"Hyphenated" Routes
The Louisiana state highway system’s most ubiquitous and unique anachronism is the infamous "hyphenated" routes. These routes were created with the 1955 renumbering, and are a legacy of the assumption by the state through the years of many otherwise local streets in cities and towns throughout the state. The state-maintained city streets were/are often short sections of road, usually interconnected with other state-maintained local streets in the vicinity. Because of the interconnectedness of these state-maintained streets, as well as their close proximity and extremely short length, it was decided for practical purposes not to separately number each and every street in a town as a separate state route. Instead, each street was deemed a 'section' of a larger whole, with the aggregate comprising a single state highway; this becomes obvious when reading the 1955 statute that defines the newly redesignated state highways. The separate sections are denoted by numbers in the statute, which correspond in signage to the last digit in a hyphenated route number. For example, LA 560-3 is section 3 of LA 560.
Similar as it may sound, this method is different from state route legislative definitions in states such as California, where state routes are often defined as existing in disjoint sections; but in these cases, there is often a linear continuity of a route through cosigning or implied connections made via other routes. In Louisiana’s case, the base "route" usually resembles a web-like or disconnected pattern; thus the distinction between sections in signage—or else there would be multiple, often intersecting routes with the same number, and real confusion would ensue.
Over the years many of these hyphenated state routes have been returned to local control, thus deleting parts of, or entire "families" of, hyphenated routes. For example, the LA 466 family originally had 17 sections, all within the city of Gretna in Jefferson Parish. Most of these sections have been turned back to local control; the remaining section lost its "hyphen" and was renumbered as plain LA 466. In Baton Rouge, the LA 950 family had 17 sections; all are extinct. Some families still survive intact, such as the six sections of the LA 830 family in Bastrop. A few have been renumbered, almost always to 3000-series routes: LA 3155 in Metairie was once LA 611-13, and former portions of LA 611-3 and 611-4 that were severed from the rest of their routes were redesignated LA 3261 and LA 3262, respectively.
Invariably, hyphenated routes are short, local streets that seemingly serve no state-level purpose whatsoever; many are dead ends, residential side streets, etc., and sometimes end in arbitrary places. The majority of these routes can be found in urbanized areas, though there are a few that exist in rural surroundings. All of the hyphenated routes in the nomenclature are found among the original secondary SR system (routes 300 to 1241). There are no 3000-series hyphenates because all hyphenates were created with the 1955 renumbering (the 3xxx routes were later additions/renumberings).
Read more about this topic: 1955 Louisiana Highway Renumbering
Famous quotes containing the word routes:
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)