States with the best routing logic?

[JREwing78]

Wisconsin's routing logic can probably be described as midpack. Lake Michigan and Chicago mess up a lot of route paths, with US-12 and US-14 out of sequence of (former) US-16 and US-18 due to their path into Chicago, and later I-90 and I-94 taking similarly wonky paths across the state.

Route numbers are almost never reused between state and US highways, which is helpful. Some decisions, like the one to truncate Hwy 13 to the Dells instead of maintaining a long multiplex south to Evansville (where Hwy 213 picks up to Beloit) make sense. Hwy 11 makes for a reasonable route along the lower tier of counties. Hwy 21 and Hwy 77 have sensible routing. Hwy 35 is near fanatical about being the first route encountered crossing from Iowa or Minnesota. Hwys 29 and 64 are good examples of coherent straight-line routes.

But other decisions, like the routing of Hwy 23, seem to defy logic. There is no way that someone starting in Sheboygan is going to follow Hwy 23 to reach Mineral Point or Darlington. Ditto for Hwy 22, which starts at a random spot north of DeForest and wanders around before veering east into Green Bay (the actual Bay, not the city of).

The path of Hwy 73 is similarly drunk, first veering east of, then west of US-51 (and later I-39) to end up at a random spot off US-8 in the middle of the Northwoods. Hwy 67 starts off in Beloit as a E-W roadway within a mile of the Illinos line, and then randomly makes a left turn and heads north before dropping you just south of Fond du Lac. just west of Manitowoc.

US-45 is reasonably coherent north of Oshkosh. But then it wanders around a bit randomly and out of the grid before being a basically parallel surface route to US-41 south of Milwaukee.

US-53 doesn't follow the best path between Eau Claire and LaCrosse, conflicting with it's almost-an-Interstate status between Eau Claire and Superior. Hwy 93 clearly was intended to replace the existing US-53 routing, but never did.

Geography doesn't help with highway logistics, but some of these routing decisions defy logic even when accounting for geography.

[SkyPesos]

- using one route per straight-line corridor (as opposed to say part of the corridor being one number, then part being another number)

Ohio's definitely going into the bottom half for this. Three numbers (US 23/OH 15/I-75) for Columbus to Toledo, and the OH 161/37/16 freeway that somehow still have 3 numbers east of Columbus; 6 numbers if you count the whole Columbus to Pittsburgh corridor along it, adding in US 36, US 250 and US 22.

Ohio's interstate network is okay until you get to the cities where ODOT's fetish for channelization and multiplexing slows traffic and creates bottlenecks. I also agree with you about the numbers not being unified. Even if they are going to use their existing numbers they should still give it a unified number like Iowa does with the Avenue of the Saints.

What I don't get is that OhioDOT has unified the various numbers of an expressway corridor to a single number before. OH 32 used to be a mix of OH 32 (old OH 74), OH 124 (which it still shares a long concurrency with) and some other numbers. They could do the same with OH 16/161 if they want to.

- using one route per straight-line corridor (as opposed to say part of the corridor being one number, then part being another number)

Ohio's definitely going into the bottom half for this. Three numbers (US 23/OH 15/I-75) for Columbus to Toledo, and the OH 161/37/16 freeway that somehow still have 3 numbers east of Columbus; 6 numbers if you count the whole Columbus to Pittsburgh corridor along it, adding in US 36, US 250 and US 22.

Interestingly, this is the same state that used OH 1 (essentially supplanted by I-71) and OH 3 to create unified Columbus to Cleveland pathways.

Little tidbit, that's actually the second OH 1. The first one is now US 40. In fact, I like how Ohio's initial state routes system have the single digit numbers on cross-state routes, before clustering numbers. Probably the best routing logic this state ever had with state routes.
OH 1 - became US 40
OH 2 - became US 20 (current OH 2 was part of OH 120 and OH 12)
OH 3 - As is
OH 4 - US 23 Portsmouth to Marion, then current OH 4 to Sandusky
OH 5 - became US 30
OH 6 - became US 25, now various county and state routes parallel with I-75
OH 7 - existing route, plus US 52 and US 50 along the Ohio river to the IN border
OH 8 - became US 21, now various county and state routes parallel with I-77. Second iteration of this route south of Akron is today's OH 800
OH 9 - became US 127

[Quillz]

Unfortunately the 1934 pattern was probably doomed to fail given how many Legislative Routes didn't initially have Sign Routes assigned to them.  The 1934 grid was designed with the belief that not every Legislative Route was going to become important enough to warrant a Sign Route:

https://www.gribblenation.org/2022/04/patterns-in-original-1934-california.html?m=1

Which is ironic, as I believe one of the original goals was to leave room for expansion. When I did a renumbering, what I found worked was to make all the original west-east routes increase by 12. So if you keep CA-4 in place, then original CA-8 became CA-16, for example. This meant something like real world CA-44 became CA-76, but now you have a good amount of space for more numbers. It offered expansion while retaining the grid schematic a bit better.

But yes, I suppose having an internal and external numbering system was just inevitably going to lead to confusion and numbers being assigned without much regard for how they fit with each other.

