least important east to west interstate ending in zero that is not I-30?

[Roadgeekteen]

That exists!

[silverback1065]

74

Nexus 6P

[hotdogPi]

"Least important" and "major" are contradictory.

If you mean "Of I-10, I-20, I-40, I-70, I-80, and I-90, which is least important?", I would probably say I-20.

[US 41]

74

Nexus 6P

I don't know, I-14 may have I-74 beat.

[NE2]

I-140.

[pumpkineater2]

I-50

[CNGL-Leudimin]

I-60 as well.

[jp the roadgeek]

Current: I-790 or I-990 in NY
Former: I-170 in MD

[Bickendan]

^You forgot I-180 in IL and WY.

[hotdogPi]

^You forgot I-180 in IL and WY.

Those are both north-south.

[bugo]

How is I-30 not important? It's the main route from Texas to the northeast. It might not be very long but that doesn't mean that it's not important.

[ilpt4u]

How is I-30 not important? It's the main route from Texas to the northeast. It might not be very long but that doesn't mean that it's not important.

Will be even moreso, if/when the I-57 corridor makes it from Sikeston to Walnut Ridge and then Little Rock, since I-30 and I-57 combined will essentially be a Dallas-Chicago SW-NE Diagonal Corridor

[jp the roadgeek]

How is I-30 not important? It's the main route from Texas to the northeast. It might not be very long but that doesn't mean that it's not important.

I-30 is short (367 miles, while the others "0" interstates that exist are at least 1500 miles in length), and it serves a limited area (2 states).  The others are either coast to coast or pass from within 750 miles of the west coast to within 100 miles of the east coast.  It's basically what I-45 is to the other "5" interstates

[csw]

I-80 is pretty unimportant.

Think about it: it passes through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. How many people live in those places? Not very many. It's concurrent through Indiana and Ohio for almost 300 miles, so that's unnecessary, then goes through rural Pennsylvania; again, no one lives there. Then it ends in quite possibly the least important city on the planet, New York.

Case closed.

[sparker]

I-80 is pretty unimportant.

Think about it: it passes through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. How many people live in those places? Not very many. It's concurrent through Indiana and Ohio for almost 300 miles, so that's unnecessary, then goes through rural Pennsylvania; again, no one lives there. Then it ends in quite possibly the least important city on the planet, New York.

Case closed.

It takes one to San Francisco, once & future home of the Warriors (yay), site of arguably the best Chinese cuisine in the Western Hemisphere (pretty much all sub-varieties of this can be found there!), and where some of the best music from the late 60's originated and was recorded.  I-80 is quite important, even if farther east it doesn't pass through a lot of "destination" cities, so to speak (skirting Chicago to the south as it does) and doesn't quite make it to NY, dying an ignominious death at not even the NJT, but a northern extension thereof!  But it connects to essentially everything else in the northern half of the country and likely serves, in terms of its segments, to disperse traffic to everything except the far southern tier.  In terms of AADT, no segment of I-80 features as sparse traffic as I-90 in central SD (too many other routes feed into it!). 

I could go on -- but the premise of the thread is itself a bit bizarre; I-30's where it is because under the original plan (the 40-41K plan eventually adopted, not the more thorough 48.3K plan discussed in another thread) there was really no other place to put it unless a full renumbering of the E-W "majors", resulting in no through Northern Tier routes, was instituted.  The numbering problems begin with (a) the Great Lakes (b) the codicil that all but forbade duplication of US and Interstate numbers within a particular state, and (c) the fact that the U.S. West Coast is quite a bit farther north than the East Coast in terms of pure latitude.  IMO, I-10 shouldn't have been coast-to-coast -- and neither should have been I-90 (like their US counterparts).  That forced "squeezing" all the other E-W routes into areas that varied in terms of N-S axis as one moved east or west across the country.  And politicians from various cities & states whined whenever their area wasn't served by a "major" (-5, -0) route, leading to the original smorgasbord of suffixes.  The folks who came up with the numbering system circa 1957-58 attempted to do too much and please too many parties with what they were given (the detritus of this can primarily be seen in the upper Midwest). 

Oh well, 60 years later we're all still bitching about this or that designation -- at least it gives us something to talk about!  I don't think anyone will ever be completely satisfied with the Interstate network -- whether you consider the system to be a fait accompli or something "organic" that can and will evolve as the need arises -- or, more accurately, is perceived by any number of actors in the arena!     

