United States Numbered Highway System
The United States highway system is a system of federal and state funded roads. As these highways were coordinated and partially funded by the United States Federal Government (as opposed to state and local roads), they are sometimes referred to as "Federal Highways".
Early Named Automobile Highway System
The first United States automobile highway system originated in the 1910s with a series of named highways, known collectively as National Auto Trails. The major routes were named for American Presidents; 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. A major exception to the presidential names was the Dixie Highway, running from Miami, Florida to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. 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. The old named highways were marked with horizontal bands of color on telephone & telegraph poles and posts beside their routes, sometimes suplimented 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).
The Current United States Highway System
The current United States Highway system began in 1924, and the named highways began to be replaced with numbers the following year. Unlike the later Interstate highway system, roads on the United States highway system are not usually controlled-access roads: many are the main streets of the cities and towns they run through. The United States Highways were (and are) state highways, funded with some federal assistance.
On maps and the road, the highway is indicated by a number on a white sign in a shape of a shield. Until the 1980's, the regulations which describe the sign did not explicit state that they would be white, leading the state of Florida to use different colors for different roads from the 1956 until 1994 [[1]].
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. The numbers increase moving east to west and north to south, which is the reverse of the progression of the interstate highway system. (This contrast was deliberate, to avoid confusing the newer interstate highway numbers with the older U.S. highways.) Route numbers greater than 101, with a few minor exceptions, are spur or secondary routes given a number consisting of a single digit prefixed to the number of the "parent" route; for example, US highway 202 is a secondary route that branches off highway 2.
Some secondary routes are designated by letters instead of numbers, such as 25A or 9W.
The Interstate highway system of limited access highways was begun in the 1950s with the National Defense Highway System. These new highways were to supplement the existing United States highway system, not to replace the US highway system, although in some areas an interstate did replace an older US highway.
See Also
- List of roads and highways
- List of United States Highways
- National Auto Trail
- Parkway
- Interstate highway
- turnpike