Right, but that expansion took place quickly and was largely already maxed out on available route numbers by the 1964 Renumbering came.  Other factors like the Interstates duplicating many 1934 era sign routes was also a problem which was addressed.

That's why I think the only way the system would have worked is if from the start, more space was used. It seems every fourth number was assigned (so 4, 8, 12, 16, etc.) Had the initial range been 2-3x larger, there would have been a lot more room to work in new routes as they were converted from legislative to state. But we got what we got, so no point thinking about it too much.

[US 89]

Utah has to be bottom half for this...

There's pretty much no order at all in how routes were assigned. The earliest numbering system was a cluster scheme that used 1-10 on the most important roads and then assigned up to about 50 in a generally clockwise direction starting in the southwest part of the state. After that, numbers were assigned in order and then also reused haphazardly as routes were deleted, which means most of the longer corridors tend to be 2 digit routes...but there are a handful of long 3 digit routes and an even bigger handful of short 1/2 digit routes. It also means there are several clusters of routes that were all created at the same time in the same area (like 268, 269, 270 in downtown SLC), but that is nowhere near regular enough to be useful.

For the most part, the routes take logical paths, but the state hates concurrencies, so there are a ton of instances where one route ends two blocks from another route that begins and carries on the same direction. Stuff like 248/150 in Kamas or 56/14 in Cedar City. There are also a number of routings, such as the north end of 68 in Bountiful, that smack of "this is how we could get numbers to follow continuous stretches of state maintained road".

There are also numerous "institutional" routes that follow random roads on college campuses that happen to be state maintained, or even parking lots of state facilities. Those are almost always unsigned...as they should be.

At least signage is generally quite good. For years Interstate/US overlap signage was a joke but now there are only a few places where US routes outright disappear.

And yet, most of the route numbers in the valleys seem irrelevant to locals for navigation due to the grids, despite the good route signage.

It's not the grids themselves - it's that such a large percentage of Utah's state highway mileage is dedicated to urban arterials with street names, and those highways typically don't extend far outside the metro areas if at all.

In any large or mid-sized city I have ever lived or spent substantial time in, locals typically don't care one bit about route designations unless they are clearly and obviously part of a much longer corridor, especially if they're US highways. For example, here in Tallahassee, it's generally known that Tennessee St is part of US 90. But nobody gives one shit that West Pensacola is SR 366, Meridian is SR 155, Magnolia is SR 265, and so on. We just use the street names. Atlanta's roads are so messy that even the US highways were pretty obscure to most people when I lived there.

[mrsman]

Unfortunately the 1934 pattern was probably doomed to fail given how many Legislative Routes didn't initially have Sign Routes assigned to them.  The 1934 grid was designed with the belief that not every Legislative Route was going to become important enough to warrant a Sign Route:

https://www.gribblenation.org/2022/04/patterns-in-original-1934-california.html?m=1

Which is ironic, as I believe one of the original goals was to leave room for expansion. When I did a renumbering, what I found worked was to make all the original west-east routes increase by 12. So if you keep CA-4 in place, then original CA-8 became CA-16, for example. This meant something like real world CA-44 became CA-76, but now you have a good amount of space for more numbers. It offered expansion while retaining the grid schematic a bit better.

But yes, I suppose having an internal and external numbering system was just inevitably going to lead to confusion and numbers being assigned without much regard for how they fit with each other.

Right, but that expansion took place quickly and was largely already maxed out on available route numbers by the 1964 Renumbering came.  Other factors like the Interstates duplicating many 1934 era sign routes was also a problem which was addressed.

That's why I think the only way the system would have worked is if from the start, more space was used. It seems every fourth number was assigned (so 4, 8, 12, 16, etc.) Had the initial range been 2-3x larger, there would have been a lot more room to work in new routes as they were converted from legislative to state. But we got what we got, so no point thinking about it too much.

Agree, to a point.  Going by every 4 does leave some room for routes in the middle, but the problem that CA had with the original numbering scheme of 1934 was that they used up some of the same numbers simultaneously.  I.e. 4, 8, 12, 16 did not leave room for 2,6,10,14 since the 4-16 pattern was used in NoCal and the 2-14 pattern was used in SoCal.

By my count, the 1934 system identified 41 even numbered routes and 28 odd numbered routes.  It was certainly correct to make E-W even and N-S odd to conform with the US system (and the later Interstate system), and it is also certainly correct to assign more important routes as 2 digit and less important routes as 3 digits, while also allowing some 3 digit routes to come into place later as gap fillers as new highways are identified.

So in my estimation, a better system to account for growth and to provide a consistent numbering pattern would be something along the lines of the following:

1, 9, 17, ... 217, 225.  Increasing from west to east.  Providing gaps for new routes.  Since CA's population areas are largley on the coast, the lower numbers will serve the bigger cities.

2, 10, 18, ...  354, 362.  Increasing from north to south.  Providing gaps for new routes.

But that's all fictional.  Appreciate that it started as a reasonable system that had to be changed into a mishmash largely because of 1964 renumberings and the additions of interstate and other state highways.

