Differences in how US routes are handled between western and eastern US

[74/171FAN]

I feel as though US 199 is one of those corridors you really don't get how important it is until you actually drive it.  There are literally no other fully reliable roads to get east from the Northern Coast of California eastward to inward locales.  Even CA 299 (former US 299) has tons of seasonal problems and closures.  The Winnemucca-to-the-Sea promoters were really onto something once they ditched US 299 for US 199. 

I remember watching the movie "Snowbound" that I believe was based on a story involving snow on CA 299.

[Max Rockatansky]

^^^

CA 299 lies on some of the most inhospitable terrain in California.  It must have been truly miserable to be part of the mining boom up there, especially along the Trinity River.

Heck, as mentioned above, a decent amount of modern US 95 plain did not exist when they were drawing up the system, and that's a 2-digit. With the exception of the US 40 (now I-80) concurrency, it generally wasn't a remotely modern road between Fallon and the Snake River Valley. Parts of US 50 and US 6 also come to mind there, with Ely-Delta not getting modernized until the 50s. US 40 across the Sierra didn't get upgraded to remotely modern standards until well after it was designated.

191 and 395 totally would have gotten more major numbers had things been more developed out west. You could make an argument for at least part of 395 being 97, but the road linking Susanville to Klamath Falls was a later development.

Amusingly the Nevada Highway Engineer made the argument for US 95 being extended early based off California wanting US 6 early even though the Ely-Delta corridor wasn't complete.  You can definitely tell the Division of Highways has pull with AASHO early on that other western states didn't.  I think that was especially evident with US 6 and the crazed US 64 proposal (which had a monster multiplex of US 66) bearing fruit with US 466 instead.

[US 89]

I'd argue that in the west there isn't much of a distinction between 2 and 3 digit routes. Because the road network is a lot more sparse in the west, there just isn't much in the way of shorter corridors that are significant enough to be the fastest way for a lot of interregional traffic and long enough to cross a state line.

Sure, there's a handful of really short routes like US 195, 197, and 199, but I don't think any of those would be designated today, and they'd probably be downgraded to state routes if there wasn't a state line involved. Then you have a bunch of long corridors that actually have some significance like 395, 191, 287, and 160...

Despite its length, US 195 is pretty important given that it is the backbone of the Palouse network and is generally more reliable than US 95 to the east.

Okay, but it's a rounding error from being a single state route. Idaho doesn't even think it exists and inventories it as a ramp. There are plenty of other important corridors in the west that don't cross a state line and so have never been considered for an upgrade to a fancy shield.

Utah SR 24, for example, is the lifeblood of Wayne County and a fairly significant tourist route. At least once Utah attempted to put a US route on it by extending US 24 west from Colorado, but AASH(T)O balked at the long concurrencies required in western Colorado and eastern Utah to get it there. If that were in two states instead of one, I'm sure it would have a 3dus designation today.

[Max Rockatansky]

I'd argue that in the west there isn't much of a distinction between 2 and 3 digit routes. Because the road network is a lot more sparse in the west, there just isn't much in the way of shorter corridors that are significant enough to be the fastest way for a lot of interregional traffic and long enough to cross a state line.

Sure, there's a handful of really short routes like US 195, 197, and 199, but I don't think any of those would be designated today, and they'd probably be downgraded to state routes if there wasn't a state line involved. Then you have a bunch of long corridors that actually have some significance like 395, 191, 287, and 160...

Despite its length, US 195 is pretty important given that it is the backbone of the Palouse network and is generally more reliable than US 95 to the east.

Okay, but it's a rounding error from being a single state route. Idaho doesn't even think it exists and inventories it as a ramp. There are plenty of other important corridors in the west that don't cross a state line and so have never been considered for an upgrade to a fancy shield.

Utah SR 24, for example, is the lifeblood of Wayne County and a fairly significant tourist route. At least once Utah attempted to put a US route on it by extending US 24 west from Colorado, but AASH(T)O balked at the long concurrencies required in western Colorado and eastern Utah to get it there. If that were in two states instead of one, I'm sure it would have a 3dus designation today.

Utah probably should have asked for US 50 be realigned or US 50A.  Having a highly visible alternate to I-70 in the Swell wouldn't be the worst idea.

Edit: What are the control cities on US 50 in Utah as presently defined?  In theory if it goes Green River-Salina then Utah wouldn't really have much of a probably realigning the highway.  That or sign US 50A without permission and ask for formal approval decades later like Nevada did.

[US 89]

Utah probably should have asked for US 50 be realigned or US 50A.  Having a highly visible alternate to I-70 in the Swell wouldn't be the worst idea.

Edit: What are the control cities on US 50 in Utah as presently defined?  In theory if it goes Green River-Salina then Utah wouldn't really have much of a probably realigning the highway.  That or sign US 50A without permission and ask for formal approval decades later like Nevada did.

