Maryland Route 404 is a major highway on Maryland's Eastern Shore in the United States. It runs 24.61 miles (39.61 km) from Maryland Route 662 in Wye Mills on the border of Queen Anne's and Talbot Counties, southeast to the Delaware state line in Caroline County, where the road continues as Delaware Route 404 to Nassau (near Rehoboth Beach). The Maryland and Delaware state highways together cross the width of the Delmarva Peninsula and serve to connect the cities west of the Chesapeake Bay by way of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and U.S. Route 50 with the Delaware beaches. Along the way, MD 404 passes through mostly farmland and woodland as well as the towns of Queen Anne, Hillsboro, and Denton. The road is a two-lane undivided highway for most of its length with the exception of the bypass around Denton, which is a four-lane divided highway.
MD 404 was designated in 1940 to run from Matapeake (where the Annapolis-Matapeake ferry across the Chesapeake Bay connected the route to Annapolis), east along present-day Maryland Route 8, Maryland Route 18, and Maryland Route 662 to Wye Mills (where it follows its current routing to the Delaware border). By 1948, the route’s western terminus was moved to Maryland Route 2 north of Annapolis, where it headed east across the Chesapeake Bay on the Sandy Point-Matapeake ferry. The MD 404 designation was planned for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge; however, US 50 was extended onto the Eastern Shore and MD 404’s western terminus was cut back to its current location in Wye Mills. A few realignments of the route have taken place since then, including a bypass of Queen Anne and Hillsboro, a segment east of Hillsboro by 1960, and the bypass of Denton built in the 1980s.
Since MD 404 is the main route for travelers between the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and the Delaware beaches, the road has a high accident rate. To improve on this situation, the Maryland State Highway Administration is planning to widen the two-lane portions of the route into a four-lane divided highway. A portion of the road east of the Tuckahoe Creek in Caroline County is receiving $7.7 million for widening as a part of the stimulus bill signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009.
Read more about Maryland Route 404: History, Future, Junction List
Famous quotes containing the word route:
“A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)