History
As part of its construction of concrete roads, started by a 1913 bond issue, Orange County paved the county road through Laguna Canyon, connecting State Highway Route 2 (the forerunner of U.S. Hwy. 101 and I-5) at Irvine with Laguna Beach, by 1917. The road was added to the state highway system in 1933 as Route 185, an unsigned designation. The entire route was added to the new California Freeway and Expressway System in 1959; the planned upgrade had already been named the Laguna Freeway by the California Highway Commission on November 26, 1957. The highway received a sign route number—State Route 133—in the 1964 renumbering.
Opening of the first—and only—piece of the Laguna Freeway was celebrated in Laguna Beach on October 1, 1952, connecting the north end of Laguna Canyon with a planned extension of the Santa Ana Freeway at a trumpet interchange and bypassing the old route on Sand Canyon Avenue. There were initially no other interchanges along the route. The state decided not to build the remainder of the freeway in late 1975, and in 1996 the portion south of SR 73 was removed from the Freeway and Expressway System. Widening of the part north of SR 73 to a four-lane expressway was completed in late 2006, moving the road out of the canyon bottom and allowing better access to areas in Laguna Coast Wilderness Park.
A new State Route 231 was added to the state highway system in 1988, connecting I-5 northwest of Irvine with SR 91, and in 1991 the south end was shifted southeast to the north end of SR 133, with the old route becoming SR 261. To prevent the route from changing numbers as it crossed I-5, the southern portion was renumbered SR 133 in 1996, with the remainder becoming an extended SR 241. The Eastern Transportation Corridor, which includes SR 133 north of I-5, was completed on October 15, 1998, opening a new shortcut from Orange County to the northeast.
Read more about this topic: California State Route 133
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)