The last time this was seriously proposed, I-70 didn't exist yet, and US 50 followed the route of modern US 6, so a hypothetical US 50A would have to go all the way out to Delta to reconnect with US 50. There was also a much more visible US 50A at the time that went through Wendover and Salt Lake. So short of designating the two alternates US 50N and US 50S, Tennessee style, at the time it probably wouldn't have been a great idea.

Control cities...I mean, US 50 completely disappears into I-70 between Salina and Grand Junction, and the control cities used across the Swell are generally Salina and Green River (except at the SR 10 exit where they use Denver eastbound for some reason). The thing is that AASHTO would never approve moving a US highway off an interstate in a case like this. I realize they've done it in North Carolina but that was for a city segment of US 17 in Wilmington, not a long distance rural corridor.

[Max Rockatansky]

That's the thing, I don't think that AASHTO particularly cares about alignment shifts between control cities.  The AASHTO Database during the 1930s is full of "don't bother us with this"  replies for alignment shift applications between control points.  I know locally from about 1936 onward California never bothered with applications for alignment shifts unless it involved a new control city.

My favorite example of this phenomenon is when US 66 was signed to Santa Monica by local agencies during 1931.  AASHO pitched a fit to the DOH about the signage being truncated to Los Angeles since it was the final control city.  They didn't care where in Los Angeles so long as it was the last city on the highway. 

The way I see it, if a bureaucratic process isn't going to help your agency and there is an exploitative loop why not take it?

[Bruce]

Okay, but it's a rounding error from being a single state route. Idaho doesn't even think it exists and inventories it as a ramp. There are plenty of other important corridors in the west that don't cross a state line and so have never been considered for an upgrade to a fancy shield.

For a time, US 195 was a single-state route because it had been truncated out of Idaho on its north end by the extension of US 2 and didn't get extended into Idaho until US 95 was rebuilt as an expressway, which is why ITD doesn't bother to acknowledge it as a full route in their inventory.

[cl94]

If the Business 93 designation is eventually decommissioned (due to 93 being truncated, or some other reason), would it be replaced by a Business 11 designation, or would NV 172 be extended westward? Given the history of highway redesignations in the Boulder City/Las Vegas area, I would expect the latter to happen.

It depends. Moreso on who maintains it than anything else. If 93 disappears from the area and NDOT maintains control, I'd assume it becomes an SR, potentially with BR 11 overlain on it. BR 11 is the most likely signed designation, if any exists, if it is downloaded to the county/city.

That being said, BR 93 is an oddity in Nevada because that is the only state-maintained business route without an underlying SR or FR. There is nothing preventing NDOT from designating it as IR 11B and calling it a day. It just has never been done before, and there isn't even precedent for a suffixed Interstate in Nevada. This is a slight difference from US 93B, which has some precedent in the form of US 93A, US 95A, US 395A, and the defunct US 40As.

That's the thing, I don't think that AASHTO particularly cares about alignment shifts between control cities.  The AASHTO Database during the 1930s is full of "don't bother us with this"  replies for alignment shift applications between control points.  I know locally from about 1936 onward California never bothered with applications for alignment shifts unless it involved a new control city.

My favorite example of this phenomenon is when US 66 was signed to Santa Monica by local agencies during 1931.  AASHO pitched a fit to the DOH about the signage being truncated to Los Angeles since it was the final control city.  They didn't care where in Los Angeles so long as it was the last city on the highway. 

The way I see it, if a bureaucratic process isn't going to help your agency and there is an exploitative loop why not take it?

They cared for a while. See US 87 in Wyoming, which has an official gap because AASHTO wouldn't allow a realignment around slides along a slightly-inferior SR. I think that level of attention has come and gone, given how they have recently approved gaps in Colorado.

[pderocco]

Yeah, US 199 is more important than people realize for exactly that reason. It's the only reliable road connecting US 101 to I-5 between the Bay Area and well inside Oregon. It makes that section of the coast a little less remote.

And when they're inching along on chains over Siskiyou Summit on I-5 in the winter, it's generally just raining on US-199. That route was useful to me back in the 90s when I drove frequently between LA and Portland.

[Quillz]

US 395 is effectively a 2-digit corridor. East of the Sierra and Cascades, it is basically the major N-S road. It is as important as US 95, if not more important, in many locations. It certainly gets more traffic than US 95, especially south of Reno.

I agree. I did a fictional renumbering scenario where I turned it into an extension of US-97. Basically you swap OR-39 and US-97, so the latter goes southeast to Susanville, junctions with US-395 there, then continues southward. It's always kind of bugged me that US-395 is an auxiliary route, even though that concept doesn't really exist in US highways in the first place. But it does feel like the really long, significant routes should have 1- or 2-digits instead of three.

