The landing appears to have been on the
west-bound carriage way around this point.
If you zoom out, most of the green space around there seems to be woods - if he had a loss of power after take off from runway 11 there's not really many places to go and if he could see the highway wasn't too busy then perhaps the safest bet.
He rang the fire department - really? I'll bet that's a hopeless hack re-interpretation of a police statement that a mayday was made to ATC telling them he was attempting to land on the highway and they called the fire department....