Exit Numbers in The United States - Early Exit Numbers

Early Exit Numbers

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• In April 1938, the New York City Department of Parks installed exit numbers on New York's parkways, specifically:
  • Grand Central Parkway - 1 at Triborough Bridge to 11 at Kew Gardens, and on to 24 at Marcus Avenue, then continuing from 25 (Lakeville Road) on the Northern State Parkway (run by the Long Island State Park Commission, which also planned numbers on its other parkways)
  • Interborough Parkway (now the Jackie Robinson Parkway) - 4 at Pennsylvania Avenue to 11 at Kew Gardens (Exits 1, 2, and 3 were intended for a formerly proposed extension to Belt Parkway)
  • Henry Hudson Parkway - 1 at 72nd Street to 19 at Mosholu Parkway
  • Hutchinson River Parkway - beginning with 7 in Pelham Bay Park
• As other NYC parkways were completed, they too got numbers.
• Connecticut's Merritt Parkway (CT-15) got sequential numbers in 1948, continuing the numbers of the Hutchinson River Parkway. The Merritt Parkway's lowest-numbered exit remains Exit 27, although the "Hutch" exits were renumbered; traveling towards Connecticut, Exit 30 is encountered at the border (also the beginning of Route 15), where the number "resets" to 27 before reascending. The remainder of Route 15's exit numbers (on the Wilbur Cross Parkway and Wilbur Cross Highway) continue the Merritt sequence.
• The Pennsylvania Turnpike had sequential numbers when its first section opened on October 1, 1940.
• The New Jersey Turnpike had sequential numbers when it opened in late 1951.
• In the early 1950s, New Jersey's Garden State Parkway opened, probably the first road to use distance-based exit numbers.
• The Gulf Freeway (US 75, later Interstate 45) in Houston, Texas had sequential numbers by 1956 The numbering scheme started at the freeway's northern end in downtown Houston, and counted up towards the southeast and Galveston.
• Massachusetts started handing out exit numbers in the 1950s to its freeways in and around the Boston area, with an uncommon system of making sure every freeway's intersection with Route 128 was an "Exit 25", numbers increasing away from Boston. Starting in 1976, these freeways started to receive more conventional numbering. As of 2007, only the US 3 freeway retains its original numbering with the older system, to avoid exit confusion with MA 3, whose northernmost non-multiplexed numbered exit is 20.