Every Day Is Special: November 11 – Highway Numbers Adopted

November 11 – Highway Numbers Adopted - From Sea to Shining Sea

Posted on November 11, 2017

On this date in 1926, a good idea was enacted:

The highways of the United States were coordinated with one numbering system, with number-names that continue through multiple states.

You might know that most house numbers in the U.S. are even on West and North sides of streets, and odd on the East and South sides. Having a system like that helps people find houses and other buildings more easily. In the same way,

the people planning the U.S. Numbered Highway System decided to use even and odd numbers in a sort of system. Generally, north-south highways were named with odd numbers, and east-west highways were named with even numbers.

Oh, and don't get me started on those pesky diagonal highways!

Another way that the numbers on highways are informative is that the major highways tend to end with the number 1 (for north-south highways) or 0 (for east-west highways).

These roads have been created and maintained by the various states, even though their numbering is national. In 1956, new Interstate highways were created, and some of the older routes were ditched in favor of the new highways. However, as you can see from these two maps, the Interstates are only a small fraction of the highways in use today:

Above, U.S. Routes
Below, U.S. Interstates

Did you know...?

So many people traveled west for tourism and to seek job opportunities on Route 66, that particular road, which stretches from Chicago, IL, to Santa Monica, CA, became widely known. Route 66 was celebrated in a song, a TV show, and in merchandise.

When many pieces of the old Route 66 had been replaced by Interstate highways, the route was removed from the U.S. Highway System. However, some portions of road that still exist have kept the name, updated to "Historic Route 66," and some states have kept the old Route 66 roads that were bypassed by Interstates as State Route 66.

Folks in Southern California had freeways before most people in the U.S. had highways, and those freeways had names that generally referred to the destinations along the roads. The Pasadena Freeway, the San Bernardino Freeway, and the Harbor Freeway are three examples.

In the book "Play It as It Lays," by Joan Dideon, a character drove "the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura."

When numbered highway systems were put into place, Southern Californians tended to use the old freeway names instead of the new numbers...for a while. However, in 1964, California simplified its highway / freeway numbering system, and around that time many new roads were constructed. People in So Cal slowly started to adopt the numbers as names - but they kept the word "the" with number name.

In other words, they'd been saying "the Hollywood Freeway" and "the Ventura Freeway" forever, and when its new name became U.S. Route 101 - and even though people in northern California and Oregon referred to it as "101" - well, Southern Californians called it (and still call it) "the 101."

The same can be said for all the other freeways, too. Folks in the Bay Area may say things like, "take 101 north to 80 east," but we southern types say things like, "take the 405 north to the 110, and the 110 up to the 101, then go east on the 134 - OR you could take the 110 to the 5, then go west to the 134. Better check traffic - it's going to be tough, at that time of the day!"

I gather that we Southern Californians are pretty much the only Americans who use the word "the" with our freeway / highway numbers. Because we were early adopters of freeways!