US Ends .com

At the time of this writing, it has been 50 years since the US 24 designation was cancelled between Grand Junction and Minturn, CO, leaving only US 6 along that stretch.  Nevertheless, some locals (particularly along the segment around Glenwood Springs, New Castle, Silt, and Rifle) still refer to the old road as "Highway 6 & 24". Gabe Chenoweth, General Manager of KMTS(FM) in Glenwood, was curious about that, so he did some searching online and found the usends.com website. Since he is also the host of a long-form interview program, he reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in discussing that subject on the air.  I agreed, and we did the interview on Sep. 29, 2025.  If you'd like to hear it, please visit this page . To prepare for that interview, I did a fair amount of research, but as it turned out, there wasn't enough time in the program to include all of the material.  Not wanting that effort to go to waste, I decided to post all of my...

^ date reposted to this blog Mar. 16, 2023: originally posted to my old blog US 231 was included in the inaugural routes of Nov. 1926, but at the time it ran only from Montgomery AL to Marianna FL. US 241 was not among the original routes*, but neither was it far behind: it was commissioned in Mar. 1930. This was mostly done to appease certain Alabama interests who wanted a US route designation to be applied to their State Highway 1.  ​ *For the sake of clarity, there actually was a US 241 that was commissioned in 1926 to run between Nashville TN and Hopkinsville KY. However, it was never signposted as such in Tennessee, and possibly not in Kentucky either. AASHO officially canceled the US 241[i] designation in Jun. 1929, and its number was recycled less than a year later and applied to the route discussed on this page. To avoid confusion, this route is sometimes differentiated as US 241[ii]. A commercial state highway map from 1928 (by General Drafting) indicated that Alabam...

^ date reposted to this blog Jun. 30, 2018: originally posted to my old blog Aug. 20, 2022: last updated The following map shows US 311 and other relevant routes as they existed just prior to the changes that were implemented in 1934: The green line represents US 220, which was primarily a Pennsylvania route. On its north, US 220 extended a fraction of a mile into New York, ending in Waverly. To the south, US 220 passed through the thin panhandle of Maryland and barely entered West Virginia, terminating at New Creek. The purple line was US 311. Its north terminus was at its junction with US 11 in Roanoke, Virginia. From there it went south into North Carolina, but instead of heading straight through Greensboro, US 311 took a longer route, first heading southwest to Winston-Salem, and then back southeast through High Point. In other words, US 311 did not follow the shortest route between its own endpoints. The thin red line was US 411. It began in Madison NC and functioned as...

^ date reposted to this blog Apr. 11, 2018: originally posted to my old blog On a recent roadtrip along US 400, my son asked me, "Isn't 400 kind of a weird number for a highway?" Apparently even non-roadgeeks sense that there is something wrong with the US 400 designation. But it goes beyond that. This post examines all of the things that are wrong with US 400: not only its number, but also its purpose, its implementation, its intra-state nature, its collateral damage, and its amount of concurrent mileage with other US routes. But I'm getting ahead of myself; let's start from the beginning... The easternmost of US 400's many overlaps with other US routes. History In the early 1990s, Wichita leaders helped to convince the US DoT of the importance of an east-west interstate through the city, and the proposed route (I-66) was included among the "High Priority Corridors" of ISTEA legislation. However, states to the west of Kansas offered no support...

^ 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...

^ date reposted to this blog Feb. 01, 2017: originally posted to my old blog  Apr. 28, 2024: last updated At 568 miles*, Texas 16 is the longest state highway in Texas (that is, the longest road with a state highway designation, as opposed to a US route or an interstate). The second-longest is Texas 6, at 551 miles*. These two routes intersect in the town of De Leon. Actually, they overlap for about a half-mile:   These two routes first intersected in 1945, when TX 6 was extended. Another result of that extension was that TX 6 became the longest state highway in Texas for the next 20 years, until TX 16 assumed that honor in 1965. The history of the changes that led to the current arrangement is largely a story of renumberings due to conflicts with US route numbers in Texas. On the 1935 official state highway map (the earliest I have seen), TX 6 began in the Galveston area (as it still does) and ran northwest, but it ended in Waco. At the time, the road running northwest o...