California State Route 60 - History

History

Before 1964, U.S. 60 ran from Los Angeles to the Arizona state line, where it continued its nationwide trek, often overlapping U.S. 99 and U.S. 70 along the way. The advent of Interstate 10 created a situation where, at one point, four different signed routes would run along the state-maintained highway.

In 1964, California implemented a plan to simplify its highway-numbering system, where one state highway had only one route number and concurrencies were sternly discouraged. As a result, the U.S. 60 designation (along with U.S. 70 and U.S. 99) was removed. Interstate 10 (as Route 10) superseded U.S. 60's alignment from Beaumont and towards the Arizona state line, even though the routing was only partly a freeway. This left the officially designated Route 60 from Beaumont to Los Angeles orphaned from its original U.S. Highway (which to this day begins at a point on Interstate 10 east of Quartzsite, Arizona). This new Route 60 was provisionally signed as a U.S. Highway since the designation would guide motorists from Los Angeles to Arizona in the absence of a completed freeway for Interstate 10; when all of Route 10 was upgraded to a freeway, the U.S. Highway designation disappeared.

At least one California highway sign managed to be overlooked for many years afterward. A sign on Hess Boulevard at California State Route 62 in the unincorporated town of Morongo Valley pointing not to Interstate 10 but to U.S. 60 (with evidence of the sign having pointed to both U.S. 70 and U.S. 99 as well) stood through the early 2000s. It has since been removed.

The stretch of Route 60 along the Moreno Valley Freeway made national headlines in April 2004, when five-year-old Ruby Bustamante of Indio and her 26-year-old mother, Norma, were reported missing. Their car had left the road, apparently unwitnessed, between the gap in two guard rails on April 4. It then crashed underneath a tree in a deep ravine. Though Mrs. Bustamante lost her life, presumably at the moment of impact, Ruby survived on her own for ten days on cups of uncooked Top Ramen noodles and bottles of Gatorade which were in the car.

On December 14, 2011, a tanker truck carrying 8,800 gallons of gasoline caught fire and exploded on the 60 freeway in Montebello, causing Caltrans to have to rebuild the Paramount Boulevard overpass.