[Quillz]

^ Interstates are the primary, US routes secondary.  Otherwise, what is the point of the US route system continuing to exist in the first place?  Out in my part of the country, keeping the US route on the local road while the interstate is the through route is just how things are done.

Interstates are primary where they exist.  But there are a lot of US routes where rebuilding the entire road as an interstate is unjustified.  US 395, US 95, US 97 are not going to have interstates for their full length for the forseeable future.  They have freeway sections built with interstate money and those sections have interstate numbers, but they don't form a network.  To form a network, the US route numbers are signed together with the interstate numbers over the freeway sections.

Then what is the point of the interstate numbers?  You're just creating a bunch of overlaps that exist over entire routes and/or long distances.  If US routes and interstates are considered equal, then why have two separate numbering systems?  Why not just make one numbering system and get rid of the US routes that aren't major enough to count as part of it?

That is probably what the numbering system should have been from the get-go.  I really like how Mexico did this concept with the Federal Highways and Autopistas.  The brand recognition thing with the Interstates could have been simply a red/white/blue US Route shield along segments that met certain design standards.  Certainly, it would have spared the road community (not that I'm suggesting this is important to the normal traveler) much of the Interstate grid perfectionism which plagues the hobby.

I think this could have worked. I think Australia does something kind of similar, too. The issue is when you have new alignments that didn't exist prior to the Interstate era, I guess they'd just become auxiliaries (so the 5 between Wheeler Ridge and Red Bluff could be something like "Interstate" 499).

[lstone19]

While thinking of this, I came up with another question - why wouldn't people know "interstate = freeway" out west? 

No, people do know that interstates are freeways out here. The difference is that, in less-urbanized parts of the west, the travel time difference between freeway and surface road is far less than it is in the east, so a route that prioritizes Interstates is less certain to be the best route.

Plus, lots of non-interstate freeways in California. Just did another Reno to Santa Barbara drive a few days ago. Of the three routes that Google Maps usually suggests, the shortest and usually fastest has the least interstate and freeway miles. From our home in south Reno, it's usually I-580/US 395 (24 Interstate and freeway miles) - US 395 - CA 14 (freeway Mojave to Santa Clarita) - I-5 (10 Interstate miles) - CA 126 (freeway Santa Paula to Ventura) - US 101 (freeway).

The other routes it will offer are:
I-580 - I-80 - I-680 - US 101 and
I-580 - I-80 - I-5 - CA 41 - CA 46 - US 101

They're close in time - go north from our house ten miles to downtown Reno and it usually will have one of the I-80 routes as best. Of course, in winter, the weather forecast will factor into how I go. I'd rather deal with Donner and be done with mountains (the coastal mountains don't count for this) if snow is in the forecast than deal with US 395 and its four over 7,000 feet (two over 8,000 feet) mountain passes.

I've done all three and in good weather, 395 is by far the easiest driving given how little traffic there is (the only part I really dislike is Lancaster on CA 14 to exiting I-5 on to CA 126). Much more of the other routes is "tough" driving. Except for the towns, US 395 is all 65mph from Lee Vining to the CA 14 split as is CA 14 (70mph Mojave to Lancaster).

[Amaury]

For a time, US 195 was a single-state route because it had been truncated out of Idaho on its north end by the extension of US 2 and didn't get extended into Idaho until US 95 was rebuilt as an expressway, which is why ITD doesn't bother to acknowledge it as a full route in their inventory.

What was the original routing of US Route 195?

Also, if I recall correctly, US Route 95 used to go through Washington before being realigned and taken out of Washington for whatever reason.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

In North Dakota, any business routes off I-29 are marked as BUS US 81, but the I-94 ones are, well, BUS I-94 since there is no longer a concurrent US route. Not sure why that is.

[Amaury]

This might be slightly off topic, but I'm also trying to figure out why there are four separate state routes/highways all numbered 200 across Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota instead of just having US Route 200. It's obvious they're all connected, so I wonder why it's like that. I mean, we don't have, for example, WA 97 or OR 97. Same with other highways, like US 2 or US 12, which also aren't separated into different state routes with the same number.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

This might be slightly off topic, but I'm also trying to figure out why there are four separate state routes/highways all numbered 200 across Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota instead of just having US Route 200. It's obvious they're all connected, so I wonder why it's like that. I mean, we don't have, for example, WA 97 or OR 97. Same with other highways, like US 2 or US 12, which also aren't separated into different state routes with the same number.

AASHTO rejected multiple applicaitons to make 200 a US route because it wasn't seen as significant enough.