[Quillz]

Unfortunately the 1934 pattern was probably doomed to fail given how many Legislative Routes didn't initially have Sign Routes assigned to them.  The 1934 grid was designed with the belief that not every Legislative Route was going to become important enough to warrant a Sign Route:

https://www.gribblenation.org/2022/04/patterns-in-original-1934-california.html?m=1

Which is ironic, as I believe one of the original goals was to leave room for expansion. When I did a renumbering, what I found worked was to make all the original west-east routes increase by 12. So if you keep CA-4 in place, then original CA-8 became CA-16, for example. This meant something like real world CA-44 became CA-76, but now you have a good amount of space for more numbers. It offered expansion while retaining the grid schematic a bit better.

But yes, I suppose having an internal and external numbering system was just inevitably going to lead to confusion and numbers being assigned without much regard for how they fit with each other.

Right, but that expansion took place quickly and was largely already maxed out on available route numbers by the 1964 Renumbering came.  Other factors like the Interstates duplicating many 1934 era sign routes was also a problem which was addressed.

That's why I think the only way the system would have worked is if from the start, more space was used. It seems every fourth number was assigned (so 4, 8, 12, 16, etc.) Had the initial range been 2-3x larger, there would have been a lot more room to work in new routes as they were converted from legislative to state. But we got what we got, so no point thinking about it too much.

Agree, to a point.  Going by every 4 does leave some room for routes in the middle, but the problem that CA had with the original numbering scheme of 1934 was that they used up some of the same numbers simultaneously.  I.e. 4, 8, 12, 16 did not leave room for 2,6,10,14 since the 4-16 pattern was used in NoCal and the 2-14 pattern was used in SoCal.

By my count, the 1934 system identified 41 even numbered routes and 28 odd numbered routes.  It was certainly correct to make E-W even and N-S odd to conform with the US system (and the later Interstate system), and it is also certainly correct to assign more important routes as 2 digit and less important routes as 3 digits, while also allowing some 3 digit routes to come into place later as gap fillers as new highways are identified.

So in my estimation, a better system to account for growth and to provide a consistent numbering pattern would be something along the lines of the following:

1, 9, 17, ... 217, 225.  Increasing from west to east.  Providing gaps for new routes.  Since CA's population areas are largley on the coast, the lower numbers will serve the bigger cities.

2, 10, 18, ...  354, 362.  Increasing from north to south.  Providing gaps for new routes.

But that's all fictional.  Appreciate that it started as a reasonable system that had to be changed into a mishmash largely because of 1964 renumberings and the additions of interstate and other state highways.

Similar idea to what I did. I simply assigned the original batch of numbers to increase by 12 instead of 4. So 4, 16, 28, 1, 13, and so on. Allows for some expansion in between. I'm not sure why some legislative routes were not originally planned to be state highways, maybe it was due to poor road quality or not having traffic counts to justify it. I do know some legislative routes in the Eastern Sierra (notably the Westgard Pass route that later became part of CA-168) was due to the former not being paved until about the late 1950s or so.

[US20IL64]

For my home state of IL, the grid is pretty much on par with several other states, with most routes taking a fairly straight path, with the lone exception being the crooked IL 110, which is always multiplexed with others, including I-88 and I-290. Its US highways are neat parallels to the Interstates they complement, even without US 66. Plus I like how IL 1 stretches from Chicago to the other end of the state.

The Single Digit IL State Routes tend to have a bit of significance

IL 1 was already mentioned, and a bonus: the northern third of the route is also essentially the old Dixie Highway routing in IL
IL 2 runs along the Rock River between Rockford and Sterling
IL 3 is a significant route in SW IL, from Cairo near the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, up into and thru the Metro East, ending at Grafton near the confluence of the Illinois and the Mississippi
IL 4 historically was a Chicago-St Louis predecessor highway to what became US 66 and then I-55. The current route encompasses past of the historical routing between Springfield and Staunton, then making a de facto outer Metro East/STL eastern bypass, and the 4 number continues south into Jackson County and ends north of Murphysboro
IL 5 used to be the then-East-West now Reagan Tollway/I-88, and still exists as a major roadway in the Quad Cities area
IL 6 is the designation of the part of the Peoria Beltway Freeway north of I-74
IL 7 is a major highway in the Southwest Chicago Suburbs, going from Rockdale and Joliet to Harlem Ave/IL 43 near the Chicago City Limits. IL 7 is aptly named Southwest Highway for much of its length
IL 8 is shorter, but crosses the IL River in Peoria and is an important route in that part of the state
IL 9 successfully runs Indiana to Iowa across Central Illinois, meeting IN 26 to the east, and crossing the Mississippi to reach Business US 61 in Fort Madison, IA

Regarding IL 110, either it or IL 336 should be decommissioned. The would-be independent section of IL 336 between Macomb and Peoria is either officially or unofficially cancelled, and 110 and 336 are 100% multiplexed with each other. Every inch of 336 is also 110

IL 110 is more a 'promotional' route, aka "Chicago to Kansas City". To get more traffic to Western IL, aka "Forgottenonia".