Why am I doing these pages?

Everybody's got their thing. This is mine. Or one of them, anyway...

Most people don't give much thought to highways. And why should they? You just drive on them, and get to where you're going... what's the big deal? Well, that's certainly true... but I enjoy thinking about where I could end up if I were to stay on a particular highway - all the way to its end.

For example: in my hometown, US 40 is routed on Colfax Avenue. But for me it's interesting to realize that, if I got on Colfax, headed east, and continued following the signs for US 40... I'd end up in Atlantic City NJ! Most people around here probably think of Colfax as nothing more than a local arterial, or perhaps one of our historic main streets. It's enriching for me to think of it as a small segment of what was once (and still nearly is) a coast-to-coast highway. It makes me feel a kind of kinship with places like Salina KS, Zanesville OH, Wheeling WV, Uniontown PA, Baltimore MD - and many other towns, people, and landscapes that really don't have much in common - except that they happen to lie along a chain of roads that were at some point officially linked together... and in 1926 those segments came to be known collectively as "U.S. Highway 40".

I also like to think about how people used to get where they were going - before we had double-barrelled freeways, and bypasses that whisk us around city centers. Back to Colfax Avenue, as an example: there was a time, before I-80 existed, that someone driving from Denver to San Francisco would've likely used US 40. (Today the US 40 designation ends near Park City UT, but the highway used to continue through to Salt Lake City, Reno, Sacramento, and ended in Frisco.) The trip probably would've taken three times as long - but a watchful driver would've absorbed a good sense of the landscape and local culture as they made their journey. Much better, at least, than what one would see today along I-80: fast food franchises, national hotel chains, and outlet malls.

Today, in many cases, the old roads which used to be our nation's interstate highways are still there - but frequently the US highway badge has been shifted over to a newer freeway. With a lot of research and a little intuition, you can usually figure out which roads would've been driven by a traveller during the "Golden Age of U.S. Highways" - roughly from the 1930s through the 1950s.

(Click here for a few more thoughts on the concept of interstate highways.)

Some might wonder, "Why do you focus only on the endpoints of each route? There's so much more to a highway than simply where it terminates." I couldn't agree more. But I couldn't possibly go into that kind of detail for all of the US routes. I leave that up to the capable people who maintain highway websites for specific states. Part of the reason I'm interested in the endpoints is because, in one sense, the endpoints define the highway. (For example: if I say there's a highway running from northern Minnesota to Tulsa OK, you probably know which other states that road passes through, and you can imagine what kind of country it must run through, and you might even know exactly which route I'm referring to.) Also, I find the history of a specific route's endpoints often mirrors the history of US routes in general (this route originally ended at an intersection downtown; later it was rerouted around downtown via a new bypass; now it's been truncated to a freeway interchange outside of town; etc.) Another interesting thing about doing these pages is it allows one to compare the differences in signage standards and practices among the various state highway departments: some do an excellent job, some are kind of hit-and-miss, and others are quite pitiful.

Anyway, I appreciate when state departments of transportation recognize the role their highways play in our national network by making a little extra effort to put up an "End" sign at the end of a highway's designation. I've traveled a lot of US highways; I've been watching for signs sporadically since 1988, and quite actively since 1997. I've noticed that many US highway endpoints are not marked. It's kind of a shame, in my opinion. Especially in cases like US 6: this road goes from California to the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. That's over 3000 miles! Yet the east end of US 6 is at a nondescript intersection with almost no signage whatsoever! Don't you think the end of a road that long deserves some kind of acknowledgment? At least a little sign that might pique the curiosity of the traveller?