What is This World Coming Too?

I had an interesting discussion the other day at an all day gathering of my Spinning Guild. (Spinning as in yarn, not exercise.)
Inspired by a disturbing local news story of a missing child that apparently died and was dumped into a trash bin and possibly incinerated, we got on the the theme of cremation and cemeteries. I started paying more attention to the topic and slightly less to my yarn.
One friend mentioned that she had told her family to "toast her and toss her", feeling that there is no reason to have a place dedicated to her remains when she wasn't going to really be there.
I can understand the line of thinking, so many of the up and coming generation cannot be bothered with planting flowers (hence the silk and plastic now found in cemeteries.) I only have one son, out o9f two, who probably knows where HIS grandparents lie, but beyond that, his eyes glaze over when I mention other locations. It does bother me when I hear that gramps is sitting in a mason jar in the garage, because no one knows what to do with him. At least we have a plot, that my Hubby's parents bought, so I know where I will be planted.
So my question that after mulling over our discussion Saturday is this. Why, if people do not want a grave, a place to decorate and to remember and honor a deceased loved one.... Why oh why do they persist in making memorials along the sides of roads where someone died? Let's make a traffic hazard, by causing gawkers where so-and-so died. They get weather beaten, bedraggled and look a mess. (Plus I see future genealogists pulling their hair out, trying to figure out where these ancestors are.)
Are these mourners just too cheap to pay for a cemetery plot? Let's have a memorial to Joe Blow in a muddy ditch. It just makes no sense to me. Maybe I'm being too hard on them, but it does drive me crazy.
I have given my family explicit orders that if I ever die in a car accident, NOT to put a cross by the road.
If they do, I promise to haunt them.