It's good to make words work hard for you, the lazy little ingrates, and Road 96's title is grafting pretty hard. It's referencing both the name of the road leading to the northern border of fictional USA-alike Petria - against which you will fling successive desperate teenagers in a procedurally generated hitchhike-athon - and the year it's all set. Yes, it's 1996, and everyone is sharing tapes, blithely getting lifts with strangers, and very concerned with the oil industry.
It's also nearing the ten year anniversary of a terrorist attack at that same border, which exploded the side of a mountain and killed hundreds of bystanders. In a move that only makes sense when tidy plotting demands your seven intertwining personal and political stories need to come to a head all at once, the totalitarian government of Petria have decided they will hold the upcoming election on the same day as the big anniversary event. A big pre-emptive whoopsie-doodle to them.