United States Numbered Highways - System Details

System Details

See also: List of United States Numbered Highways

In general, U.S. Routes do not have a minimum design standard, unlike the later Interstate Highways, and are not usually built to freeway standards, although some stretches of U.S. Routes do meet those standards. Many are the main streets of the cities and towns through which they run. However, new additions to the system must "substantially meet the current AASHTO design standards". As of 1989, the United States Numbered Highways system has a total length of 157,724 miles (253,832 km).

Except for toll bridges and tunnels, very few U.S. Routes are toll roads. AASHTO policy says that a toll road may only be included as a special route, and that "a toll-free routing between the same termini shall continue to be retained and marked as a part of the U.S. Numbered System." Although U.S. Route 3 meets this obligation, as in New Hampshire, it does not actually follow tolled portions of the Everett Turnpike. However, four toll roads in the system follow this:

  • U.S. Route 51 uses part of the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway in Illinois; the old road is Illinois Route 251.
  • U.S. Route 278 uses the tolled Cross Island Parkway in South Carolina; the old road is U.S. Route 278 Business.
  • U.S. Route 412 uses the Cimarron Turnpike in Oklahoma; the old road is U.S. Route 64.
  • U.S. Route 412 uses the Cherokee Turnpike in Oklahoma; the old road is Alternate U.S. Route 412.

Read more about this topic:  United States Numbered Highways

Famous quotes containing the words system and/or details:

    “Social and scientific progress are assured, sir, once our great system of postpossession payments is in operation, not the installment plan, no sir, but a system of small postpossession payments that clinch the investment. No possible rational human wish unfulfilled. A man with a salary of fifty dollars a week can start payments on a Rolls-Royce, the Waldorf-Astoria, or a troupe of trained seals if he so desires.”
    —John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    “Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.”
    —Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)