Why and how the Four Corners area US routes should be renumbered (again)
^ date reposted to this blog Feb. 22, 2017: originally posted to my old blog It is always instructive to begin by looking at the history of highways in the area, in order to understand how and why the current situation came to be. The early years To this day, vast tracts of land in northern Arizona and southern Utah are miles away from any kind of paved road. But the remoteness of this area was even more pronounced back in the late 1920s, when the US routes were first commissioned. At the time, there was no road worth showing on maps between Green River and Salina UT (along today's I-70 corridor). Nor between Cortez CO and Tuba City AZ (the path of modern US 160). Nor to the south from Monticello UT (along today's US 191): c. 1927, Rand McNally Even US 89 between Flagstaff and Salina was still an unpaved road, as was US 450 between Durango and Green River. In many respects, much of the Colorado Plateau was practically an untracked wilderness. When US 160 was first commiss...