US Ends .com

^ date reposted to this blog May 11, 2023: originally posted to my old blog May 18, 2023: last updated Inspired by Kurumi in an AARoads Forum post , I decided to compile a list of US routes that have been completely moved (or at least mostly moved) from their original alignments. In other words, these routes bear no resemblance (or very little resemblance) to the route that originally carried the same number. A subset of these shape-shifting routes could be considered "Grandfather's Axe highways". Grandfather's Axe highways That term refers to a philosophical conundrum which posits the question, "If grandfather replaced the head of his axe, and later he replaced the axe handle, is it still the same axe?" One could ask a similar question about some US routes. Imagine a highway that started out along certain corridor, but then the "head" of the route was moved, and later the "tail" of the route was moved, such that the highway no lo...

^ date reposted to this blog Jul. 05, 2020: originally posted to my old blog Feb. 28, 2023: last updated Of the "main" US highways (i.e. the one- and two-digit routes), the longest nine were all east-west routes (6, 20, 50, 30, 40, 60, 70, 80, 12). And if we take the longest 16 highways, only one of them is a north-south route (US 1, shown in red here): That stands to reason, because the United States is roughly twice as wide from east to west as it is from north to south. So it makes sense that there would be more long east-west routes. But does the same hold true if we look at the "branch" routes of the system (i.e. the three-digit routes)? Not really. The three longest branch routes are all north-south highways (287, 281, and 191). The fourth-longest (160) does run east-west, but it is about 400 miles shorter than the longest north-south branch routes. The next three longest also run north-south (395, 183, 385): Technically, there is some debate about how...

^ 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...