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 Interstate 10 (as Route 10) superseded U.S. 60's alignment from Beaumont and towards the Arizona state line, even though the routing was only partly a freeway.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.
Read more about this topic: California State Route 60
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.”
—Newt Gingrich (b. 1943)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)