from Seattle to Sturgis there would be a ditch full of motorcycle helmets just across the border into Idaho on I-90.

Lol, river!