United States Numbered Highways

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This article is about the system typically called U.S. Routes or U.S. Highways. For general information about numbered highways in the United States, see numbered highways in the United States.

Image:US 39.svg Image:US 101 (CA).svg The system of United States Numbered Highways (often called U.S. Routes or U.S. Highways) is an integrated system of roads and highways in the United States numbered within a nationwide grid. As these highways were coordinated by the United States Federal Government in the early days, they are sometimes referred to as Federal Highways, but they have always been maintained by state or local governments. Nowadays, there is no funding difference between these routes and any other state highways. The numbers are coordinated by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), in which the only current federal involvement is a non-voting seat for the United States Department of Transportation.

Similar systems are the informal National Auto Trail system, which was used before the U.S. Highway System and the Interstate Highway System, which has partially replaced the United States Highway System.

Many United States highways are designated as part of the National Highway System, which includes all highways of national importance.

1 Early named system
2 Current system
3 See also
4 External links

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Early named system

Image:JeffersonHighwayMarker.jpgThe first United States automobile routes were named highways known collectively as National Auto Trails, starting in the 1910s. There was no plan or system to these Auto Trails; anyone could designate a highway. All it took was a knack for promotion. Signing your chosen route often involved painting your chosen route marker on solid objects along the route, like telephone poles or concrete bridge abutments. Some routes had metal markers echoing modern signage. Many of the routes were named for Presidents of the United States; for example the Lincoln Highway ran from New York City on the Atlantic coast to San Francisco on the Pacific; the Jefferson Highway from New Orleans north to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Two major exceptions to the U.S. presidential names were the Jefferson Davis Highway (named for the president of the Confederate States of America) ran from Washington, D.C. to Blaine in Washington State near the border with Canada, and the Dixie Highway, running from Miami, Florida to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Other Auto Trails were named after cities they linked, national parks they connected to, or after historic wagon trails.

Such obsolete highway names survive only in scattered locations in the United States, mostly on old highway routes that have been bypassed by later larger highways and now are used mostly by local traffic, or in the street names given to portions of the modern numbered highways within cities and towns (such as Lincoln Way in Cheyenne, Wyoming and Ames, Iowa). The old named highways were marked with horizontal bands of color on telephone & telegraph poles and posts beside their routes, sometimes supplemented by letters (eg; a red, a white and a blue stripe with an "L" indicated the Lincoln Highway; two blue stripes with "JH" indicated the Jefferson Highway; two white and one red stripe with "DH" showed the Dixie Highway).

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Current system

Image:Arizona us 66.svgDiscussion about the form of the proposed United States Numbered Highway system began in 1924 and a preliminary list was ready by the next year. The final list was approved on November 11, 1926. During 1927, the agreed upon numbers were posted. Some states removed the existing auto-trail names. U.S. numbered highways do not have a minimum design standard, unlike the later Interstate highway system, and are not usually controlled-access (stoplight-free) roads. Many are the main streets of the cities and towns they run through. The United States Highways are state highways, funded just like any other state highway.

The numbering of U.S. highways is not controlled by the federal government. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) determines the routes to be signed.

On maps and the road, a U.S. highway is indicated by a number on a white sign in a shape of a shield with six points, five above, one below[1]. Until the 1980s, the regulations which describe the sign did not explicitly state that they should be white, leading the state of Florida to use different colors for different roads from 1956 until 1994[2]. Arizona, Rhode Island, Kansas and Mississippi all experimented with coloring the US shield over the years.

The numbering system consists of a one-, two-, or three-digit number. For routes 1 through 101, odd numbers represent north-south highways and even numbers represent east-west. Major North-South US routes were designated by ending in 1. Major East-West US routes ended in zero. The numbers increase moving east to west and north to south. In contrast, the modern Interstate reverses the grid. For example, US 1 and I-95 are located on the East Coast, while US 101 and I-5 run along the West Coast. I-10 and US 90 run across the southern U.S., while I-90 and US 10 are found in the northern U.S.

Route numbers greater than 101 are spur or secondary routes given a number consisting of a single digit prefixed to the number of the "parent" route; for example, U.S. Route 331 is the third secondary route that branches off US 31.

Further defining the system, suffixes have been used. Equal splits in a route were designated E and W for East/West and N and S for North/South. Existing examples include US 31E & US 31W in Kentucky and Tennessee, in addition to US 70N & US 70S in Tennessee. This sort of equally split route is not as common as it used to be. AASHTO has been trying to eliminate such routes since 1935.

Bannered highways, additional loop and spur routes, are defined as alternate routes (A routes), bypass routes, and Business Routes (B routes). Temporary Routes are occasionally used (T routes) Some states have designated Old Routes, Historic Routes, Truck Routes, Scenic Routes, and Spur Routes. Toll Routes, City Routes and Optional Routes have been used in the past.

The Interstate highway system of limited access highways was begun in the 1950s as the National Defense Highway System. These new highways were to supplement the existing United States highway system, not to replace the U.S. highway system. The original plan for Interstates specified that the new numbers would not replace the existing US highway grid.

While AASHTO guidelines discourage US and Interstate routes with the same number to exist in the same state, such examples exist, like I-24 and US 24 in Illinois. In addition, I-49 is proposed to extend through Arkansas, a state that US 49 passes through; I-69 is planned to extend to Texas, where US 69 currently exists; and two Interstate/US concurrencies with the same number will occur in North Carolina (where I-74 will share a freeway with US 74) and Wisconsin (where I-41 will be designated along current US 41).