And who keeps score? We do.

The new I-40 waistband around Greensboro's west side is built for comfort and for speed, a full eight lanes wide. That's double the current bandwidth of West Raleigh's I-40.

After ours is widened in 2010, we'll have six crummy lanes. Whoopee.

We're not pouting. We're happy for our hefty Greensboro friends. We can't wait to drive their phat new freeway en route to someplace we like better.

But Greensboro's I-40 beats Raleigh's in another way. We're not going to be good sports and pretend this does not matter:

Their miles are longer than ours.

The old I-40 route rumbled for 15 miles through Greensboro. (It still does, with a new name, Business 40.) Today, if you zoom around the city on the new I-40 bypass arc, you'll travel about 19 miles from the Winston-Salem end to the Burlington end.

So when state Department of Transportation engineers rerouted I-40 to follow part of Greensboro's Urban Loop, they added four miles to every journey past Greensboro. I-85, which shares part of the bypass with I-40, is affected in the same way.

Walter High of Chapel Hill read about this and wondered whether DOT would adjust mile marker signs across the state to reflect the new distances.

Would DOT change every "X miles to Raleigh" sign to say that Raleigh is now X-plus-four miles away?

Nope. Instead, DOT stretched Greensboro's old miles to fit the new distance.

Many of the green mile markers planted along the Greensboro bypass are 1.1 to 1.6 miles apart.

Drive I-40 around Raleigh and you'll find that our miles are the old-fashioned 1.0-mile kind.

It would be more accurate to change the signs around Greensboro and down the road. But it also would be expensive for the state and confusing for drivers, said Patty Eason, a DOT engineer who supervised the Greensboro bypass construction.

"Rather than having to renumber everything statewide, we just decided to make the best fit we could," said Eason, DOT construction engineer for a five-county area around Greensboro. "We discussed whether this was going to create an issue for people."

Greensboro drivers are having enough hassles as it is, she said, making sense of new business and bypass routes and exit numbers.

This kind of thing rarely happens, a change in mileage on an existing interstate, Eason said. Usually an urban loop gets a new name, such as Raleigh's I-540.

What difference does it make? High, a retired university librarian, says he's a "numbers guy." He notices such stuff.

Interstate highways have been laid out for years with mile markers and corresponding exit numbers. Interstate 85 Exit 120, at the new bypass interchange on the south side of Greensboro, is supposedly about 120 miles up the road from South Carolina.

Interstate 40 Exit 270 in Chapel Hill, near High's home, used to be about 270 miles from the Tennessee border.

"I use it as a rough guide," said High, who does a brisk business in used books at Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

"So when I would pass the Mile 70 marker near Asheville coming this way, I knew I had about 200 miles to go.

"Now I've got about 204 miles, apparently."