Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Back home at last after six weeks in the not always sunny-in-winter southern Pacific Coast.

While traveling, I made use of road maps. And this brought to mind the national systems of highway numbering. The basic scheme is clear, but the details are sometimes anomalous.

An account of the origin of the U.S. highway or route system is here. Unlike the Interstate system begun in the 1950s, the U.S. numbering system emerged in the mid-1920s from lower-level initiatives.

The general scheme is that north-south routes are odd-numbered and east-west routes are even. The lowest numbers are in the northeast, the highest in the southwest.

From my Rand McNally road atlas collection I dug out atlases from 1941 and 1952, my oldest, and did some checking. Even numbers ranged from 2 in the north to 94 crossing lower Florida in the south. The odds were from 1 in the east to 101 along the west coast. The linked article goes into detail regarding split highways (for instance, U.S. 99E and 99W -- east and west versions of highway 99) and three-digit numbers indicating variants (195 and 395 running parallel to 95 in Oregon and Washington).

The Federally-implemented Interstate highway system retained the odd-even scheme but flipped the numbering order: the lowest in the southwest corner of the country, the highest numbers in the northeast.

What I find interesting are the oddities. For example, a little number-adjusting back in the late 60s (if I remember right) resulted in Interstate 76, which just happened to pass through Philadelphia. (Nudge: Philadelphia. Declaration of Independence. 1776. Get it?)

Then there is Interstate 84 (Portland, Oregon - near Salt Lake City). For many years it was 80-N -- mainline 80 connecting San Francisco and New York City's George Washington Bridge. Eventually 80-N was renamed Interstate 84. A while later, a stretch of Interstate connecting I-90 and I-84 via Yakima, Washington became I-82. Huh? Why not an intermediate number such as 86 or 88? (I-88 is fragmented already, one segment is between Binghamton and Schenectady, New York and another between the Chicago area and Moline, Illinois.)

The old U.S. highway system had a few cases where a route would seriously wander from its proper sequential place. A famous example is Route 66 which went between Chicago and Santa Monica, California. Then there was U.S. 6 which, in the 1940s ran between Long Beach, California and Provincetown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. By all rights, U.S. 6 should have been placed north of U.S. 10, which stretched from Seattle to Detroit.

One problem with highway numbers is that, while there are plenty of reasonable-size cities in the east that can serve as anchors, the west only has a few potential termini: Puget Sound, Portland, Oregon, the San Francisco Bay area, the Los Angeles region and San Diego.

Regardless, I find studying the supposedly orderly but actually slightly messy number systems an interesting way to occupy my mind when it has nothing better to think about.

Later,

Donald

Interstate 84 also is fragmented, with an eastern portion running from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts.

Posted by: Peter on February 2, 2010 7:18 PM

In California, Highway 49 (not US) runs through the foothills— aka Gold Country.

And I hear you about the anchor points. Driving from Eugene, Oregon to Denver, Colorado is quite an adventure. You could take 84 up over the top of the state— it's actually listed as faster, but it's at least 200 miles longer. Or you can take 126 to 20 and cross the state through the middle, which I recommend for a different type of beauty than the Columbia River Gorge. (Heading west from the Idaho border at sunrise is particularly beautiful— we've done the trip in both directions.)

One hazard, though— there's only one rest stop between the border and Burns, and it's a pit toilet.

Posted by: B. Durbin on February 3, 2010 1:11 AM

This inspired me to do a little research. Here are the four "corners" of the U.S. Highway grid.

US 1 and US 2 meet at Houlton, ME, about halfway up the border with New Brunswick.

US 1 meets US 98 in downtown Palm Beach, FL.

US 2 runs doesn't meet US 101; US 2 ends in Snohomish, while US 101 runs around the Olympic Peninsula, and ends in Tacoma. US 2 meets US 97 near Wenatchee, WA, about 80 miles east of Seattle.

The southwestern "corner" is the meeting of US 60 and US 93 at Wickenburg, AZ, northwest of Phoenix.

The "center" is the meeting of US 50 and US 51 at Sandoval, IL, about 60 miles east of St. Louis.

Posted by: Rich Rostrom on February 4, 2010 5:15 AM

Route 66 is the most famous of the diagonal-ish routes, but if you want some odd angles, you take US 52 (Portal, ND to Charleston, SC) or US 62 (El Paso, TX to Niagara Falls, NY).

Posted by: CGHill on February 5, 2010 9:48 PM

I-76 may have a patriotic provenance, but everyone here just calls it the Schulkill, at least within twenty miles of Philadelphia, after the river next to which it runs.

Also interestingly, I-476 is a beltway addition that was unfinished for years, appearing as a dashed blue line on roadmaps for a generation. As a result, we all just call it "The Blue Route".

Posted by: karlub on February 15, 2010 8:09 PM






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