CA 77 and it’s tiny half mile freeway lacking a full interchange.
LOL only 1/2 a mile? That's literally just a long stretch of an avenue without a traffic light! Yeah over here we have a road called the "Prospect Expressway" that's only like 1.7 miles long, but half a mile LMAO
Shortest field signed State Highway in California. Grander ambition would have had it much larger in scale than it turned out.
Even at full length it would have qualified as a "weird route", taking a convoluted path through the Oakland hills and ending up at I-680 in Pleasant Hill. Trouble was it went through a lot of ultra-pricey property in Moraga and Lafayette along the route, so its prospects were pretty dim from the beginning (it was cut back in the '70's to Lafayette) -- and once the urban freeway revolt was in full swing circa the '70's, the entire alignment was pretty much toast.
Nevertheless, if one wants weird-shaped routes, you can't do much better than CA 18: from its southern terminus at CA 210 it goes north for several miles, east for several more, winding through mountains (after all, it's labeled the "Rim of the World" highway) before crossing between two lakes (one mostly dry) and then heading nortwest out of the mountains before striking out west across the desert. And it has one of the few "mutual terminations" in the state: CA 138 terminates at CA 18 near Crestline, while CA 18 terminates at CA 138 out in the desert near the L.A./San Bernardino county line between Phelan and Pearblossom.
Came in to see if anyone had mentioned CA-18. And don't forget its historical alignment had it extend southwest down to around Long Beach, using the alignment that is today CA-91. This is actually why it was numbered "18," because the number made sense relative to the other routes of the era (original CA-14, CA-22 (still exists) and CA-26, for example). That kind of made it even weirder: a relatively straightforward urban route, then does a northeast swing and basically completely inverts itself coming down the north side of the mountains. Even Caltrans doesn't really post directional signage on this route for the most part.
One that I don't think got mentioned yet is CA-169. It's not really "weird" per se, but unrealized. Has an unconstructed 30-mile gap between its two pieces. So you've got the western piece that basically runs for about 2 miles and just ends. The eastern piece is a fairly conventional highway, except roughly half of its route is narrow, maybe 1.5 lanes wide. Similar to the dreaded CA-236. So you've got an unrealized route that isn't very wide in a very remote part of the state. It's one of those routes that is fairly well signed but is completely forgettable.
Was about to bring up CA-18. Even as originally laid out, it went from near Long Beach all the way up in the mountains and then on to Victorville. It was not the most direct routing from Long Beach to Victorville, so I’m not sure what the reasoning behind the route was back then other than maybe as an auto-tour route.
Now it’s even weirder with its “eastern” (northern?) terminus at CA-138.
Really when you think about it, how else was one supposed to get to Big Bear from both sides of the San Bernardino Mountains in the early 1930s? The Rim of the World Highway specifically has origins all the way back to the 1850s during the California Gold Rush. The state didn’t even designate LRN 207 (future CA 30 and 330) until 1937. LRN 190/future CA 38 was designated in 1933 but took decades to build. Given the context I don’t see having a single highway assigned over a mountain range as particularly odd given it was the only real infrastructure available.
I get assigning it over the mountains and having it be the route you travel into or through the mountains from the north and south. I don’t get having it then run all the way to Long Beach. Victorville to San Bernardino via the mountain resorts makes sense; Victorville to Long Beach via an indirect route doesn’t, particularly in the age of navigating by map or trip-tik.
And in the post-64 signing era, I don’t get the point of having 18 run out west to 138 to terminate. Other than making sure a state-maintained road has a number assigned to it, what does that leg serve? It causes 18 to intersect 138 twice, which could create driver confusion. It locates the eastern terminus further west than the western terminus and makes consistent cardinal direction signing nearly impossible.
If I am at the 210/18 (“western”) terminus, and I want to travel to the 138/18 (“eastern”) terminus, I don’t take 18 all the way. I almost immediately get off of 18 and get on 138 and take that west to the eastern terminus. If I’m in San Bernardino, and I’d like a nice day in the mountains and then want to end up at the other end of 18 when I’m done, I don’t keep following 18 all the way up and through Victorville after I’ve stopped off in Arrowhead or Big Bear. I turn around and go the way I came to get on 138, which is the vastly shorter route to the other end of 18 than taking 18 itself.
Truncating 2 made sense, because why have it run across one mountain range, but then terminate in the middle of another. So now 2 is the route up into and through the San Gabriels only. Having 18 be the route up into and through the San Bernardinos would have made total sense. The added leg to 18 so it could terminate further west in the middle of nowhere seems to be the exact opposite of that the CTC was trying to accomplish with truncating 2.
