US Ends .com

^ 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 Feb. 07, 2023: originally posted to my old blog Historically US 80 connected Dallas and Ft. Worth. Although US 80 was decommissioned along that segment in 1993, some evidence of US 80's historical presence in Ft. Worth survived for nearly another three decades. This photo was taken looking north on Beach Street: Charles Turner, Jun. 2016 Even though the designation of Lancaster Avenue was changed to TX 180 in 1993, overhead signage still had not been replaced (most likely related to the fact that Beach is not maintained by TXDoT). The sign on southbound Beach had weathered the elements much better than its northbound counterpart: Sanderson, Oct. 2017 Those sign panels were finally replaced in 2020 (presumably by the City of Ft. Worth, not TXDoT). Although I have no proof, I suspect the new panels were in-kind replacements, i.e. they were originally created with US 80 shields. By March 2021 the panels referred to US 180 (instead of US 80), but clos...

^ date reposted to this blog Jan. 21, 2023: originally posted to my old blog Feb. 09, 2026: last updated (after Super Bowl LX [60] was played) When I was growing up in the 1970s, one of my favorite collections was a set of miniature plastic National Football League helmets. I recently happened to find them again, and now that nearly 50 years have passed, it is interesting to look back at what has changed in the NFL since then. During the '70s there were only 28 teams. So that was 14 teams per conference, which did not divide up very well. There were only three divisions in each conference, so two divisions consisted of five teams each, while one division consisted of four teams. Since 2002 there have been 32 teams, or 16 per conference, which divides up nicely into four divisions, each consisting of four teams. During the intervening years, some teams moved to new locations, new divisions and/or new conferences, and obviously there has been a net gain of four teams. In the p...

^ date reposted to this blog Feb. 21, 2022: originally posted to my old blog Prior to I-25, there was a different main highway that connected Denver to several of the Northern Front Range cities in Colorado. The number of this highway has changed a few times during the past century, but its general corridor has remained the same: it still runs through Ft. Collins, Loveland, Berthoud, Longmont, Lafayette, Broomfield, Westminster, and Denver. Not all of those cities had even been established at the time of the 1916 map shown below, but the highway corridor running along the Northern Front Range is readily apparent (going forward I will refer to this road as the NFRH, for "North Front Range Highway"): c. 1916, CDoT Towards the bottom of that map, notice the jog in the road that is circled in red; this article will focus on that area later. But for now, notice that the NFRH had been assigned a designation of State Highway 2 at the time. About ten years later, a couple major ...

^ date reposted to this blog Feb. 01, 2022: originally posted to my old blog Our planet is spheroidal in shape, which means its surface is curved. So making a map of the Earth's surface involves taking something that is curved and projecting it onto something flat (such as a piece of paper or a computer screen). But this flattening inherently causes some distortion from reality. It is not possible for any one map projection to preserve all of the following: 1.) direction, 2.) shape, 3.) area, and 4.) distance. So when a cartographer chooses a particular map projection, they are choosing to preserve one or more of those traits at the expense of others. Maps of the 48 states often use the Lambert Conformal Conic projection. Even if you are not familiar with that term, it is a map projection with which we are all quite familiar; many cartographers use it because it is a great choice for mapping the 48 states. It preserves shape well, and it comes reasonably close to preserving ...