[Max Rockatansky]

This might be slightly off topic, but I'm also trying to figure out why there are four separate state routes/highways all numbered 200 across Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota instead of just having US Route 200. It's obvious they're all connected, so I wonder why it's like that. I mean, we don't have, for example, WA 97 or OR 97. Same with other highways, like US 2 or US 12, which also aren't separated into different state routes with the same number.

AASHTO rejected multiple applicaitons to make 200 a US route because it wasn't seen as significant enough.

Which is BS when you consider stuff like US 191 has multiple segments with less than 100 vehicles a day.

[Bruce]

For a time, US 195 was a single-state route because it had been truncated out of Idaho on its north end by the extension of US 2 and didn't get extended into Idaho until US 95 was rebuilt as an expressway, which is why ITD doesn't bother to acknowledge it as a full route in their inventory.

What was the original routing of US Route 195?

Also, if I recall correctly, US Route 95 used to go through Washington before being realigned and taken out of Washington for whatever reason.

US 195 originally formed a full loop off US 95 with termini near Lewiston and in Sandpoint to the north.

As I mentioned in my previous post, US 95 was realigned out of WA when the expressway was built. It was probably simpler for Idaho to go it alone rather than need to cooperate and split costs with Washington, hence the curve that avoids the border.

[Bruce]

This might be slightly off topic, but I'm also trying to figure out why there are four separate state routes/highways all numbered 200 across Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota instead of just having US Route 200. It's obvious they're all connected, so I wonder why it's like that. I mean, we don't have, for example, WA 97 or OR 97. Same with other highways, like US 2 or US 12, which also aren't separated into different state routes with the same number.

We do have WA/ID 128, OR 3/WA 129 (which used to be a branch of PSH 3), and the extremely short extensions of OR 35 and ID 41 that are on the books as WA 35 and WA 41. Multi-state routes with common numbers aren't uncommon even out west.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

I'm not familiar with the full overview of 200 outside MN, but there was obviously interest in daisy-chaining this route together by the four states even without AASHTO allowing it to be a US route. In MN, the new TH 200 designation replaced the entirety of TH 31 from the North Dakota border to Walker, and then what was previously TH 34 east of Walker (where 34's east end was truncated to) around 1969-70.

[Henry]

Around the time I was born, most of the western US routes were literally paved over by Interstates, as opposed to running parallel like the eastern ones did. Perhaps the reason behind it was that with less populated areas, there really was no logic in having two through routes, so the Interstates acted as the replacement highways, with bypasses of the downtowns where necessary. I like the approach TX took in building its own freeways, where the frontage roads were made first, and the freeways came later. I really wish more states would build them this way.

[lstone19]

Around the time I was born, most of the western US routes were literally paved over by Interstates, as opposed to running parallel like the eastern ones did. Perhaps the reason behind it was that with less populated areas, there really was no logic in having two through routes, so the Interstates acted as the replacement highways, with bypasses of the downtowns where necessary.

This too. The distance between settled communities can be much greater in the west than in the east. There's no need for a separate non-freeway when there's nothing between towns except large ranches (served by local exits off the freeways) or nothing at all (public undeveloped land). Comparing two areas I know reasonably well, US 9 north of Albany still serves an important role connecting all the small towns from Albany to the border while there's very little between Reno and Colfax, CA that would justify having retained US 40 in addition to I-80 (old 40 still exists over Donner to serve some areas in there and a few other areas but absolutely nothing to justify a second through road - even in less than a year of living in Reno, I've already made four after midnight trips over Donner and realized just how little traffic there is on I-80 that time of day - a few hundred vehicles per hour - and even in day, there's so little (compared to the east) traffic on most rural western freeways (I-5 between L.A. and S.F. and I-15 between San Bernardino and Las Vegas being major exceptions) there's just no justification for a separate non-limited access road between communities.

[vdeane]

Not to mention that even rural areas out east have enough development to preclude an upgrade in place.

[Max Rockatansky]

I'm not familiar with the full overview of 200 outside MN, but there was obviously interest in daisy-chaining this route together by the four states even without AASHTO allowing it to be a US route. In MN, the new TH 200 designation replaced the entirety of TH 31 from the North Dakota border to Walker, and then what was previously TH 34 east of Walker (where 34's east end was truncated to) around 1969-70.

ID 200 and MT 200 west of US 93 alone would make for a viable US Route.  I'd argue the proposal should have included WA 20 at least to US 97 if not I-5. 

[SkyPesos]

At least in the part of the country I'm in, there isn't a set hierarchy of US routes over state routes like what you might see in the west (or at least that's the impression I'm getting from reading this thread). Plenty of examples of state routes being more important than a parallel US route, like IN 63 replacing US 41 as an expressway route for through traffic north of Terre Haute, and a similar case with OH 32 over US 50 for Cincinnati to Athens and the OH 2 freeway replacing US 6 and US 20 in the Cleveland area.