1955 Louisiana Highway Renumbering - History

History

Highway numbers in Louisiana first appeared in 1921, per Act 95 of the 1921 Special Session of the Louisiana Legislature. Routes 1 through 98 were defined that year. These first 98 routes remained consistent throughout the pre-1955 era. The lowest numbered routes seem to have followed major auto trails; for instance, LA 1 was the Jefferson Highway, LA 2 was the Old Spanish Trail, etc. The remainder of the numbering system seemed to work on a lower-number, higher-order principle, with some clustering; for instance, LA 61 and 62 both existed in St. Bernard Parish. When US highways were added in 1926, the US designations were simply overlaid over the preexisting state route (SR) designations in a method similar to modern Georgia (the state route was included in signage as well).

Other routes were added as time went on, numbered in consecutive fashion, starting with LA 99 in 1924. By 1926 there were 162 defined routes; by 1929, 490. The number of routes increased precipitously during the Huey Long era, with 1325 routes defined by 1930 and more to come. A few routes were given "half" numbers, such as LA 99½ and LA 1315½, for reasons perhaps related to numerical duplications in the official legal descriptions of the routes. (LA 99½, which had been jokingly referred to as "the left lane of 100," was redesignated in the pre-1955 era, as LA 2203.)

The pre-1955 system eventually reached the 22xx numeric range (or so) at its zenith. There were also "C-xxxx" roads, the purpose of which is unclear. All roads were seemingly numbered in the order that they were taken into the system, which led to anarchy, inconsistency, and disorder prevailing among the system of numbered routes. Major through routes were often divided up into several different route designations, and the routing of several primary marked routes (such as the old LA 1 and LA 30) came to make little sense from a traffic flow perspective.

Route designations were somewhat sacrosanct; apparently they could only be rerouted to take advantage of minor alignment shifts along the same general route. Former route segments retained the same number with a letter suffix added, starting with "D" and increasing with other bypassed segments in the same area. For example, bypassed LA 7 west of Hammond (current LA 1040) became LA 7D (or 7-D) while a bypassed segment east of Hammond (current LA 1067) became LA 7E (or 7-E). However, the major routes by and large retained consistent numbers despite the lack of major reroutings. Suffixes were also used in a way similar to the "spur" routes in the present system.

Unlike today's system, clustering of the higher numbers seems to have occurred only when multiple routes in an area were added at the same time. For example, LA 1225 to 1251 all existed within Jefferson Parish and were designated by the same act of legislature in 1930. Otherwise, routes appear to have been numbered sequentially as they were added to the system.

Not all numbers were assigned to existing roads; some roads were merely "projected", which is to say they were only lines on paper. State roads were often improved only "if funds were available." This resulted in routes being nonexistent in the field, in whole or in part, or signed along routes that sometimes differed from their legal description. LA 33 was always discontinuous as ten miles of the New Orleans-Hammond Highway was never completed as planned through St. John the Baptist and St. Charles Parishes. LA 1 did not match its legal description until 1928 when the Jefferson Highway was completed between Shrewsbury and New Orleans.