California State Route 16 - History

History

The two ends of SR 16 were added to the state highway system by the third bond issue, passed by the state's voters in 1919: Route 50 from Lower Lake east to Rumsey and Route 54 from the Sacramento-Amador County line east to Drytown. Each was connected to Sacramento by existing or planned paved county highways. Although the exact alignment of Route 50 was not specified, the state Department of Engineering had already surveyed a 35-mile (56 km) route through Cache Creek Canyon pursuant to a 1915 law, which defined the Yolo and Lake Highway "following generally, the meanderings of Cache creek" but did not make it a state highway. By 1924, the California Highway Commission's engineers had realized that building Route 50 through the canyon was impractical, and adopted a substitute plan for two highways connecting Lower Lake and Rumsey with the planned Route 15 (Tahoe-Ukiah Highway, now State Route 20) to the north in September 1925. The western connection, to Lower Lake, became part of Route 49 (now State Route 53 there), which continued south from Lower Lake to Calistoga.

Each route was extended to Sacramento in 1933 over the aforementioned county highways, taking Route 50 southeast from Rumsey to Woodland near Cache Creek and then alongside the Sacramento River to the I Street Bridge, and Route 54 west from the county line to Route 11 just outside Sacramento. The entirety of both routes, from SR 20 near Wilbur Springs through Sacramento to State Route 49 just north of Drytown (and initially overlapping SR 49 to Jackson), was included in the initial state sign route system in 1934 as Sign Route 16. Through downtown Sacramento, SR 16 followed U.S. 40 (Legislative Route 6) and U.S. 50 (Legislative Route 11), mostly on Capitol Avenue, while Legislative Route 50 continued south on 5th Street (later a one-way pair of 3rd and 5th Streets) and turned east on Broadway, carrying Sign Route 24 most of the way to Freeport Boulevard. In the 1964 renumbering, Route 16 became the new legislative designation, and Sign Route 24 through Sacramento was replaced with State Route 99 and State Route 160. As neither of these used what had been Sign Route 24 along 3rd and 5th Streets and Broadway, part of Route 16's new definition ("Route 5 near Woodland to Sacramento") was used for several years on this alignment until it became part of State Route 99 later that decade. This left the western segment of SR 16 ending at Interstate 5 near the east end of the I Street Bridge until 1984, when the Woodland-Sacramento portion, which had become redundant with the parallel Interstate 5 complete, was deleted from the legislative definition. It was at about this time that SR 16 was rerouted from the intersection with County Route E7 to continue north on a bypass of Woodland instead of east to Interstate 5.