[silverback1065]

I-80 is pretty unimportant.

Think about it: it passes through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. How many people live in those places? Not very many. It's concurrent through Indiana and Ohio for almost 300 miles, so that's unnecessary, then goes through rural Pennsylvania; again, no one lives there. Then it ends in quite possibly the least important city on the planet, New York.

Case closed.

It takes one to San Francisco, once & future home of the Warriors (yay), site of arguably the best Chinese cuisine in the Western Hemisphere (pretty much all sub-varieties of this can be found there!), and where some of the best music from the late 60's originated and was recorded.  I-80 is quite important, even if farther east it doesn't pass through a lot of "destination" cities, so to speak (skirting Chicago to the south as it does) and doesn't quite make it to NY, dying an ignominious death at not even the NJT, but a northern extension thereof!  But it connects to essentially everything else in the northern half of the country and likely serves, in terms of its segments, to disperse traffic to everything except the far southern tier.  In terms of AADT, no segment of I-80 features as sparse traffic as I-90 in central SD (too many other routes feed into it!). 

I could go on -- but the premise of the thread is itself a bit bizarre; I-30's where it is because under the original plan (the 40-41K plan eventually adopted, not the more thorough 48.3K plan discussed in another thread) there was really no other place to put it unless a full renumbering of the E-W "majors", resulting in no through Northern Tier routes, was instituted.  The numbering problems begin with (a) the Great Lakes (b) the codicil that all but forbade duplication of US and Interstate numbers within a particular state, and (c) the fact that the U.S. West Coast is quite a bit farther north than the East Coast in terms of pure latitude.  IMO, I-10 shouldn't have been coast-to-coast -- and neither should have been I-90 (like their US counterparts).  That forced "squeezing" all the other E-W routes into areas that varied in terms of N-S axis as one moved east or west across the country.  And politicians from various cities & states whined whenever their area wasn't served by a "major" (-5, -0) route, leading to the original smorgasbord of suffixes.  The folks who came up with the numbering system circa 1957-58 attempted to do too much and please too many parties with what they were given (the detritus of this can primarily be seen in the upper Midwest). 

Oh well, 60 years later we're all still bitching about this or that designation -- at least it gives us something to talk about!  I don't think anyone will ever be completely satisfied with the Interstate network -- whether you consider the system to be a fait accompli or something "organic" that can and will evolve as the need arises -- or, more accurately, is perceived by any number of actors in the arena!   

pretty sure he was just trolling you there 

[sparker]

pretty sure he was just trolling you there 

More to the point, he was trolling the OP!  I just chimed in to (a) attempt to de-troll the thread and (b) try to make a point that the original premise of "major" and "minor" Interstates is a bit overemphasized -- and that the way the original system was configured functionally made a mockery of the notion of ranking Interstates by their quintile divisibility.  

[1995hoo]

How is I-30 not important? It's the main route from Texas to the northeast. It might not be very long but that doesn't mean that it's not important.

To be fair to the OP, "least important" is not the same as "not important."

[briantroutman]

According to Kurumi, it's I-20: http://www.kurumi.com/roads/rank2di.html

[Revive 755]

I-80 is pretty unimportant.

Think about it: it passes through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. How many people live in those places? Not very many.

The residents of the Salt Lake City metro, Omaha - Council Bluffs metro (~900,000 per Google) and Des Moines metro (~600,000 per Google) would disagree with you.  Plus it serves the Iowa City - Cedar Rapids area and Lincoln, Nebraska areas, both of which are growing at a decent rate, and provide another access to the Denver area via I-76.

For at least west of Chicagoland, I think a better case could be made for I-90 than I-80 given - off the top of my head without checking the numbers - the lack of population served between Spokane and eastern Minnesota.

[hbelkins]

I-220. Does Shreveport really need a bypass?

[Henry]

I-20, simply because it doesn't go west of Texas.

And also because the only major cities it serves are Dallas-Ft. Worth and Atlanta.

[Roadgeekteen]

My answer is also I-20

[RG407]

I-20, although Columbia, Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson, Dallas and Fort Worth might beg to differ.

[US 89]

I would say, in order of importance:

I-80
I-40
I-10
I-70
I-90
I-20
I-30